I came to the Episcopal Day School at Christ Church in Pensacola, FL as a fourth grader and I stayed four years, attending class with the same group of twenty or so kids. No doubt we were sheltered. But neither is there any doubt that within that protected environment we recieved the foundation for a first rate, unapologetically liberal education. Dr. Currin made the policies. He hired the right people, administrators and teachers to implement them. And the whole process was founded on a concept he often repeated, which runs like a treasured litany of deliverance - that "we need not check our brains at the front door of the church as we enter."

Well, truth be told, I did a very moronic thing. I checked my brain on the way 'out' of the Day School as an eighth grader, and it took the better part of two decades to recover. While this technically, stays within the boundaries Dr. Currin defined, I've come to realize it was probably NOT what he meant.

So I left Pensacola at fourteen, with just half a brain. But Matt Currin's infection ran deep and there is simply no easy cure for an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Hope they never find one.

I re-established a relationship with Matt shortly after his retirement. My Father had moved back to Pensacola in the last decade and the two of them spent countless pre-service Sunday mornings trading tales and swapping dirty jokes over freshly brewed coffee. But as all things must, both bad and good, there came an end. My Father contracted Cancer and together, Matt and I saw him peacefully out of life - Matt simply doing more of what has come so naturally to him throughout his life and service to God.

I cannot claim to know and accept the same definition of God as Matt has, though we do share many extensively radical views on certain events and interpretations of Christian History. I've had a very different set of circumstances and experiences in my lifetime. But my once and future mentor simply smiles at my doubt, convinced I'm exactly where I should be - that I'm where and who God intended me to be.

I've been on a lifelong search for spirituality, in the broadest sense of that word. Despite my different perspective of its ultimate meaning, its impossible to ignore the lifelong fact that Matt Currin is now and has been, hands down, the most spiritually adept individual I've ever known.

The tales of his life bare an unintentional yet undeniable witness to the inestimable value of his lifelong service to the Episcopal Church, to Pensacola and its communities, to those like myself who ventured beyond armed with the awesome power of his educational convictions.

Mostly he is my friend. Thousands can make the same claim and personally, I believe thousands more will want to claim the same during and after a reading of "Does God Still Speak to Us?"

Enjoy the following excerpt found on pages 254-259 of Matt Currin's 406 page manuscript.

~Publisher and Agent inquiries are welcome at : mattcurrin31@aol.com

or : mollick@electricfrescostudios.com

Page 254-259

There are no limits to the possibilities of new worlds, and we are on the threshold of new ventures of the soul and the mind and the heart. "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses, what is man that you should be mindful of him?" (Psalm 8:4-5, Book of Common Prayer, p. 592). The Good News of the Gospel is that God is mindful of us, each and every one of us, and those "out there." What a glorious future our children have in store for them. A New Age is dawning, and it staggers the imagination to think what goodness God has in store for His wonderful creation. We are living today on the very edge of infinity.

Several years ago, I was in Washington DC for a pre-Christmas continuing-education seminar at the College of Preachers of the Washington Cathedral. One of our assignments was to write a Christmas sermon based on St. Luke's Christmas Story. Jimmy Carter had just been elected President, and he was in Washington making plans for a new administration. Gerald Ford was still in the White House. You could tell the old administration from the new administration by the dress in National Airport as I arrived. Those in blue suits and red ties were symbols of the old administration. Those in blue jeans and t-shirts were the symbols of the new administration. I had flown out of Atlanta with one of Jimmy Carter's blue-jeaned staff members and I was impressed with him as a person and one who knew where America was at the moment. I chuckled to myself as I walked through the airport thinking that I looked very much like one of Gerald Ford's boys in my blue suit and striped tie.

The few days at the College of Preachers were eventful as Washington is always eventful for a little country boy. I had plans for a luncheon at the Senate Office Building with Peatsy and Fritz Hollings, Fritz being the Democratic senator from South Carolina . I also planned to squeeze in a visit to the King Tut exhibit at the National Gallery, and I would see the magnificent splendor of treasures thirty centuries old. On top of all that excitement, Harry Reems was in Washington fighting a battle with the censors over his movie, "Deep Throat."

Back at the cathedral, we were supposed to write a Christmas sermon based on St. Luke's Gospel. No matter how hard I tried, nothing came forth. The two worlds just didn't converge.

On the last night before coming home, following a late-night theological discussion, one of my fellow priests decided we ought to go for a late-night snack. I suggested that if we were going to do that, and I was game, then we had to call a taxi, since it was not safe to go wandering around the streets of Georgetown at that hour. We called a taxi and in a few minutes four of us were in a Metropolitan cab in a hair-raising ride through the streets of Georgetown . The cab driver, a young man in his mid -twenties, told us that there was no place to get a ham sandwich at that hour of the night.

I sized up the situation and told him, "You have to be kidding. You can't tell me that there isn't some place we can get a Bloody Mary and a ham sandwich in Washington at midnight ." He glared at me. I added, "And why don't you join us . Be my guest."

