Customer Reviews

God Hides in Plain Sight: How to See the Sacred in a Chaotic World

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In his 1933 essay, "The End of Our Time," Nicholas Berdyaev writes: "Two attitudes, two completely divergent positions, are possible for man, and he finds the face of everything different accordingly as he chooses the one or the other. He can --- if he will --- put himself in the presence of God and the mystery of being. Then he has a clear conscience and a clean heart, revelation and intuition are vouchsafed to him, the true primordial spirit appears, he reaches to the very source of all."

It is precisely this posture toward reality and experience that Dean Nelson endorses in his new book: "God Hides in Plain Sight." Nelson, who reminds me of Leonard Sweet in person --- brilliant, quick on his feet, enormously well read --- writes here with the poetic grace of Anne Lamott or Thomas Merton, exploring the mystery and the meaning of Divine presence in everyday moments.

By day, Nelson writes op-ed pieces in The New York Times and other venues while leading the journalism department at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. Yet in these pages he writes from a philosophical perspective. Using a skeletal outline from the Christian sacraments, Nelson traces the tiny, often unobserved specks of DNA evidence that establish God's paternity amid His creation, teaching us to be more attentive as we experience family, community and society.

Woven through these well-crafted pages are quotes from Henri Nouwen, Walter Wangerin, Frederick Buechner and others, including novelist Walker Percy. The result is a collection of tightly-written essays that command the reader's notice while rewarding it with perceptive and intriguing depth.

With this book, Nelson places himself among the first tier of contemporary thinkers, challenging us to address the critical questions of life by becoming more attentive to daily graces.

Dr. David Frisbie

The Center for Marriage & Family Studies

You might also appreciate reading: The Power of Serving Others: You Can Start Where You Are

So in the interest of fair disclosure, I know the author and think he is a great guy. Nonetheless, I am writing this because I truly loved his book and not to be polite. I found this book both both highly readable and profound. I enjoyed the stories, anecdotes, and quotes from other deep thinkers. More than that I loved the deeper sense of intimacy I felt with God after experiencing this book. This book was so good, I loaned it to a friend who was in agony she couldn't highlight and write in it. Needless to say, I went out and bought a copy for her. I hope you like it also.

In his 1992 film Husbands and Wives, Woody Allen's character watches television, as a scientist quotes Einstein, "God doesn't play with dice." Allen turns the TV off and walks away, "No he doesn't play with dice. He plays hide and seek."

Nelson takes strong exception to the notion that God plays hide and seek with the universe. Rather, God constantly breaks in. We simply fail to recognize it, just as the natives on the southern tip of Argentina assumed that Magellan's ships were apparitions because they lacked the experience to decode the event. The book attempts to show us how to see God in the world and in our lives. He draws from mostly Catholic authors--Thomas Merton figures prominently--in an attempt to persuade us that spiritual discernment is not a "Where's Waldo" exercise but a discipline of prayer.

The central difficulty with the book is the use of the seven sacraments as touchstones in his analysis of how God breaks in and constantly reveals himself. Our Catholic parish book group recently read this book. I expressed my curiosity that an evangelical Protestant would take such an approach. The primary reference point of the Reformation is an "individualist" concept of grace that can cause some to lose contact with the senses and the social sphere. Protestantism is suspicious of any "pagan" tendencies, so it avoids festivals, ceremonies, rites and all "sense oriented" religious tendencies. Grace is mediated solely through the preaching of the word, interior conversion and pure doctrine.

The distinguishing feature of modern evangelical Protestantism is "decisionism" which, roughly speaking, means that a Christian is one who has made "a decision for Christ" or has accepted Christ as his/her personal Savior. The believer makes only one decision, a once-and-for-all event, before which the sinner is damned and after which the sinner is saved. Decisionism is a relatively new concept that many scholars attribute to Charles Finney (1792-1875), a professor of theology at Yale, who formulated an earlier version of it in the 1820s. Although the concept was highly controversial in its day and was attacked as superficial, it has held sway and is the cornerstone of modern evangelical Protestantism. Decisionists are peculiarly individualistic. They are typically suspicious of sacraments as detracting from the centrality of the "decision for Christ." Indeed, Nelson tells us that he grew up in a church in which communion was celebrated twice a year. Therefore, it is odd that this book would emerge from the evangelical community.

Others in our group found that the book was not only "odd" or "curious" but downright annoying. Several suggested that it is clear that Nelson understands little about many of the sacraments. This chapter on "Last Rites" essentially missed the point. Other than a cute story about his evangelical protestant father-in-law being asked in a Catholic hospital whether he wanted to see a priest, the chapter says nothing about the sacrament. Rather, the chapter is a discussion about the sad treatment of death and dying in our culture. That's fine, but why did he have to link it with "last rites," which isn't even the real name of the sacrament? Similar criticisms could be lodged against his treatment of the other sacraments. Several members of the group visibly winced when passages from the chapter entitled "The Sacrament of Communion" were read aloud.

In a rejoinder to these criticisms, Msgr. Dennis L. Mikulanis, a Catholic priest says that "Nelson is not writing about the theology of the sacraments. He is writing about the description of sacramentality, which can loosely be defined as `seeing the grace of God in the everyday moments of life.'" (North County Times, March 19, 2010) Why, then, mention the sacraments at all? Many in our group argued that the book will only confuse both Catholics and Orthodox who are poorly educated about their faith as well as Protestants who see the sacramental system as a strange syncretistic pagan gloss on the gospel.

