Years later, as a young married man, my wife and I were hosts for a Great Books group in our home. We sought wisdom by reading the insights of the world’s great writers. One of our members was a young Roman Catholic priest who had found answers to his questions in the encyclicals of the Pope. He was concerned about me because I had so many questions; he wanted me to join a monastery where I would find answers provided. But I had no interest in someone else deciding for me what God had in mind. Like David, Isaiah, Peter, and scores of others, I wanted to see God face to face. I sought to understand for myself and what God wanted me to do with my life. Besides, I had a wife and two young sons! A monastery was not for me!
Still later, when I was forty-one years of age and the Director of the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina, I was blessed with a trip to Denmark to learn how folk schools were inspired by a Danish priest, Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, to transform Denmark, and the other Scandinavian countries, into admirable successes among the countries of the world. Grundtvig, a free-thinking Lutheran priest, song writer, and politician became my mentor. As a seeker, he understood that perhaps God is also a seeker! God, he said, may be using us as an experiment in how “spirit and dust” can create something wonderful.
I like that idea! Perhaps it really is up to us to listen and then to show how what we have been given can be used to live successfully on this planet. Life may be one of God’s experiments!
I would like to see God smile and say, “Well done!”
