Article September 2, 1985 Issue

Spirituality and the demands of Christian discipleship: a conversation

with contributions from Joan Cawood, Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Joan Cawood has a lively faith. Her evangelical Protestant church taught her to love God and to live Christ Jesus' teaching. But in the two or three years just after college, although she was living a Christian life as best she could, she found herself in the midst of a deep spiritual struggle.

She wanted to trust God wholly and serve Him, but at times there seemed to be "a bridge missing"—a gap between what she knew of God and what she experienced of Him. At one point, although she was hard at work on her career, the yearning to be closer to God became so persistent that she decided to leave her job and look for work that would give her more time to pray and to study her Bible. In this interview she talks about the questions that troubled her and the experiences that brought her to her answer.

As a Christian, I certainly wasn't looking for a faith to replace Christianity, but for a deeper sense of God, which would help me understand and live more of Christ Jesus' original teachings. I was quite sick at the time. The real problem, though, was that deep down I felt—a little like the Apostle Paul—that I was fighting against what God meant me to be. Yet in the midst of struggle, I had intuitions of a very different sense of reality. There were times when I could just feel God's presence. Something shifted for a time; so that instead of pushing or struggling I lived in the flow of God's love.

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