The Road to Asbury

Originally published on LewRockwell.com, July 22, 2023

“I don’t know the words to their songs,” I said to my sister over the phone. It wasn’t a question of not going. As soon as we’d expressed the thought, we knew we were going. I just wasn’t exactly sure what would happen once we got there.

“I don’t think it matters,” she said. “You can just hum along. That’s what I’m going to do.”

It had been just over a year since my family had put all of our belongings into an enormous truck and made our way out of California, to a place I’d never even visited before: Lexington, Kentucky. My sister and her family had come a year previously, not long after they’d watched the city nearest to them be burned and looted by rioting mobs.

We came because those places had become unlivable for us.

But even though we’ve left them behind us, we still worry. We both know that the forces that turned our former homes into what they are now are not isolated to those geographies, and indeed appear to be moving across the entire earth with seemingly unstoppable power and speed. We worry about economic collapse, medical tyranny, CBDCs and social-credit systems powering up to control every aspect of our lives, the threat of nuclear war, chemical spills, crime, the list seems endless. Mostly, we worry about our kids, and about the kind of world they are growing up into.

So when we found ourselves living about a half hour north of what had spontaneously become the “Asbury Revival”, the choice seemed clear.

It was icy when we got there. Tiny occasional snowflakes floated in the air around us, and a line of people stretched all the way from the entrance to Hughes Auditorium down to the sidewalk by Lexington Avenue, and up along West College Street.

We struck up a conversation with a man who was heading in the same direction.

“So what do you think is happening here?” He asked.

A “revival”? An “outpouring”? The words didn’t seem to matter, didn’t capture what we thought was happening, or why we had come.

“I think there’s a real hunger for something,” said my sister, “for connection, for an experience of the divine, of something bigger.”

All around us, there was an air of quiet anticipation. Nobody seemed annoyed or dispirited when a man wearing a little tag that read “usher” stepped up to our part of the line and told us that it would be at least a few hours before we could expect to get into Hughes.

The man lived nearby, and had been called in to help. “This is all new to us,” he told us, his own face wide with wonder, “none of this was planned.” He told us that there were  “overflow chapels” where there might still be seats, across the street, and we thanked him and made our way down.

Inside it was warm. The service in the much larger Hughes Auditorium – which had been going continuously for nine days now –  was being simulcast on two screens at the front of the chapel. Music filled the air, and all around us people stood, sat, swayed, prayed, held their arms up in the air, or didn’t. We found seats and joined them.

With everything that’s been going on in the world, I had expected there to be a sense of catharsis, of the light rising up valiantly against the darkness. But that wasn’t the feeling at all. It was just light. It was as if the outside world, with its wars and its toxic spills, its petty tyrants, vaccine mandates and runaway inflation had, not disappeared, but become much, much smaller and less important.

I don’t call myself a Christian. I believe in God – although my view of what that means is probably very different from those of many Christians – and I believe in the teachings of Jesus. But I don’t believe the Bible is infallible, and I don’t believe that the only way to God is through Jesus. I could go into all kinds of detail about all of that, but it’s not really relevant here. The way I see it, we – all of humanity – are the blind men trying to make sense of the elephant. There is a spiritual truth, and our religions grasp parts of it, but none of them has the whole picture. I’m not even sure we’re capable of grasping the whole picture.

Probably, most of the people in the chapel with us, most of the people in Hughes Auditorium, and most of the people standing out in the line in the cold, would think I’m wrong about that. Probably, if we were to get into a theological discussion about the merits of our different beliefs, it would get a little heated. Maybe even unpleasant.

And I imagine that’s true not only for me, but for a great many of the people there. If they all started talking with each other about who believes what and who isn’t so sure about some things, and how some of them practice their Christianity as opposed to how others do it… I imagine there would be a lot of people becoming very judgmental about how so many other people are doing it wrong.

But here, in a place of pure worship, all of that disappears. That’s what’s so beautiful about a Revival. Or an “Outpouring.” Or “Awakening” – or whatever you want to call it. It bypasses all of that. It is emphatically not an intellectual exercise. It goes straight to the heart, straight to our connection with God. And we discover – actually feel and experience – that despite all of our disagreements, our differing and sometimes conflicting ways of seeing things, we are bound together by something very real and profound.

CONFRONTING CYNICISM

Some have questioned whether what happened at Asbury was a “real revival.” I don’t know what that means. I also don’t think I care. What I know with certainty is that there was something very real and very powerful in the room with us.

One of the speakers described it as “a thinning of the veil between heaven and earth.” Others have said that there was a “timelessness” in the space. Both descriptions are accurate. Here’s what I think: When people gather together to worship and sing, something magical happens. The Holy Spirit is a real thing, and it was there in the room with us at Asbury. The question as to whether the gathering met some intellectual or historical standard for a “real” revival just isn’t relevant.

There is an attitude of savvy cynicism that has become a cheap substitute for intellect throughout much of mainstream discourse. This spirit of cynicism will stand back and try to pass judgment over an event like this, to pass judgment on whether it is “genuine” or not. It will look at all of the people in that chapel and say “this one is an alcoholic, that one is lazy, this one over here yelled at her kids this morning… and that one doesn’t even fully believe in God!” As if all of these things invalidate what they are doing here, invalidate who they are.

But the Asbury kids know better.

They know that we are all flawed, and that the way to redemption is not – as our loud, hyper-critical, mainstream culture would have us believe – to insist that we are flawless, or to wait to act or to speak until we are. It is to acknowledge our failings openly, own them, and meet God wherever we are. The mainstream noisemakers will tell you that is impossible. That God is only for the airbrushed. But these kids know better.

As we heard it, the whole thing started with one student confessing his sins after chapel had ended. He spoke openly about his failures in front of other students. We heard that other students had joined in, and that a great many more felt compelled to be in the space, to stay long after the service had finished, to continue to worship. As people from outside of Asbury heard about what was happening there, they too felt compelled to come and be a part of it.

And so they came: These people, from all over, with all of their pain and their flaws and their failures, coming to be honest about what was going on in their souls, about the things that matter. At one point, while we were in the overflow chapel, someone in the main chapel called for prayer for those whose children were lost to God, and asked for those who need these prayers to stand. A man in front of us stood up, and we put our hands on him and prayed. It was one of the best things I have ever done. And I can’t help thinking that if we just did more of this – less “fighting evil” and more manifesting good – that maybe evil would have nothing to latch on to. That maybe this is all that is needed.

Only later did it occur to me: Teenagers did this. Teenagers and young adults. The very people we are so tied up in knots over. The ones whose lives we don’t know how to fix, or how to protect from the world. They did this themselves. While we are agonizing over their futures, they are finding their own way toward what will fix their lives and make them whole.

For several days after my visits to the Asbury Outpouring (I went twice), I still felt as if I was in that chapel, filled with a sense of peace, and with a new  awareness that the darkness isn’t as big or as powerful as I had believed it to be – that the enemies of light don’t have anything like this kind of power on their side. And that maybe, just maybe, the kids are going to be alright.