The Paper Sewn Into Pascal's Coat

On the night of November 23, 1654, Blaise Pascal — one of the most brilliant mathematicians in France — sat alone in his room in Paris. Sometime around half past ten, something happened that shattered his carefully ordered world. For two hours, Pascal encountered the living God in what he would later call his "Night of Fire."

When it was over, Pascal grabbed a scrap of parchment and scrawled words that tumbled out raw and unpolished: "Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace." He wrote of tears, of forgetting the world, of total surrender.

Pascal sewed that parchment into the lining of his coat. He carried it against his chest every day for the remaining eight years of his life. A servant discovered it only after his death in 1662.

Like Isaiah standing in the temple, Pascal found that encountering the Holy One does not leave a person unchanged. Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up and cried, "Woe is me! For I am undone." Pascal, that towering intellect, was similarly undone — reduced to sentence fragments and tears before the Almighty. And like Isaiah, whose lips were touched with fire and who then answered, "Here am I. Send me," Pascal emerged from his night of fire with a life reoriented entirely around God's purposes. The encounter with holiness always demands a response.