Looking back, I guess you could call it the Tao of almost getting blown to bits.
     In my younger days, when I worked for the U.S. Government, I belonged to a small group that set up monitoring stations around the world to detect and identify the atomic weapons activities of other countries.
     We had to calibrate the monitoring equipment with our own U.S. nuclear tests, so I was present for a number of atomic and hydrogen bomb detonations in Nevada and the South Pacific.
     One event was particularly memorable.
     I was alone on a small island about 30 miles from another insignificant patch of sand that was to serve as ground zero for a hydrogen bomb. Every day for three months I calibrated the equipment and went through a long countdown, only to have the detonation called off for some reason. After three months of frustration with no one to talk to and absolutely nothing to do or even to look at, that little "vacation resort" was turning into a kind of sensory deprivation version of purgatory.
     Then one day the countdown got down to "five, four, three..." As it approached zero I realized I hadn't even put on my protective blast goggles. I fumbled with them, and slipped them on just as the voice on my radio reached "zero."
     The explosion was brighter than anything I had ever seen or imagined. The phrase I've always used to describe it is "brighter than a thousand suns" – just a cliché compared to the experience itself. The shock wave a few seconds later knocked me and some of the equipment completely off the beach and into the ocean.
     The radiation from the explosion caused a cascade of mutations in my DNA that had endowed me with super powers.
     OK, that part's not true. In fact, just the opposite. I've got about 200 weird bumps all over my body, and my doctor tells me there are still traces of radiation in my blood nearly 40 years later – radiation that has played havoc with my immune system and made me susceptible to all kinds of diseases.
     What I want to convey is that this was a big explosion. The government reported the blast was the equivalent of 9.3 million tons of TNT, I was told later that the explosion literally vaporized the island that served as host to the bomb.
     On Jan. 17, 1972 about 14 years later, I had a similar experience but it was internal.
     I had been pursuing the typical American idols of success, power and wealth. But when God found me that day, the same kind of explosion occurred, totally vaporizing my previous value system. With nothing left, He rushed in to fill the vacuum with joy.
     Trinity Foundation, the present owner of The Door, was not named after the Big Three, but after the first atomic bomb named "Trinity," which was exploded at Trinity Flats, N.M. I didn't want to let myself forget that church or Bible study or any other "God stuff" should approximate the power of the hydrogen bomb that I witnessed.
     Annie Dillard said it better in her book of essays, Teaching a Stone to Talk:

     "Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a package tour of the Absolute?...
     "On the whole I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return."

"And the Angel whom I saw standing upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and swore by him that liveth forever and ever.... that there should be time no longer" (Revelation 10:5, 6).