"Merger................................."

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Tomas Halik worked as a psychotherapist during the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia and at the same time was secretly ordained as a Catholic priest and active in the underground church. My first literary encounter with his writing had me anxiously awaiting his next book being published here in the states. Three chapters into it, I’m still finding connection wherein, although he speaks through his own religious experience and understanding, his description of life in Christ registers with the journey as I have known it to be thus far. When he identifies “speaking in tongues” as a “psychological regression into baby talk”, I realize he’s just never yet been fully submerged in God’s presence; and when he equates celebrity evangelists, with their rebuking demons and laying on hands to obtain healing, as being no more than a “quick alternative to years of therapy”, I figure he has only seen the sham that’s out there and never been in the midst of believers when “the real deal” steps into their midst. Pentecostals aren’t the only ones to have made a mess of this, however. What remains true is His promise, indeed His faithfulness, to go with us and meet us at the well… Sunday evening worship just seemed, for the most part, too programmed, too orchestrated for this old man. There was a time when, from the initial point of entry, my heart would have been one with what-or-whomsoever, but nowadays the broadcast camera and the PTL reproduction on stage tends to leave me feeling, before we even start, like the congregation has been seated in the gallery. I’m what the pastor quite often refers to as a “bullfrog”, not all that enthusiastic about stirring up the soup being served. Personally, I find him a bit of an arrogant rooster, able to crow as he wants, whenever he wants, the two of us having known each other for forty years, good friends, and able to see in each other, in spite of our differences, the Holy Ghost as an anchorage for our soul. Within that scenario, then, as his sermon progressed last night, more and more it brought me up out of the pew to a place where my hands were lifted, my eyes were filled with tears, and the guy inside this worn out vessel of clay just wanted to walk the aisles giving Him glory. Disagree about much, we do; but swimming together in His waters is a no-brainer……