He turned around to look at me and said, "You have to be a damn fool. You just don't go around inviting cab drivers to have a drink and a sandwich."

I responded, "Why not?"

He said after a moment, "OK, let's go." And with that we went around the corner and down a dark lane.

One of my friends said, "God, Matt, what have you gotten us into?"

 I replied, "Just wait and see."

He pulled the cab up in front of a small eating place, called in on his radio, got out, and locked the cab. The five of us went into a very nice little restaurant filled with college students, and as the Bloody Marys went down, out came his story. He did not know who we were. He had a degree from the University of Chicago but was not educated to earn a living. With his wife and baby, he had moved to Washington looking for work and had ended up driving a Metropolitan Cab. His wife had left him and taken his little son with her. He was lonely, depressed, and sick at heart. In his spare time, he composed music in one room of a boarding house. No one had ever invited him to have a Bloody Mary and a sandwich. He had eaten alone for months.

"Who the hell are you, anyway?", he asked.

            I told him, and he couldn't believe it.

He replied, "Well, I'll be damned." Then he took us back to the cathedral refusing to let us pay him and said, "Tomorrow when you leave, call the company and ask for me. I'll pick you up and take you to the plane, it's damn hard to get a cab at that hour."

The next day as I boarded the plane to return to Pensacola , still unable to write that Christmas sermon, my mind raced. What in the name of God could a fantasy about shepherds and wise men and a virgin birth and an unmarried mother and a surprised father and angels singing in stereophonic music and all the rest have to do with Washington and a lonely cab driver and Jimmy Carter and a new administration and Gerald Ford and an old administration and King Tut's thirty century-old tomb and world hunger and economics? I couldn't think of a thing, so I settled down in my seat looking out the window, thinking of the past week and of the weeks to come.

I was deep in these thoughts, like a vast mosaic, when quite suddenly the plane took off and something remarkable happened. Looking out over that marble city with darkness descending and man-made light shining, I saw two things. At one end of Washington was the Hill with the Capitol flooded in brilliant light. At the other end, another hill, Mount Saint Alban, and the majestic Washington Cathedral also flooded in light. Two worlds miles apart, but there, standing silently was the last hope for mankind...the church and the republic! Hope? Yes, there was hope. I remembered that it was overlooking this same city so long ago that Phillips Brooks had written of another city;

"O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie…

 the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight."

Suddenly it was Christmas. There in that city, in the heart of the world, are two buildings fashioned by mortal men under the hand of the Almighty...the Capitol building at one end and the Washington Cathedral at the other. I suddenly felt very warm.

"The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight,".

 And they were, though for me it was nineteen hundred years later.

There was the message of the angels, and the shepherds and the wise men and a mother and a father and a little baby. God was there in the middle of it all just as He had been in the middle of it all nineteen hundred years before. The Christmas story, the Gospel, came alive. That's what Luke and Matthew were trying to tell me, us, and the whole world. God was speaking to me in another day and age, an age of jet planes and the Pentagon, war and hunger and a suffering world crying to be made new, a world of gothic cathedrals, rejection and anger, a world of lonely cab drivers and a midnight ride in a taxi. It's the same world… the world of Bethlehem and King Herod and persecution and smelly stables and love when and where you least expect to find it.

Mankind is still as when the Garden of Eden became a jungle. We are still running, seeking, and looking. We still need meaning, companionship, and love, but we are still able to try again and to find hope when and where we least expect to find it… like a child in the dirt and stench of a stable. I knew that moment in the plane now high over Washington and turning south to bring me home that this is what the New Testament was trying to tell us in the words and symbols of nineteen hundred years ago. God still comes to us, often low-key, when we least expect it, as He came to shepherds, wise men, cab drivers, and Episcopal priests. We have to get behind the words to find it, like a Capitol Building , a Gothic cathedral, and a jet plane flying over a hectic city in the glow of evening when the lights begin to twinkle on.

The lights did come on. They saw a child, a child destined to be the Savior of the world, the world of Bethlehem and Washington and Pensacola and wherever we live. That's where the hope is, and it is hope for us, too. God keeps coming into our world because he loves us that much. This is his creation, and he loves that, too. He doesn't bully me. He never has. He doesn't overwhelm me. He never has. He takes his time with me, but He comes and He speaks. He tells me who I am and who He is. That's all that matters. Sometimes it is in the words of the Bible. Sometimes it is in the words of my own personal and very human experience. But He comes. I knew this on that night in a plane high over the City of Washington DC.

I looked out the window, and it was dark. Washington had gone, as Bethlehem was gone. Whether it was nineteen hundred years ago or nineteen hundred miles made little difference. There was light, sudden and when I least expected it. Just like the shepherds, just like the Wise Men. And I knew it was true. "When the fullness of time was come, God sent forth his Son!" (Galatians 4:4 KJV). In him, with him, and through him there was peace, joy, and hope.