A man is walking down a street like any other street, on a day like any day. In what seems an idle impulse, he turns in at a church, and there, without warning, a spiritual crisis breaks upon him and his life is changed. It may come after long torment or as a sudden surprise. The circumstances may be as dramatic as Paul's blaze of light on the Damascus road or as commonplace as the voice of a stranger borrowing a match. But the result is always the same: "One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see."
Published this week is a brief anthology of 13 contemporary crises of the soul, collected and edited by Methodist Minister David Wesley Soper—These Found the Way (Westminster Press; $2.50). Among the contributors—all Protestants —are a doctor, a Methodist bishop, a disabled veteran, a Congregational theologian, a journalist, a Roman Catholic priest turned Episcopalian minister. In all their narratives, Soper tells his readers, "you will find ... a third of your own biography. Perhaps you will find the remaining two thirds as well." Samples:
The Communist. Joy Davidman was a poet and a Communist. She was born in New York City in 1915 to Jewish parents who had lost their religion in the New World. "My father declared proudly that he had retained the ethics of Judaism . . . and got rid of the theology—rather as if he had kept the top floor of our house but torn down the first floor and foundation. When I came along, I noticed that there was nothing supporting the ethics; down it crashed."
Joy Davidman did her best to be a happy materialist, sure that God was a myth and that her occasional experiences of piercing beauty were "only nerves" or just plain sex. But, even though the name of Christ suggested to her "floggings and burnings, 'gentlemen's agreements' and closed universities," her poems were haunted by Christian symbolism.
She went to a Communist friend and said she wanted to join the party. " 'Wait a minute,' said [the friend], listening suspiciously to my bubblings. 'You mean you want to join for the sake of other people?' Then and there I told my first lie for the party. Her tone warned me that I was in danger of rejection. 'To hell with other people!' I declared. 'I want to join the Communists for my own sake . . .'"
She married a fellow Communist, Author William Lindsay (Nightmare Alley) Gresham. One day he phoned to tell her that he was having a nervous breakdown, then disappeared. "For the first time in my life I felt helpless . . . All my defenses—the walls of arrogance and cocksureness and self-love behind which I had hid from God—went down momentarily. And God came in ...
"There was a Person with me in the room, directly present to my consciousness—a Person so real that all my previous life was by comparison mere shadow play." Her husband had been baptized an Episcopalian, raised an agnostic. Returning to Joy, he retraced lost beginnings. Today, ex-Communists, they are Presbyterians—members of a church near their Staatsburg, N.Y. home.