revival, retrospection, assessment

At Evangelical Colleges, A Revival of Repentance – The New York Times (1995):

Students at evangelical colleges are embracing a revival calling them to repent. “We haven’t seen a student revival since the Jesus movement days of the late 60’s and early 70’s,” said the Rev. John Avant, pastor of a Baptist church in Brownwood, Tex., where the movement started. […] 

Some … say it is premature to gauge the significance of the movement in relation to other revivals in American religious history. “I would say that the thing to do is to call back in 40 years,” said Mark Noll, a historian at Wheaton. 

It’s only been thirty years, so the jury’s still out. But I doubt that many of you reading this have ever heard of this revival. 

That doesn’t mean that it has had no impact. These things are exceptionally difficult, probably impossible, to discern. In 1964, in his introduction to an anthology called The Protestant Mystics, W. H. Auden described a kind of experience that he called “the Vision of Agape.” In that context he included a brief narrative account of an experience “for the authenticity of which I can vouch.” Here is that testimony, somewhat abridged:

One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other well enough but we were certainly not intimate friends, nor had any one of us a sexual interest in another. Incidentally, we had not drunk any alcohol. We were talking casually about everyday matters when, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly — because, thanks to the power, I was doing it — what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself…. My personal feelings towards them were unchanged — they were still colleagues, not intimate friends — but I felt their existence as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it….

The memory of the experience has not prevented me from making use of others, grossly and often, but it has made it much more difficult for me to deceive myself about what I am up to when I do. And among the various factors which several years later brought me back to the Christian faith in which I had been brought up, the memory of this experience and asking myself what it could mean was one of the most crucial, though, at the time it occurred, I thought I had done with Christianity for good.

This whole account is fascinating, but I want to call attention to this: the experience had a major influence on the direction of Auden’s life only some years after it occurred. Indeed, at the time it occurred he didn’t understand it: his calling it a “vision of Agape” is a retrospective interpretation, one quite different from how he thought of his experience in the poem he wrote shortly after it happened. He seems to have thought it a curious event, but not an especially important one. Between the event and his reinterpretation of it, the experience went underground: imagine a branch falling into a river that plunges below the land’s surface and emerges much farther downstream, bearing some of the cargo it acquired much earlier. (I saw such a river once.)   

Presentists — which is to say, 99.7% of Americans — think that whatever is happening right now is the best or worst thing ever, certainly the most dramatically extreme and totally important thing ever. (Just as they also think that “desperate times require desperate measures” and Right Now is always a desperate time.) So a great many Americans believe that a major revival is happening right now — North Americans, perhaps I should say, because one of the most interesting reflections on this development is by the Canadian writer and scholar Marilyn Simon.

Simon asks a good question and makes a good point: “And so what is this revival (it is most certainly a revival) going to accomplish? Of course we don’t yet know.” But what I would say is: We may never know. Indeed, we will almost certainly never know.

In 2035, if people follow Mark Noll’s advice and think back to the 1995 Christian-college revival, how will they assess its influence? Even the people who were there may not know how it shaped them. Think of how writers can commit inadvertent plagiarism, a phrase having dropped into the mind and remained in the current long after its origin is forgotten. Maybe people involved in that revival can’t recall the words they heard there but have internalized them all the same, or have certain feelings when singing a hymn or reading the Bible that (without their realizing it) have the source in that long-ago experience. 

To be human is, it seems to me, to care about the origins and sources of things, but we know very little, it also seems to me, about what most deeply shapes us. At the end of Middlemarch, George Eliot says of her heroine Dorothea that “the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive.” Of how many people and experiences is this true? Many, I suspect. The truly defining events of our lives will may remain unknown to us — and that, I suspect, is true on a social as well as a personal level. 

I’m not sure what lessons are to be drawn from all this, except one: It’s best not to make decisions about what to do, or even what to think about, based on an immediate perception of what’s really important, really influential. So hear the words of the Preacher: “In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.”