Writer: Chris Ahrens
It was as if everything had a point, and it was up to me to get my Burning Bush decoder ring and figure out the specific hidden message God had for me. I don't do that anymore. I just look for signs of his presence, because I know they are there. He doesn't hide. I am just blind.
-Dean Nelson, God Hides in Plain Sight

Dean Nelson is seated in front of me. I can see him, hear the warmth of his words and laughter. I am certain he is there, just as I am certain that I am in the room with him. God, according to the scriptures, is also in the room with us. But He can seem harder to locate than His creation. A true seeker, Dean Nelson finds God in a place many Protestants wouldn't think to look-in a place that many of us non-Catholic abandoned during the Reformation. We may have been a bit hasty in our baby and bathwater discards.

Risen Magazine: Why did you choose to write about the sacraments?
Dean Nelson: I think it was Eugene Peterson who said that we talk about God in these veiled references. The sacraments are a way to talk about God without talking about God. We don't end up talking about God, but the activity of God, the evidence of God, the experience of the sacred.

RM: Protestants don't look to the sacraments.
DN: Protestants think there are only two: baptism and communion. They're losing something by only focusing on two.
RM: Protestantism is a reaction, and sometime reactionaries miss out.
DN: The Reformation was a great thing and it was also an awful thing. We lost a lot during the Reformation. Part of what we lost were these great traditions and seeing the activity of God. Did the sacraments, for instance, get so parceled out that only priests could be the means by which to experience the grace of God? That just got a little screwy. Going back to the sacrament of confession, for instance-over a meal, you may start articulating things you didn't even know you thought until you started hanging language on them. When you do, you realize you're actually revealing something from your heart. In receiving it there's a type of healing experience. Take one of the sacraments that Protestants do embrace, baptism-we're all over the place as to what it means and how important it is. Some people say that it's something that happens to a baby. Or they use a term like dedicate a baby, which is a type of baptism. Or, is baptism a public declaration of your faith in God and you wait 'til you're a little older, a teenager or an adult. Or, you get baptized because what you really want is healing. Protestants use that word in a variety of different contexts. The way I address it in this book is… when Jesus got baptized by John, He comes up out of the river and the voice of God says, “This is my son in whom I am well pleased.” What Jesus got at that moment was a new identity-He knew who He was and the world knew who He was. That's how I approach baptism in this book. It isn't just an act at a baptismal portion in a church service. It's an act of knowing who you are before God. There are moments in our lives when we have those revelations. It doesn't rule out infant baptism, but baptism can be so much more. The whole point of this book is seeing the activity of God, or the grace of God being given to us in everyday life, not just at the prescribed moments when a church might have said, Now we're going to have baptism, or you need confession before you can receive communion. Confession can be ongoing, confession can be experienced all the time; baptism can be experienced all the time.
    In the movie Shawshank Redemption, the Timothy Robins character escapes from prison and digs his way out of the sewer system, going through the worst muck imaginable, through everybody's waste, including his enemies'. He finally comes out of the sewer pipe into a river, and there's a moment where he stands up out of the river and sheds those prison clothes. That was a baptismal moment. He had a new identity once he escaped that prison. He escapes that prison and becomes a new creature. I'm saying that we have those moments where we have similar types of experiences.

RM: For a writer, maybe writing can be a type of confession, and selling a book a type of absolution.
DN: Exactly, and when it's received the person receiving it has a clearer idea of the state of your heart and probably the state of his or her own heart. And you receive some absolution, or healing. I think that's one of the reasons we write.

RM: If you're doing all right as a writer, you're both the therapist and the patient.
DN: Yeah, getting things out to your peers is important and to those who will love you no matter what you write. You might reveal something really dark, or reveal something not in a very artistic way, and yet they're going to receive it.

RM: As a Catholic kid, there was something about confession and talking to someone behind the veil. Yet, right around puberty confession becomes less honest.
DN: [Laughs] That's one of the ways confession can be heard. I don't think it's the only way.

RM: Take me through the sacraments as you see them.
DN: I look at something like the sacrament of vocation, which over time was interpreted as receiving what in the Catholic tradition is called “Holy Orders,” which meant you were going into the priesthood or a convent. I studied these sacraments, and that isn't necessarily what the sacrament of vocation was intended to be. It just evolved into that and became this kind of exclusive club of the professional class. I looked back and found that it began as an understanding that we all have a spiritual vocation, and that spiritual vocation is to participate in the redeeming and the restoring and the reconciling of all things back into a right relationship with God. That was the old understanding, then it evolved from vocation into occupation-that's what your job was and the only time you received the sacrament of vocation was when you had this certain job.
    What I've tried to do with this book is say that we all have a spiritual vocation, we all have holy orders, and those orders are to be a participant in the redeeming and restoring and reconciling of all creation back into right relationship to God. I use an example of going to my daughter's middle school, where they had this program called “Dads at lunch.” It was basically crowd control. You've got all these middle schoolers in an outdoor eating area, and it's like a prison riot now and then. I was available once a week and I could go in and have a presence there, with a big button on my jacket that said “Dads at lunch.” They gave me coupons