Midlife Meditation

As a Methodist, I’ve always been equal parts amused and embarrassed at the words John Wesley used to describe his conversion experience, which happened in an extremely odd way. Following a failed experience as a missionary to the New World, during which he behaved abominably toward a woman who rejected his advances by denying her communion, Wesley had been sent home to England. His faith at a low ebb, he was wandering around town when he overheard a Bible study leader reading the preface to Martin Luther’s commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, and dropped in. Something about Luther’s words affected him so that, as he put it in his writings, he felt his heart “strangely warmed.” This language never did much for me, though in retrospect, I realize Wesley was much like me: a scholar of religion who knew to much to be drawn in by simple appeals to emotion, whose critique of the Church of England—his mother church—had led to his expulsion from all its pulpits,...

6-22-14 I grew up in church. Until last November, I spent almost every Sunday morning of my life in church. Even on vacations, I usually found a church, though as I grew older, I felt less and less need for that observance. Church had become a job, and little more. Finally, last November, I resigned from a good paying church job because I just needed, for the first time in my life, to have weekends. I haven’t looked back. With all that said, church is still a comfortable place for me to be. I speak the language, I understand the way people think and interact, and even though I may now find those customs and ideas far less attractive, and find some of them offensive, I know that church is, and always will be, a place I can fit right into, no matter where it is or what its practices are. So Sunday morning in Ghana, knowing we would be attending a church in Dzodze—though strictly for sociological reasons, to see how they made use of Ghanaian music in a western religiou...