It was the last day of our honeymoon and we were headed for St Paul's Cathedral.
As Rev Tom Guerry said at our wedding, "Carol and Mitch have loved before." Carol had survived a terrible divorce after 20 years of marriage and my Liz had died suddenly of a brain aneurism after 32 years of marriage. Neither of us had expected to find love again.
Although St Paul's was crowded, we managed to get inside. What a breathtaking, soul-stretching, holy place! We were simply overwhelmed by its beauty.
Neither of us had ever experienced anything that came remotely close to this. Every nerve in my body tingled with the sheer grandeur of it all. All of the guidebooks put together could not prepare you for this. How could one possibly digest it all?
As magnificent as the cathedral is, and as elated as I was to be there, my real epiphany was yet to come.
At 11 am, the public address system came on. The priest introduced himself and then said, "At this time each day we pause and say together the 'Our Father' prayer."
Then the most unbelievable thing happened. Voices belonging to people from around the world, of every language, of every colour and hue, every nationality, disabled and whole, male and female, child and adult, gay and straight, prayed aloud together, "Our Father".
For the first time in my 65 years the full meaning of the opening words caressed my soul in a way I had never experienced before. Here in this ancient house of worship, in this ancient city with my new bride, the true meaning of "Our Father" coursed through my veins. I was awestruck. There was no turning back. It was the beginning of a new understanding of my journey of faith.
I could hardly contain the sensation of oneness in God that engulfed my entire being. I knew that my understanding of God had taken a quantum leap. "Our" took on a meaning far greater, far more profound than its three characters would signify. This must be what St Paul had felt on the road to Damascus.
As I struggled to comprehend this unexpected revelation and gain some perspective, my thoughts drifted back to my childhood. Incidents and experiences that had remained separate and unexplored for their meanings for all of these years began to come together and a pattern began to emerge.
Two years later I discovered a prayer by Pam Kidd in Daily Guideposts 2001 that expresses the same phenomenon: "Dear God, in my scariest moments, you point me to the place where, in your time, You fit the pieces of my life together into a perfect whole. Thank You."
The pieces of my life were slowly coming together. I understood that my revelation at St Paul's was not the result of an isolated incident but had been a lifetime in the making.
I have been in church all of my life and had become a Christian at 11 years old. I have prayed the Lord's Prayer hundreds of times, but never had I been so captivated by that little word, "our".
St Paul's Cathedral is light years away from the small textile mill village church in South Carolina, USA, where I grew up during the days of racial segregation, but that church too played a major role in my understanding of who God is and who is in his family. Our Father: Discovering Family, is an unfolding of my spiritual journey. The process of reflection and writing it led me to a far richer discovery than I had imagined at the outset.
Our Father: Discovering Family is available from the publisher www.wipfandstock.com, Barnesandnoble.com and amazon.com in either paperback or ebook editions.
