Called Out of Darkness Page 0,63

He was on that altar. And I wanted to go to Him, and the impelling emotion was love.

Only dimly did I care about the doctrine of the Transub-stantiation, the Catholic teaching as to how Our Blessed Lord is present Body and Blood in the small wafers kept in the Catholic tabernacle. Only dimly did I reflect on it, because truly I had a sense of something so much greater than the verbal expression of any one doctrine that it didn't matter to me how superstitious such a belief might seem to a skeptical mind. And my mind was still, to some extent, a skeptical mind.

I didn't care about the framing of the doctrine. I cared about Him. And He was calling me back through His Presence on the altar. He might have used the falling rain to call me back; He might have used the music of Vivaldi. He might have used the statue of Christ and Francis that was on my desk. But, no, He used the doctrine of the Real Presence.

And I surrendered to that doctrine because it was the way to Him, and He was what I wanted, with my heart and soul.

Go to Him, I thought. Go to the Christ who is under the roof of your church. He's waiting there for you. Get up from the desk and go. Go to the Christ who is Real and Present in every Catholic tabernacle throughout the world. Go to Him.

In the moment of surrender, I let go of all the theological or social questions which had kept me from Him for countless years. I simply let them go. There was the sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything I did not have to know everything, and that, in seeking to know everything, I'd been, all of my life, missing the entire point.

No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him. The reason? It was magnificently simple: He knew how or why everything happened; He knew the disposition of every single soul.

He wasn't going to let anything happen by accident!

Nobody was going to go to Hell by mistake. This was His world, all this! He had complete control of it; His justice, His mercy - were not our justice or our mercy. What folly to even imagine such a thing.

I didn't have to know how He was going to save the un-lettered and the unbaptized, or how He would redeem the conscientious heathen who had never spoken His name. I didn't have to know how my gay friends would find their way to Redemption; or how my hardworking secular humanist friends could or would receive the power of His Saving Grace. I didn't have to know why good people suffered agony or died in pain. He knew.

And it was His knowing that overwhelmed me, His knowing that became completely real to me, His knowing that became the warp and woof of the Universe which He had made.

His was - after all - the Divine Mind which had made the miracle of the Big Bang, and created the DNA only lately discovered in every physical cell. His was the Divine Mind that had created the sound of the violin in the Beethoven concerto; His was the Divine Mind that made snowflakes, candle flames, birds soaring upwards, the unfolding mystery of gender, and the gravity that seemingly held the Universe together - as our planet, our single little planet, hurtled through space.

Of course. If He could do all that, naturally He knew the answer to every conceivable question before it was formulated. He knew the worst suffering that a human soul could feel. Nothing was wasted with Him because He was the author of all of it. He was the Creator of creatures who felt anger, alienation, rage, despair. In this great novel that was His creation, He knew every plot, every character, every action, every voice, every syllable, and every jot of ink.

And why should I remain apart from Him just because I couldn't grasp all this? He could grasp it. Of course!

It was love that brought me to this awareness, love that brought me into a complete trust in Him, a trust that God who made us could not