Athiest’s story a reminder of God’s ‘Unconditional Love’

I have been reading the Rev. John Powell’s “Through Seasons of the Heart” for my daily meditation.

The book is a series of 365 reflections taken from several of his books including, “Why Am I Afraid to Love?,” “The Secret to Staying in Love,” “Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am?,” “Unconditional Love,” “Fully Human, Fully Alive” and “Will the Real Me Please Stand Up?”

John Powell is a recently retired professor at Loyola University in Chicago.

In his book, “Unconditional Love,” Powell writes about Tommy, a student in his theology class. Because this story is long, I have edited it to fit two columns.

Tommy had been my resident atheist in my Theology of Faith course. He constantly objected to, smirked at or whined about the possibility of an unconditionally loving God.

When he came up at the end of the course to turn in his final exam, he asked in a cynical tone, “Do you think I’ll ever find God?”

I decided instantly on a little shock therapy. “No!” I said very emphatically.

“Why not,” he responded, “I thought that was the product you were pushing.”

When he was five steps from the classroom door, I called out, “Tommy! I don’t think you’ll ever find God, but I am absolutely certain that God will find you!” He shrugged and left my class and my life.

Later I heard that Tommy had graduated, and I was duly grateful. Then a sad report came that Tommy had terminal cancer. Before I could search him out, he came to see me. When he walked into my office, his body was very badly wasted and his long hair had all fallen out from chemotherapy. But his eyes were bright and his voice was firm.

“Tommy, I’ve thought about you so often; I hear you are sick,” I blurted out.

“Oh, yes, very sick. I have cancer in both lungs. It’s a matter of weeks.”

“Can you talk about it, Tom?” I asked.

“Sure, what would you like to know?” he replied.

“What’s it like to be only 24 and dying?”

“Well, it could be worse. Like being 50 and having no values or ideals, like being 50 and thinking that booze, seducing women and making money are the real biggies in life.”

I began to look through my mental file cabinet where I had filed Tommy as strange. (Apparently, everybody I try to reject by classification, God sends back into my life to educate me.)

“But what I really came to see you about,” Tom said, “is something you said to me on the last day of class.” (He remembered!)

“I asked you if you thought I would ever find God and you said, ‘No!’ which surprised me. Then you said, ‘But God will find you.’ I thought about that a lot, although my search for God was hardly intense then.

“But when the doctors removed a lump from my groin and told me that it was malignant, that’s when I got serious about finding God. When the malignancy spread into my vital organs, I really began banging bloody fists against the bronze doors of heaven. But God did not come out. In fact, nothing happened.”

“Did you ever try anything for a long time with great effort and with no success? You get psychologically glutted, fed up with trying. Then you quit.”

“Well, one day I woke up, and instead of throwing a few more futile appeals over that high brick wall to a God who may be or may not be there, I just quit. I decided that I didn’t really care about God, about an afterlife, or anything like that.”

(Continued next week)