My Dark Epiphany, by Tom Williams

2008-04-23T13:06:00.003-04:00

Tom Williams is an attorney with the firm Stoll-Keenon-Ogden in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the immediate past president of the Louisville Bar Association and a member of the Board of Interfaith Paths to Peace.

My Dark Epiphany….April 17, 2008

Thomas, called Didymus, one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into his side, I will not believe.” John, 20: 24-29.

My name is Tom Williams. I am 43 years old and an attorney. My wife, Sarah, and I have three children, Lilly (8), Lincoln (6) and Nelson (3). We are blessed to live in this community and to have wonderful friends and food on the table. I call my epiphany a “dark” epiphany because God did not come to me with joy, ease and lightness. No, He came to me at 4 a.m. with fear and trembling upon the sudden realization of the enormity of my own darkness—my fully human darkness. It was through this tunnel of my own darkness that I was born anew. The consolation to me is that even my mistakes may be transformed to good by the grace of God. Before I give my epiphany, I will provide a brief witness of my life.

I was adopted as a child and grew up Methodist with loving parents and an adopted brother. Our life was far from perfect but my brother and I always knew we were loved by John and Miriam Williams—our parents. I was given the name Thomas Matthew—the doubting one and the tax collector in the Christian tradition. In high school, I was mostly a good kid, good grades, no drinking, no cussing, no gambling, and no smoking. I was always around Christianity and good people. True to my name, however, I doubted the existence of God at an early age—as early as 12 or 13 years old. I could not believe in Him simply because someone told me to believe. I had to know for myself.

This soul-felt need to seek the truth led me to study philosophy in college. I studied philosophy with a passion. I was a lover of wisdom and seeking the Truth…but at this point in my life I believed the truth was that God did not exist. How could He exist? My head, the source of all my knowledge, could not comprehend God or understand God with any form of investigation that I had been taught. My knowledge, without knowledge of its limitations, was blind to anything that I could not explain.

By my junior year in college, I began to see a theme in philosophical investigations: reject Christianity, create a new way of understanding the world and then “prop up” Christ as an ideal person with a new, more sophisticated understanding. This approach, however, seemed cowardly to me. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t accept that man was responsible for all of the pain and grief in the world and then accept that there was some underlying reason to honor man by following man’s morality. If God did not exist, then everything was available to me. It was an utterly earth-shattering freedom.

In hindsight, if I had one redeeming quality during this time, it was my willingness to seek the truth and then to act upon what I believed to be true. Now that there was no God, I acted upon that belief and sought to destroy my conscience…the only thing between me and what I wanted. My leader and my guide on this journey to destroy my conscience was the philosopher Frederich Nietzsche. Nietzsche, I believed then, had the “courage” of his convictions to destroy all morality with the pronouncement of the “death” of God. He wrote a book literally called the Antichrist. This, I thought, was someone who took his vow of the destruction of morality seriously.

The frustration with this “conscience project” for me was simple: the harder I tried to destroy my inner guide…the more he fought back. It was truly a dark night of my soul.

Thus, it was at night that I experienced my epiphany. It came in the middle of October 1985—about the date of Nietzsche’s birth—October 15th. I was reading Nietzsche at four a.m. and the phone in the hall of my fraternity house rang four times. I was reading from a Nietzsche book called Ecce Homo which is Latin for “I present the man”--the words of Pontius Pilate when he presented Jesus for crucifixion. Whatever I was reading at the time spoke precisely to the moment—something about feeling a tremendous fear. For some reason, I thought then, if God was dead, perhaps he could come back to life. The Nietzsche pronouncement that “God is dead” was made by a madman who waived a lantern during the day. Should I trust a madman? Wouldn’t the Antichrist lie to me? It suddenly and powerfully occurred to me what I had been doing without knowing it…I had been following the philosophy of a man who figuratively claimed to be the Antichrist. Nietzsche died in an insane asylum having been declared “mad” just like his spokesperson for the “death of God.” Paradoxically, if there is an Antichrist that lives, that told me that Christ was living and is….But now I thought: what had I done with my life?

Before discussing that, you might wonder about the significance of four rings at four a.m. I had studied symbols. I had read the Bible as an historic text and believed that “four” was the number of death. The fourth horseman of the Apocalypse was death. Four is also a number of death in some other cultures--as I understood it then.

In a word, that night of my dark epiphany, I thought I was going to die—right then. Death had called me. I had this image of the “Nightmare” a painting by Fuseli where demons literally invade our sleep at night after riding in on a horse. I was in a state of utter fear and trembling for what I had done, what I had failed to do and who I was trying to become…a human being without a conscience.

