A Tiny Spark of Light
In her book, “Redeemed,” Heather King writes about the changes in her life when she went from being a waitress to becoming a lawyer in Los Angeles.
Described as “an essayist, memoirist, blogger and speaker” by Wikipedia, King was estranged from God and addicted to alcohol, and in telling her story and the reasons she gave up the subsequent practice of law, she provides unflattering opinions about the law and lawyers.
“…The entire legal profession,” she asserts, “was so driven by the fear of not winning enough money, so intent on covering its a.., so inured to the meaninglessness of the whole enterprise, that if the truth had stood up from the jury box and waved, we would have stared for a moment in shock, then made a motion in limine to rule it inadmissible.”
Disillusioned
My apologies to any lawyers who may be reading this. King was obviously disillusioned by her experience as a lawyer – something that happens with many professions. But that experience and a painful recovery from her addiction led her to broader questions about her life and the equivalent of a common question, “Is this all there is?”
“Almost nothing in our culture validates such questions,” she writes, “provides any meat, gives the person worried about the state of his or her soul anything to latch onto.” She latched onto “a tiny spark of light,” starting to notice, and focus on, the suffering of others and “participate in their burden.”
Her recovery helped her realize “the deep limitations of my intelligence, and also not to feel the need to prove my intelligence. People who don’t believe in God, I’ve observed, are often very invested in how smart they are. They’ll say, ‘God is for stupid people’ or ‘I’m too smart to believe in God!’”
I can’t say whether this characterizes most atheists, but I believe it’s true that there is an element of intellectual pride in doubt, which I defend in these blogs as necessary for faith. Obviously, a sincere search for God rules out a motivation of pride.
One of King’s observations I believe to be especially interesting is her distinction between “spirituality” and “religion.”
“I’m not sure I can describe the difference,” she writes, “but religion seems to involve another Person. To be concerned about the state of my soul presupposes that someone greater than myself is similarly concerned; to want to be held to my highest self presupposes that someone else – someone who knows me to my core – is doing the holding.”
Finally, part of what moved her to become a believer was participation in a religious retreat and an encounter with an “old Irish priest” who noticed the anguish of her search for God. Instead of bidding her to “get a grip” or launching into a sermon, he simply said, “You’re very dear to God.”
That moved King. Besides an obvious personal affirmation, it resulted in what King described in another place in the book as receiving “that stab of joy that hints at a world hidden within this one.”
Change of Focus
As important as that type of encounter may be for people searching for God, I believe another kind may be equally important, having to do with King’s change of focus from herself to others.
She describes the search for God of a friend who also struggled with alcoholism and other disorders and the friend’s decision to volunteer at a women’s homeless shelter, a work the friend continues at the time of the book writing. King describes her friend’s experience by quoting Mother Teresa as “the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.”
It reminds me of the famous prayer attributed to St. Francis, the kind of prayer that I believe paves the way to God: “O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love.”
