KINGSVIEW

PEN AND GOD GO MISSING

Michael A. King

I loved that pen. I don’t remember all its features, but I do remember that in the 1960s, before computers mostly turned fine pens into antiques, you could get pens with amazing technology. All sorts of fascinating inks and inkwells and pen tips and burnished metal cases combined to make the finest pens. This pen was a premiere model in 1963, when I was nine.

And lost the pen. I was heartbroken. I ached for my treasure. I looked everywhere. No pen.

So I prayed. No pen. I prayed some more. No pen. I prayed on my knees looking under carpets and beds and on tiptoes peeking across the tops of bureaus. I prayed and I prayed and I prayed some more. No pen.

An uneasy thought began to worm its way through my pen-craving mind: What if praying is not giving me back my pen because God doesn’t really answer prayers? And not too far behind that thought was at least the germ of another one that would blossom into full expression three years later: What if there is no God?

I remembered the day pen and God went missing when I encountered Lee Snyder’s story (in this issue of DSM), "The Testament God Gave Back," of the day her prized Gideon New Testament went missing but after much fervent prayer both God and Testament turned out to be very present. As Snyder observes, "While that experience appears to an adult as embarrassingly naïve, I have no doubt that God answered my prayer. It was as though the heavens had opened and God had handed back my Testament."

Two things strike me about our respective stories. First, both are the stories of children. These events unfold before either author has developed a mature theological framework.

Second, these are primal events with power to shape the spiritual journeys and theologies of the adults the children grew into. Snyder looks back on prayer leading to recovery of a lost Testament as a noteworthy moment in her understanding of God: "That child-God encounter was one marker along the way of discovering one’s place—a place in the God-scheme of things."

Snyder speaks eloquently for me as well. Except that because my primal experience took a different twist, my spiritual journey likewise took a different twist. My own formation by the missing pen appears to the adult I am, as does Snyder’s recovery of her missing Bible to her, as embarrassingly naïve. Still I can look back and see that God did begin to go missing for me the day the pen vanished.

From that point forward, I was on a path toward an atheism which eventually gentled into agnosticism and then into the paradox of a faith-filled Christian agnosticism. The vanishing of the pen fanned the glowing cigarette lurking in the bedclothes of my boyhood faith: What if the reason real life seemed not to match the miracles and wonders reported in the Bible was that actually God doesn’t act like the Bible says? What if the church was wrong when insisting I was wrong if I couldn’t take the Bible’s portrayals of God at face value?

Eventually, no doubt partly simply as an act of adolescent rebellion—its intensities satisfying to the missionary kid I then was—my questions hardened into atheism: It’s all baloney. The deluded fancies of people who don’t know how, as I was later to learn figures like Freud and Feuerbach put it, to live without their comforting projections of a God-figure onto a meaningless universe.

As teen years gave way to young adulthood, to college and seminary studies and beyond, I gradually concluded that faith in no god was probably no better grounded than faith in God. I found ways to draw inspiration from such a wonderful text as Hebrews 11:1, with its affirmation that "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." That allowed me to believe it can be possible to live by faith even when not entirely convinced we can know, based strictly on the evidence, whether or not there is a God.

So I became a Christian. But also an agnostic, in the sense that I’ve never been able to shake the primal sense that pens which stay missing may be evidence God is not there. But also a faith-filled agnostic Christian, because even as I doubt there are failsafe ways to verify God exists, I’ve given my life to faith that God exists—and sometimes found the results as primally pointing to God’s reality as the missing pen pointed away from it.

So in the end I do live by faith. But my missing pen has left its indelible mark on my quest for my "place in the God-scheme of things." Whereas many persons of faith seem to experience the gift of seeing easily and naturally why God of course is real, God has given me the gift of seeing easily and naturally why of course some people find it hard to believe God is real. Thus in my life and ministries I’ve been particularly drawn to people who find faith hard or impossible and to the connections between faith and doubt.

So Snyder movingly thanks God for the Testament that came back. And I thank God for the pen which forced me to look for God when God went missing.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church; and editor, DreamSeeker Magazine.