We sat around a table at a local restaurant. The young man with a British accent was vibrant. He looked like a different person from the time I had seen him just a few weeks earlier. His hair was clean and relaxed. His smile was warm. His eyes were bright. He was more at peace, and it showed in his countenance. He was more relaxed, but that was not all. He was more alive!

As he talked, he kept saying that he felt he was on the verge of a whole new part of his life, really a qualitatively different way of living. It was more than an adventure, but it was adventurous. He was excited with anticipation, and we could see it.

What we saw was a person coming to faith in Christ. He defies all stereotypes of what that means or who can experience such a thing. His orientation to life has been a war cry for conservative Christians around the world. Further, there was no indication that God had been convicting him about that in the least. It appeared that he was not saved from something but to something. Or better, to someone.

As it was, I realised that he would not fit into any fundamentalist or evangelical church either here in Bermuda or anywhere else. Because of his lifestyle, the people would be all over him, attempting to make him acceptable, getting him to change before he could get much past the door. I asked myself, "What if God had more important things to discuss with this person?" What if the more profound change was not his sexual orientation, but his orientation to God?

Later, when I was reading in the gospel of John, I found this thing that Jesus told his followers, "If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you…all these things they will do to you for My name's sake, because they do not know the One who sent Me."

This made me think that there is a pre-salvation knowing of God that primes a person to come to Jesus. One needs it in order to hear what Jesus says and see what He does and to recognise those things as coming from God Himself. I don't think this is simply the convicting work of the Holy Spirit that conditions a person so they realise they need a saviour. I think this is the softening of the person's spirit and the enlightening of the mind that gives a person what Jesus called "ears to hear" what God whispers to a person's soul.

There is a French philosopher, Jean-Luc Marion, who writes about this. He calls this dynamic the "saturated phenomenon". He says that everyone has what is called a horizon that is comprised of past experience and all imagined potential experience to come; think of it as a scroll rolling out into the future that contains what that person regards to be all possible objects of interest and all possible experiences that are available for that person. It's a person's world. If something isn't on that scroll, in that person's horizon, then that person simply does not think of it or even notice it if it happens to be right in front of him.

Marion wrote, "Neither visible according to quantity, nor bearable according to quality, nor absolute according to relation, that is, unconditioned by the horizon, the saturated phenomenon finally gives itself as incapable of being looked at according to modality." The saturated phenomenon overwhelms one's usual way of perceiving. Usually, one is presented with the object of one's attention, which is recognised by the person's cognitive capacities – the ability to think and to achieve concepts. If you see a ball bouncing down Front Street, you see the ball, but unless you think the ball, it is an empty perception; it has no meaning. This thinking is related to the horizon in which you pick something ("bouncing ball") out of a reservoir of experience and give significance to what you see.

God overwhelms our customary ways of perceiving. This is what Jesus meant when He spoke to His disciples and contrasted the way God had gotten hold of them as opposed to the lack of understanding among many others: …I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. In their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says, "You will keep on hearing, but will not understand; you will keep on seeing, but will not perceive; for the heart of this people has become dull, with their ears they scarcely hear, and they have closed their eyes, otherwise they would see with their eyes, hear with their ears, and understand with their heart and return, and I would heal them." But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear.

God encounters a person and brings light into the way they see, sound into the way they hear. We have no categories by which to fathom God; before God touches us, we only have, at best, some kind of flimsy God concept that does not actually accord with the Being that God is. So, we have no way of putting thought to the experience of God, which cannot be a perception in the usual fashion anyway, since God is not a physical presence. God is felt and sensed with immediacy, all at once, and not in bits and pieces that we then arrange to make a puzzle understandable. God comes all at once, and a person simply begins to "get" Him – to see with the eyes of his spirit, and to hear with the ears of his spirit, that there is an overwhelming, and saturated phenomenon that defies explanation, even while making total sense and presenting as the most significant presence one has ever encountered. This, we could all see, was what our friend with the British accent was beginning to experience. He had acquired ears to hear, and he was beginning to perceive what God has been up to in Jesus.