Paul Mitchell.
Before having a powerful conversion experience when he was younger, Australian writer and poet Paul Mitchell says he couldn’t have cared less about the Church and the creeds. Then the God within him sang, a tune to which he keeps returning, and that rings out through the decades.
I’m alone in a paddock at night and staring at a vision of a shining cross in the sky. A few seconds later, I’m singing aloud a melodic song I’ve never heard: “I’m God, and I’m in you, and I am always, always, always going to be the one.”
Anyone with a conversion story has their stand-out moment. As a twenty-year-old, that was mine. And it’s taken thirty years to realise the melodic beginning to my spiritual journey had within it an end goal. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, I sense I’m arriving where I started – and knowing the place for the first time.
Franciscan Friar Richard Rohr writes about Christianity’s distrust of inner experience. Without dismissing outer experience – the Bible, church tradition, doctrine – he says Christianity has relied on these at the expense of “inner authority”. I could have had no more certain display of inner authority than my song, yet in my faith journey I’ve often viewed inner authority with suspicion. I’ve sought external authorities instead, which has often led me to live as if God wasn’t in me and wasn’t always going to be the one.
My experience of the song, any of my spiritual experiences at conversion and after, can’t be validated empirically. Whereas Jesus’ life, the Bible, church tradition and the creeds are all verifiable reasons to believe. I know many see them as the sure faith foundations, while personal experience is at best an add-on, at worst a misleading distraction. Those who eschew personal experience perhaps believe it situates spirituality too strongly in the realm of Western individualist culture.
Before my song – and numerous other events during my conversion experience – I’d read about Jesus in the Bible and I’d had Christian tradition and the creeds explained. But I couldn’t have cared less. Like Mick Jagger I was, on the inside, singing, “Don’t want to talk about Jesus, just want to see his face.”
It turns out I was singing something else on the inside. And while I might not have seen Jesus’ face, my song and other experiences are foundational to my Christian faith. As strange as it might sound – and while I’m aware of their deep importance – the Bible, tradition, creeds and the institutional church feel like the add-ons to me.
I’ve always found it odd when people refer to the Bible as the Word of God when the Bible refers to itself as a book helpful for instruction and never as the Word of God. That title is reserved for Jesus. And in its pages, the Christian-slayer Paul – among many other biblical heroes – has a personal experience of the risen Jesus that turns his life around. That’s the foundation for the faith that motivates his work founding the church amongst the Gentiles.
When my faith flounders, I am, of course, in prayer, as I always try to be. And I read the Bible and spiritual writers who’ve gone through similar phases of doubt. But, underneath it all, there’s my song, and the God who’s always going to be the one singing about where God can be found.
Paul Mitchell has published six books, including poetry, fiction and non-fiction works. His latest is Matters of Life and Faith (Coventry Press, 2021), a collection of personal essays.