I closed my eyes and prayed for the first time in years…I was so afraid of what I had done. My friends would find me the next day and think that it was a shame that I had died of unexpected, but medically explainable, causes. In the end, after a sleepless and fear-filled night of prayer—I did wake up. I did keep breathing and I did have a life to live. My dark epiphany was literally a “crisis of conscience” that manifested itself in dramatic ways and gave me the truth that I am going to die—so I had better learn how to live.

I still think how ironic that my “Call” would actually come in the form of a telephone call. A Thomas to the end, I didn’t accept the Call until I could touch it…until I could know it in my entire body—with fear and trembling. I didn’t answer the phone you will notice …I wasn’t ready. But now I know that it was the experience at four a.m. that placed my finger into the wounds of Jesus.

It was as if I had always been a tadpole swimming in the quiet waters without air and now I had lost my tail and become a frog living in the strange and refreshing world of the air. I was still greatly undeveloped but I had transformed into to something higher—by pure grace, I had been baptized into a new world and new life. This dark epiphany, where I stumbled and fell, is a centering and ordering experience for my life. I will ever be grateful for the ecstasy and the suffering it brought me.

In my undeveloped condition of brokenness, I was swept up by the net of St. Peter and the mysticism and paradox of the Catholic Church. It has been said that Peter came to God by doing it all wrong. His story and his Church resonated with me on my journey. While this story is for another day, I am ever grateful to find a new guide to the light of community in St. Peter and my Catholic faith as we try to follow Jesus to the mountain of God.

The Debt, By Donald H. Vish

2008-04-22T12:04:00.001-04:00

Donald Vish is an attorney with the firm Middleton Reutlinger in Louisville, Kentucky and serves as president of the Board of Interfaith Paths to Peace.

Sometime after the new millennium, I incurred a debt .Today, it remains unpaid. And it’s grown.It is relevant to my story to tell you that on the day of myepiphany, my car is a Mercedes -Benz being serviced in St.Matthews; my shirt is c custom made, suit tailored , shoesbench-made and the cufflinks are gold . My pocket moneyis folded in a silver money clip: five $20 bills.As I walked to lunch, I crossed Chestnut Street nearThird. A passing bus advertised a special fa re: 25 cents.While crossing, I had a flashback from my youth in the50’s. The bus-stop at Chestnut and Third provides serviceto St . Matthews. So, I decided to skip lunch and ride thebus to pick up my car.I got on the bus, pulled out a $20 bill, extended it in thedirection of the driver who ignored it (and me) and saidin a voice addressed to the world-at-large, “ The fare is aquarter.” I said, “ Take it out of this $20.” The driver said,“We don’t make change. The fare is a quarter.”I said, “I don’t have a quarter. What do I do?”The driver said , “ Get off the bus—and get correctchange.”I want to pause for a moment, while you take in what Ijust told you .Many thoughts raced through my mind: Is this how it feelsto be poor? Is this what it feels like to be powerless? Isthis what it feels like to be other?By some standards, I was a rich man—but I lacked thecoin of the realm. Neither my gold cufflinks nor my silvertongue could keep me on that bus; my trappings were useless,worthless. I needed a quarter and didn’t have one.As the bus door opened for my departure, an old, whitehairedwoman seated in the back of the bus, bent overfrom age and care, a woman who was no taller standingthan she was sitting, rose with the aid of a cane and saidin a strong mezzo soprano voice, “I will pay his fare.”The driver stayed in place pending her a arrival at the farebox knowing that she couldn’t walk on a moving bus. Shearrived, dropped a quarter in the fare box and returnedto her seat. Stunned speechless by the events that hadjust unfolded, I sat down.As we approached St. Matthews, she rang the bell signalingher intention to get off at the next stop. I knewthis stop well. There is nothing there. Never has been.It’s just a large vacant parking lot, a convenient stagingarea for day-workers, such as domestics, to wait for theiremployers to pick them up. I got off with her. She toldme she did ironing.I reached into my pocket, pulled out the five $20 bills, extendedthem to her and said, “Here, give these to your minister onSunday.”“No, no,” she said. “That’s not the way charity works. Youmust now do for others what I have done for you.”Ladies and gentlemen, not a day goes by that I am nothounded and haunted by her injunction. And the moreI give, the more I owe her for making me a truly richman.

Personal Epiphany Stories

My Dark Epiphany, by Tom Williams

The Debt, By Donald H. Vish