Thinking Back on My Spiritual Odyssey Part 5

 In this ongoing discussion so far, I have sorted through a lot, and today I wanted to just share some memories of what my vision of church was.  This is something very detailed, and it is multifaceted, so bear with me as I begin this stroll down a very ancient part of my story.

As a young minister, heavily influenced by liturgical worship and with a vision for reshaping what it was to be Pentecostal at the time, I had a definite vision for the church I wanted.  Like many aspiring young ministers then, I was looking to have the big megachurch, one in which thousands of people would attend each week, and it was going to be a different type of megachurch for me.  Much of my inspiration came from several sources.  For one, I saw the ministries of people such as Earl Paulk and John Meares as being models of what I wanted - these were Pentecostal ministers who essentially had built liturgical churches, they wore clerical collars, and they were what I wanted to be.  Later, I would become extremely disillusioned with Paulk though, as a series of sex scandals as well as a veering into heretical doctrines would taint his legacy (for one, his actual nephew ended up being his biological son due to an affair he had with his sister-in-law years earlier, and then there was the whole Mona Brewer mess - Paulk really messed with her life badly), but I had gotten to actually see his church outside Atlanta, Chapel Hill Harvester Church, and I loved its design and its vision then.  Another inspiration for me was Presbyterian minister and culture warrior Dr. D. James Kennedy, who pastored Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale and I loved the design of that church too, in particular the huge and beautiful Ruffati organ that had been designed by Diane Bish, who played it almost every Sunday.  The great organ in that church featured pipes in front that looked like trumpets, and it was magnificent.  I also appreciated Dr. Kennedy's pulpit, a high structure with a "hood" with a light fixture which one went up to on a winding staircase.  I also appreciated Dr. Kennedy's intellectual ability - he was a theologian in the truest sense, and the way he carried himself was something I wanted to emulate. Another influence I had was one I will talk about shortly, that being the Assyrian and Armenian Christians I had worked with for many years - I thought I was called to them, but they ended up converting me in the long-term.  All of these things, and my own propensity to create architectural drawings in graphite, led me to draw many pictures of the great church I envisioned.  It had a huge central dome, twin bell towers, and an elaborate staircase with a large reflecting pool in front of it. On the inside, I had designed it unlike the typical Pentecostal churches I had been part of - the altar was central, and the pulpit was to the left of the main platform.  Behind the altar was a large orchestra pit, with the great organ occupying a central place smack in the middle of it, and a baby grand piano to the right.  Rising behind the orchestra pit was the choir loft, and overshadowing it were the massive pipes of the organ.  The baptistry, which in Protestant traditions was in the center/back of the platform area, would be located in my church in an alcove off to the left side of the sanctuary, and was accessible via a set of two spiral staircases which led up to a baptismal pool in which a fountain of water would supply fresh water to the baptistry.  It was surrounded by tall stain-glass windows in the alcove depicting events from the life of Christ.  I have those drawings still, and here is first the external view and then the front platform:

These are two of them I managed to find, but I drew this a lot over the years, and it was my dream church.  In time though, I started having a bigger vision for this, as it involved my work with Assyrians and Armenians.

I got involved during my junior year of high school with political activism for two prominent but persecuted communities of Middle Eastern Christians, the Armenians and Assyrians.  In the coming years after I graduated high school and went to college, I would actually befriend clergy and political and ideological leaders among these people, which would culminate in a visit to California in December 1995 when I would actually be on radio out there with Dr. Sargon Dadesho, a leading Assyrian nationalist who operated the Bet Nahrain Organization as well as an Assyrian-language TV and radio station in Turlock, CA, called KBES.  I wanted to do something grand for these people, and one of the things I proposed in my mind and then wrote up a plan for was what I called the Saint Isaac of Nineveh Village.  It was to be a completely self-governed city that would serve as a refuge for Middle Eastern Christians, and my dream church would sit in the middle of it on an island in a lake as sort of a basilica. I saw many things in this vision too - a great aquarium and zoo, community gardens, a university, and even a security force for the community too.  It would be in essence a self-sustaining city which would also use revolutionary technologies and other things.  Perhaps the closest comparison I could note for this in real life is the town of Ave Maria, FL, which was built with a similar vision - a fully Catholic community centered around a premiere Catholic university. I would literally get goose bumps thinking about this back in the day, as it was perhaps one of the most ambitious yet also a beautiful plan, and perhaps had I had marketing abilities I could have made this a reality.  However, being I am 55 years old now, the chances of that happening are extremely slim unless in the future someone comes across my dusty plans and decides to take an inspirational initiative from it.  Perhaps, if you are reading this in the future, may God bless such a person if they can do this, because it would be a great service to a longsuffering ethnoreligious community that could really benefit from it. 

