A Parable and a Testimony

Last updated on: April 7, 2009 at 6:28 pm by James F. McGrath

A Parable and a Testimony 2009-04-07T18:28:00-04:00 James F. McGrath

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There was once a rich man, who was very generous. This man who had two sons.

The eldest son had seen his father sometimes forced to do without, even though his land was fruitful and his business prosperous, because he had given away all he had at that moment to those in need. When his father died and left a large sum to him and his brother, he was determined not to find himself in the same situation. He put the inheritance in a secret place, and made his sons and eventually his grandsons keep its location secret. Although wealthy, the eldest son, and eventually his family, lived frugally, often talking about the hidden treasure but neither touching it nor divulging the secret of its location to anyone outside the immediate family.

Eventually, after many generations, a distant descendant of the rich man’s eldest son wondered about the stories he had heard of the family treasure. He went to the place where it was supposed to be hidden, but found nothing there, and concluded that his family had been passing on a myth.

The younger son of the rich man had a different perspective. He was impressed by his father’s generosity and determined to follow his example. He would regularly go to the secret place where his father’s wealth had been left behind for him and his brother, and often found himself puzzled that his brother never seemed to visit the place or use the money. He would take not for himself and his own use, but in order to give freely to those in need in his community. His generosity, like that of his father before him, had a positive impact on the community, and as generations passed, the community prospered as it fostered mutual care and support.

Eventually the descendants of the younger brother fell upon want. They did not turn to the hidden wealth – it had long been given away, and this line of descendants didn’t preserve legends of great prosperity their ancestors had in the distant past. Rather, in their present circumstances of difficulty, they were helped by the community that their ancestors and they themselves had helped shape.

– – –

It seems to me that this is much like the divergence between two different approaches to the Christian faith. One sort considers it of crucial importance to believe that people in the past experienced God, that they wrote about their experience and their beliefs without error, and to preserve this from generation to generation. Such individuals often lose their faith, if they go to look and find reasons to doubt the historical veracity of that which they’ve been passing on.

Another form of Christianity emphasizes having a personal experience of God. For some such Christians, the precision and accuracy of earlier Christians is an interesting and not unimportant question, but neither is it ultimately decisive. Their lives are being transformed in the present, and that is their foundation. Moreover, they have confidence that, just as they are fallible human beings who nonetheless have something important to share, so too the earliest Christians may have written fallibly and yet still have something important to share.

I find it ironic that the reality of my own life-changing experience has been questioned because I don’t affirm the absolute accuracy of certain specific beliefs that were defined as crucial by 20th century fundamentalists (using the term in the strict sense), but which we have no reason to think all the earliest Christians considered that important and definitive of Christian identity.

I promised to recount my own testimony, and so here it is, reposted almost but not entirely verbatim from a place where I had it on my old blog (I figure there is no point in typing it again, and I’ve already spent quite a bit of time on this post):

At age 15, I was at a stage in my life when I had begun thinking about matters of faith. I had been raised Catholic, but had drifted away from attending church with any frequency (and had a tendency to miss religious education classes in the evening because they were on at the same time as Charles in Charge). But I continued to believe in God, and clearly recall debating a friend of mine who didn’t believe in God about this subject (when we were both seriously drunk). Anyway, I had spent many years being something of a loner, a nerd, and can’t say I was particularly happy – indeed quite the opposite. Once I started high school, however, it had been something of a new start, and since I was also very much involved in music at this point in my life, that helped me make friends and start having something of a different experience, but it didn’t eliminate my inner sense of feeling that I hadn’t found the meaning of life yet, that something was still missing. It was at this point that I happened to tune to a college radio station during an hour when they broadcast contemporary Christian music. I was struck by the music, because although I believed in God, I didn’t find myself able to actually sing about it – it was as though these people had something real that they had experienced and yet I had not. I even tried forming a Christian band with a friend of mine, and when we asked another student, she thought it was weird because, from her perspective, we weren’t even Christians. She did, however, invite us to a concert at her church (a Pentecostal church). To make a long story short, we went, and I was very moved by it. I went to the morning service the next day (Sunday), and as so often in stories like this one, I cannot remember what the sermon was about. What I do remember is that, after the service, I called out to God in my heart and said something like “God, I don’t know what your way of living is, but mine isn’t working, so whatever your way is, I want to try it”. At that moment, a sense of peace washed over me.

So there you have it – the experience that started it all. I’ll end here, since I’m sure that we’ll be talking about this more over coming days. But I will repeat the wise observation of a Lutheran pastor in Latvia, who observed that it is those who’ve had a genuine religious experience who tend to be less resistant to finding new ways of talking about and expressing it in a new setting, context and language. Or in terms of the parable, the point is not to pass on theories about a treasure, but to put it to use and let it transform lives, even if that means changing the balance (literally or metaphorically), converting into a new currency, and so on.

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