c. 2000 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Thrashing about in the muck along the banks of the Flint River, theologian Roberta Bondi glimpsed God in a way she had not seen before.

Recounted in a new book, “Night on the Flint River: An Accidental Journey in Knowing God” (Abingdon Press), her story brings the universal to bear on the incidental.

It is the story of an overworked, busy college professor and author who gave in to a friend’s plea that she join her on an outdoor adventure.

As her story begins, Bondi admits she got in over her head before the journey truly began.

“I have to face it: I am simply not an outdoor person,” she writes. “I had always thought I was, however, before that black night I spent with Pam and Jeff, lost on the Flint River, one of the longest rivers in Georgia.”

She goes on to explore how what we really think about ourselves may prove _ in the trenches of life _ to be misbegotten information.

As a little girl, Bondi loved the outdoors, taking delight when she could revel in snow-dusted mountains and chilly outdoor air. As an adult, when her children were younger, she enjoyed camping with her husband and kids, preparing for classes and reading texts in a pop-up camper on weekends.

She missed those trips as their lives grew more complicated and her travel schedule jammed her life in-between plane flights, conferences and speaking engagements. So she accepted when her friend, Pam, proposed the two of them join another mutual friend for a short Sunday afternoon canoe trip along the Flint River.

The idea was to relax, but weather and other problems turned a simple trip into a life-altering adventure.

Bondi’s own words say it best.

“Nothing turned out as we had expected, however, and before long we were in trouble,” she writes. “There had been a drought some time before, which had killed many trees. Almost as soon as we were in the water we found ourselves entangled among their dead trunks, roots, and branches that had fallen across the river. Having decided, in spite of the obvious, to push on in hopes of finding that the water would be clear farther along, within hours we were in total darkness the likes of which I, at least, had never known before.”

She writes that she honestly believed she would not survive.

Yet it was in that darkness that Bondi learned what she needed to know most: God is present in the darkness, in the uncertainty. We must find God for he has already found us.

As she struggled and stumbled along the river’s banks, she remembered other times of darkness in her life, how she had retreated into ideas, words and behavior patterns that did not meet her deepest needs.

Remembering set in motion a pattern of thought that also uncovered times of light.

In “A Night on the Flint River,” she remembers the five years it took her to write a book on early monastic spirituality. She recalls the strong tribe of powerful Kentucky farm women who form her lineage on her mother’s side. She remembers her lonely first night in Kentucky when she moved in with her grandparents along with her mother and siblings after her parents’ marriage dissolved.

Bondi, a professor of church history at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, survived the traumatic night. So did her friends. Much of her learning from the experience came later, following prayer and reflection.

“I do believe, however,” she writes, “that when something like this happens to any us of, if we are attentive and honest with ourselves, God is able to use these times that seem to set us so at the boundaries between life and death, mystery and the ordinary, to speak to us in ways that help us grow in love of God and neighbor.”

(Cecile S. Holmes, a longtime religion writer, teaches journalism at the University of South Carolina. Her e-mail address is: cecile.holmesusc.jour.sc.edu).

DEA END HOLMES