Over the years, as my old zeal began to settle into reality-land and I focused more on earning an income to support my family, much of those visions and dreams fell by the wayside and I did keep the original stuff I did as a sort of memory to remind me of them,  Whether building a magnificent church like that, or even going further and constructing a whole specialized city, these ambitions would take literally millions of dollars to even start working on them.  And it would take decades for them to even be fully realized too.  I think of that guy in Frostburg, MD, who was building an ark as a church called "God's Ark of Safety."  He too had ambitious plans, but in all honesty all he did was build a steel frame which still stands today along I-70 outside Frostburg, rusting and never even  being close to completion.  It is natural for human beings to dream big, but when the realization sets in about what needs to be invested in those dreams, it can be a dealbreaker. And, it is something I have come to accept, especially since for the past 25 years I have been a faithful Catholic and am content to just serve the Church in a lay capacity as an educator.  But, a part of me misses that excitement and ambition, and I often imagine what it would have been like if I could have pulled it off.  I have had some dreams about the church in particular over the years, and it looked quite magnificent in my dreams.  The odd thing about one or two of the dreams were that the settings of them were on what looks like the campus of my alma mater, Southeastern University.  Other dreams had the church in a big city somewhere, located on a street with an incline.  I often do muse that perhaps maybe I could submit my church architecture drawings to an archdiocesan building fund somewhere for a potential large parish or a cathedral - but then again, maybe not. So, do I regret the forgotten dreams?  That is a complex answer I will explore now.

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to do things I was interested in with a large flare, and it started with my toy Noah's Ark set I got from Mom as a kid.  I had a huge collection  of plastic animals of every species imaginable, and I recall lining them up around the side of Granny's old house processing into a small ark in which not all of them would actually fit.  Then was my music collection - up until this time last year, I had perhaps the dream collection of vintage big band recordings, something I salivated over since my teen years.  It was somewhat devastating to lose the 3200 CDs, LPs, DVDs, and assorted 78 RPMs, 45 RPMs, and wax cylinder recordings I had housed in two huge cabinets in my old office in Hagerstown.  That collection took me the better part of 30 years to assemble, but thankfully I was able to salvage some of the best parts of it.  Often, when something is ripped away like that from me, I tend to regroup.   Spiritually it is the same - for many years after becoming Catholic, I had to rethink so much.  After all, I was a minister in a major Pentecostal tradition, and now I was unable to do that anymore so I had to redefine what my role would be in a Catholic setting.  That can be a process, and it often is not easy,  and to be honest I still have days I struggle with it.  But, it is no accident God led me to where he led me, and I am Catholic for a reason.  I have learned to develop an attitude of trust and faith in God in order to let him guide me where he wants me, and for now, that is teaching at the Jesuit high school I work at.  I am not sure if this will be a long-term vocation or if it is just for a season of my life, but it nonetheless is where God wants me.  And, if it is just a short season, I trust God to open doors.  I am not the person I was at 23 though that is for sure, and the whole point of these reflections is to meditate on that.  But, it was fun revisiting some things, and perhaps God wanted me to do that too, who's to say?  Anyway, I just wanted to share some concluding thoughts and then I can wrap this up.

The old drawings and dreams represent an apt conclusion to these reflections now, and as I assess this all, there are some things that actually did happen.  I mean, for one, I am a Ph.D. now, although not in the way I originally wanted to go.  Also, despite not ever seeing my dream of that magnificent church realized, I am - and have been part of - a member of a beautiful Catholic parish that personifies a portion of my dreams.  Both St. James the Greater Church in Charles Town, WV, as well as SS. Philip and James Parish here in Baltimore are both parish churches that I have always wanted to be part of, and to a degree I see some of my old dreams and drawings in them too.  Also, despite the fact I never got to pastor a church, I am still exercising a pastoral role in a way as a teacher in a Catholic school.  While I may never know the total impact I had on students, God does know that, and in time I will see the fruits of my labor.  I am in a place 33 years after the fact of my initial dreams and drawings I never imagined being, and in a way I may have fulfilled what I needed to do.  However, my life is not over yet, and there are still many years ahead to see what happens.  So, that leads to three valuable lessons I wanted to close with, and they are as follows:

1. Write down your dreams, visions, and testimony - it will serve you well later, and also may be an inspiration to someone else.

2.  Never forget where you come from - it will keep you humble. 

3. There are times when we all need a little recharge in our lives - perhaps we feel discontented, burnt-out, or discouraged.  Recalling our old zeal may awaken something in us if we reflect upon it. 

And, that is essentially where these reflections end - not with fireworks, but just with a couple of life lessons.  In time, I may share more, but now you helped me reflect and revisit, and hopefully it will be an encouragement to one who reads this.  Thanks again, and see you next time!