Summer/Fall 1997

Some Thoughts from Berkeley

Tal Brooke, SCP President

If you are like me, there are times you desperately need to get off by yourself--by a good healthy distance--from the intense demands of the present to a place of silence and soul-searching reflection. We can spiritually dry out in the very heat of activity and not even know it.

When we do find a place of quiet before God, we rediscover that He can steer our thoughts, renew us, and prepare us for the things that lie ahead. Perhaps you, like me, love the contest of going at full tilt as well as its very opposite, deep solitude, where God brings us to a place where a "still small voice" can enter the periphery of our minds far from the clamor. I usually realize I have greatly missed that unique sense of nearness that I have known for so long, deeper than the riveting distractions that have dominated my thought life (Didn't Christ go off into the hills of Galilee to pray alone?).

In solitude we are reminded why we have been striving in the shadow of Paul for a struggle that has been going on for millennia. Every age and every effort in each age adds to its long history. It is part of the Great War, the one that so many miss. Yet this battle is the one thing worth fighting for. It is a struggle that constantly goes in and out of focus in the distractions of the moment. In solitude, we rediscover our purpose in the struggle. If we have strayed off course, we have the chance of regaining our orientation. I am grateful to be a part of this timeless war, yet have learned to take nothing for granted.

In truth, I am not sure I am really any closer to that still quiet voice that I first encountered during my honeymoon of Faith twenty five years ago in India. Indeed, during the solitude of my honeymoon in India, I think that God provided me with extraordinary grace. I knew then so tangibly that God's presence would sustain me anywhere, but I needed to keep from wandering away from that sense of immediate connection (what better description than a spring of living water). I also knew that up ahead I had to dive full force into the arena of life which could be its own distraction. And so it was, as I became "occupied" and sometimes overwhelmed with trying to live out my calling right up to the present.

In those early moments of faith in India--and it really was a time of enormous release, hope, and joy--my prayer was that those things I knew so powerfully then would not retreat from my awareness and fade over the years once I returned Westward. As we all know, some with Moses saw the Red Sea part only to doubt it years later in the desert. I did not want to join that crowd. I did not want to betray the One who rescued me at so great a price by falling into the temptations and trials that can devour any of us. I hoped somehow to stay true to my charge. And of course what I am saying about my own life applies to us all. We are living our own Pilgrim's Progress at the end of the twentieth century.

On a more mundane level, the contest continues for us here in Berkeley and as of late has been intense, at times rewarding as well as grieving -- this has been true of Heaven's Gate, representing the strange deceptions of our era. Such dark episodes can bring special opportunities for ministry, as when the media came to us looking for insight before a perplexed nation. The same goes for the new book, Virtual Gods. Exciting yes, but it is about the sobering things taking place in our midst. In the category of special privilege, I have been invited by the President of the Cambridge University Christian Union of 32 colleges--recommended by my old friend Lindsay Brown, worldwide head of Intervarsity--to speak at the big opening weekend at Cambridge University in England this Autumn. That great university has a charged and vital atmosphere as well as some of the world's most gifted minds--if God will only call some of them out for service in our age. Cambridge has provided countless Christian giants down the centuries, even men like John Harvard who started a small seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For a long time Harvard graduated great saints, then it lost its way. Now it despises the very faith that gave it birth. The world needs a new infusion from Cambridge.

Meanwhile, thanks for being on board with us as we continually navigate new terrain.

With Appreciation,

Tal Brooke

Chairman/President, SCP, Inc.

PS. The next journal will deal with Deepak Chopra, Andrew Weil, Bernie Seigel, and possibly other "cosmic medicine men."