One member of the group suggested that Nelson's notions of spiritual discernment could be improved by a study of St. Ignatius of Loyola's works on the subject. Perhaps Nelson could benefit from a Jesuit spiritual director.

Our group gave the book a mixed review. The book invites us to reject Woody Allen, turn off the television, and see God in the workings of our ordinary lives. It uses various stories to illustrate how that can happen. But the treatment of the sacraments misses many essential points and may promote confusion on both sides of the sad historical divide of Christianity.

A previous reviewer of Dean Nelson's "God Hides in Plain sight" had this to say,

"Nelson's own fluid prose and keen observations are often bolstered with insights from not just Buechner, but from a wide array of writers and thinkers, including Anne Lamott, Philip Yancey, Eugene Peterson, Thomas Merton, Henri Nowen and Frederica Mathewes-Green. This rich contextualization is a delightful feature of the book that introduces (or perhaps reintroduces) readers to other authors whose work they will also want to explore."

My reaction to this masterful work is that future writers on this incredibly important topic will be widely quoting Dean Nelson.

It all started in India. Well, kind of. In retrospect, I'm sure Dean Nelson would agree that GOD HIDES IN PLAIN SIGHT is a book that has been in the making long before that trip. But it was in India, on a brief teaching assignment, where Nelson started to notice things that seemed unusual --- incidents that reminded him of his family. A piano player in the hotel lobby played songs two days in a row that his children had played at a recital the night before he left on the trip. A student, a missionary, in his class wrote a paper about a transformative experience with a pastor back in Wisconsin --- a man who happened to be Nelson's father-in-law. Nelson is quick to say that coincidences do happen. But he also saw in these events a kind of greeting from God.

He writes, "I believe that grace goes before us as a way for God to say, `Welcome! I got here before you. I've been expecting you.' That is exactly how I felt when I heard this missionary read his assignment in Bombay. I was alone, feeling like a Martian, a little bit afraid, and I sensed God saying to me, `See? You're with me, and you're going to be fine.'"

As Nelson tells it, that experience gave him courage, even amused him. And he started paying closer attention to his life. "What I hungered for was better vision so I could see God and his activity throughout my day. I believed that his grace and love and presence were all around me, but I wasn't seeing them. I wasn't living with that knowledge at my center. I wanted the blinders off. I wanted to catch the subtleties of God's activity."

Such vision doesn't develop overnight. But slowly and steadily, Nelson started to see and understand that grace is constantly breaking into everyday moments, making them different --- sacred --- drawing us into the presence of God. "It's not about us getting a hold of the sacred. It's about the sacred getting a hold of us," he writes.

In GOD HIDES IN PLAIN SIGHT, Nelson unpacks how the idea of the sacraments --- outward signs of inward grace --- helped him see God at work in the world. Through rich and wonderful storytelling, he explores the outlandish and mundane, urging readers to see God at work in all areas of life, even (and especially) the messy, chaotic and even boring areas. His important lessons come easily through engaging and good-spirited prose, making this a read that is both delicious and nutritious.

But don't just take my word for it. The cover of GOD HIDES IN PLAIN SIGHT features a nature scene that evokes the title and an endorsement from Frederick Buechner in the upper right-hand corner: "This book has wonderful and valuable things to say." Buechner's assessment is true, and he should take some personal satisfaction in this given that Nelson is clearly beholden to Buechner's work in the development of his own ability to see God in the world around him. Nelson writes, "Much of our lives, it seems to me, are spent like that of the main character in Camus' novel, THE STRANGER; we are indifferent, unmoved, unfeeling, walking dead people. Not until the stranger faced his own death did he ever notice the stars in the sky. He reminds me of a lot of people I meet. `Listen to your life,' Buechner said. `See it for the fathomless mystery that it is ... There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize Him or not to recognize Him.'"

Nelson's own fluid prose and keen observations are often bolstered with insights from not just Buechner, but from a wide array of writers and thinkers, including Anne Lamott, Philip Yancey, Eugene Peterson, Thomas Merton, Henri Nowen and Frederica Mathewes-Green. This rich contextualization is a delightful feature of the book that introduces (or perhaps reintroduces) readers to other authors whose work they will also want to explore.

I myself hope to track down a book by Jean-Pierre de Caussade, first published in the 1700s, titled THE SACRAMENT OF THE PRESENT MOMENT. As Nelson relates, "[Caussade] says that God's activity permeates all things, even the most trivial and annoying. Look for God backstage, he says, not center stage. `No moment is trivial,' he said, `since each one contains a divine Kingdom. The present moment is like an ambassador announcing the policy of God.'"

But before Caussade, I look forward to spending more time with Nelson. His lively, conversational tone makes GOD HIDES IN PLAIN SIGHT a pleasure to read. It's the kind of book you want to revisit, to slow down with, and to learn from. And in this way it's like a good friend, one that's helping you to see your own life more clearly by bringing God's presence into focus.

--- Reviewed by Lisa Ann Cockrel

At last! A Christian book without a whiff of sanctimoniousness.

Dean Nelson is a cool guy, but more than that, he's a superb teacher and storyteller. Each beautifully written chapter offers a fresh look at the sacred moments in everyday life. Reading this, it's hard NOT to feel closer to the Divine. I laughed, I cried; I didn't want the book to end.

God Hides in Plain Sight is a book you'll want to re-read and pass along to friends.

Organized around the Christian sacraments, this book presents welcome insights into living a Christian life. Written in accessible and interesting manner. It would be excellent for a church study group to go though by each chapter.