On May 19, 1838 at 10:30 a.m. a worldly university student, age 25, whose life had been plagued by a family curse, a culture of death, an abusive and condemning Christian father and the unremitting intellectual powers of his own dark genius, recorded the following experience:
“There is such a thing as indescribable joy which glows through us as unaccountably as the Apostle’s outburst is unexpected: “Rejoice, and again I say rejoice.” —not a joy over this or that, but full jubilation “with hearts, and souls , and voices”—a heavenly refrain which cuts short, as it were, our ordinary song: a joy which cools and refreshes like a breeze, a gust of trade wind which blows from the Grove of Mamre to the eternal mansion.”
Soren Kierkegaard, a young nineteenth century Dane, was the celebrant of this joy. Considered a Prophet to the twenty first century church, known and read around the world, Soren was not making this up in 1838. From the glow that bursts with joy to the breeze that cools, a full range of ecstatic experiences has been present in the Church since Pentecost.
Soren refers to the Oaks of Mamre, referencing Abraham’s encounter with the Lord in Genesis 18 , “As he sat in the tent in the heat of the day.” Abraham was to walk on through this early encounter with the Lord to finally scaling Mount Moriah with his son, Isaac. On Moriah at the end the father-son relationship is transformed into a relationship constituted and sustained not by kinship but by Grace alone. For the Lord God who graciously spares Isaac is the Father who does not spare his own Son, but graces us (Soren and us) with his death “for us.” Yet it all began when old Abraham “runs from his tent in the cool of the day” to receive from God the promise of Isaac.
Soren, long before his twenty fifth birthday, intellectually knows that we are all miraculously children of Abraham or we are dead. But before age twenty five Soren does not know this truth experientially. So what happens to open up this unlikely convert to the “heavenly trade winds?” A real, not so unique human story. For on his 25th birthday, just two weeks before his experience of joy unspeakable, his eighty two year old Father confesses the sins of his youth (the cursing of God , his sexual infidelities and his abuse) to Soren. He asked his son’s forgiveness for them and for all the negative consequences they had brought on his family and his young son.
At that moment Soren was horrified to discover that his own falling away mirrored that of his Father. This brought Soren to himself and when he and his father had forgiven and blessed each other he returned home. The curse was gone and the arms of the Father were open wide!
This experience of the “cooling trade winds” –the Spirit’s winds which come as the double conflict between father and son, and between them both and God was resolved in a stunning moment of participation with a Holy and gracious God leads Soren to an enduring reconciliation with the Father God. The joy unspeakable comes after the healing with his father and after presenting himself for confession in preparation for celebration of his first communion with the risen Christ. Soren became a follower of Christ.
Though born into a corrupted , cursed human bloodline he is now redeemed by the blood of Christ and living among the “cool trade winds” of the Spirit. It was two weeks later that joy unspeakable came and energized him for the rest of his difficult and sometimes very sad life.
The joy of the Lord rumbles up from the depths of a life trained in Christ and literally possessed with the recovery of discipleship in a Denmark overlaid with the concrete of culture Christianity.
So it is with us. Let us together seek the Lord , begging for his healing and liberation. Let’s “run from our tents to receive the Lord and his promises of life now and forever.”