The Great Good Thing (23 page)

“Well then, let's not. Let's go somewhere new. Let's go to California!” she said brightly.

I thought about it only a second. Then I shrugged. “Okay.” It made sense actually. A couple of my novels were being made into movies then, and some of the studios were hiring me from time to time as a screenwriter. I'd never particularly wanted to be in the movie business, but I found now that I enjoyed it. After all the solitary years of fiction writing, it was a pleasure to work with other people. Los Angeles was where the business was, so we headed in that direction. We didn't want to raise our kids in the city, so we settled in Montecito, just outside of Santa Barbara, about eighty miles north of LA.

It was there, when these five years of prayer were over, that I drove up into the mountains one morning. It had been, as I say, a time of both happiness and sorrow. But it was impossible for me to miss the change that prayer had made in me. I was full of a profound sense of gratitude for the abundance of life that God had given me, an abundance that was above the events of the day, both good and bad. With the hilltops rising to the right of me, and the forest and city and sea unspooling below me to my left, I looked through the windshield toward the blue sky ahead and prayed again that first prayer of mine:
Thank you, God.

Then I went on.
I don't know how to respond to this abundance,
I told him
. You've given me so much. You've given me everything I wanted since I was a child. Presence of mind and
love and a voice and meaning and beauty. You've just handed them to me, gifts, like on Christmas. I don't know how to repay you. I don't know how to begin. You're God and I'm nothing. I can't think of a single thing I can offer you that would matter to you. If there's something I'm missing, tell me. Please. Tell me what you want me to do.

The answer came back to me on the instant, so clear in my heart it might have been spoken aloud:
Now you should be baptized.

And I blurted at the windshield: “Baptized? You've got to be kidding me!”

Nothing could have been further from my mind. I thought I had moved beyond all that. Religions, doctrines, scriptures—I figured I had left them all behind. I had formed a personal relationship with the creator of heaven and earth. The last thing I wanted was some church or some preacher yammering at me about what that relationship was supposed to mean, or what rules I should follow or what rites I should perform or really about anything. I still read the Bible from time to time as the mighty and foundational work of literature it was, but I'd never turned to it as a source of anything more than literary wisdom—as I would turn to a Dostoevsky novel or a Shakespeare play—and I had no plans to start now. And really, to go back into all that Jesus business that had driven me so crazy in my youth . . . and to start such an uproar in my family . . . and to make my public opinions even more unacceptable and controversial than they'd already become . . . it was trouble I didn't want and didn't need. And
for what? I wasn't a Christian. Was I? I didn't even believe any of the things that Christians are supposed to believe.

What could it mean then:
baptized
? Why should God want that of me now?

At first I tried to dismiss the idea. Perhaps it wasn't a celestial communication, just a fleeting thought of my own. The mind deceives itself, after all. It does nothing better. An angel clothed in radiant light could descend on wings of ivory and whisper the truth of ages in my ear, and I could still get it wrong. That's how corrupt the heart can be.

But one of the most important things I had learned—one of the central principles of my reclamation—was this: the very fact that the mind can be deceived implies that it can be
not
deceived, that it can know things rightly—deep things—beauty, truth—just as they are. The call to baptism had come to me so clearly that I couldn't just ignore it. In all humility, in all gratitude, I had to ask myself: Was this the word of God?

So for the first time since I had started praying, I began to try to put my beliefs about this God I had come to know into words and into order. I tried to define my theology. The result should not have startled me, but it did.

G. K. Chesterton said that in stumbling onto his Christian faith he was like an English yachtsman who had gone off course: he thought that he had discovered a new island when, in fact, he had landed back in England. I saw now that I was like an archaeologist who, after a lifetime of digging, had unearthed the lost foundations of a civilization that turned out, in fact, to be his own. I had spent fifty years of reading
and contemplation and seeking and prayer and I had managed to do nothing more than reinvent the Christian wheel.

What were my five epiphanies if not tenets of Christian faith? The truth of suffering was the knowledge of the cross. The wisdom of joy was the soul's realization through relationship with God. The reality of love was the personality of the Creator as only Jesus had ever revealed it. The possibility of clear perception was the sign that we were made in God's image, that we had the ability to know his good as our good, even if only through a glass darkly.

Then there was the laughter at the heart of mourning, my bizarre but ever-present sense that, despite our grief and fear and suffering, some essential comedy lived at the center of tragic existence. What could that be if not the realization that this life is not what we were meant for, that death is not what we were meant for, that who we are is not who we're supposed to be? Even the lowest form of humor—maybe especially the lowest, the most basic form—suggests that we were intended to be something higher than ourselves. A man who slips on a banana peel and falls into a puddle of mud is funny not because of his pain but because of the contrast with his sense of dignity. He feels he is something high, but he has become something low and ridiculous. So it is with us when we sin. So it is with us even when we die. We are meant for something better, and we know it, and even as we suffer and mourn, we also laugh.

In response to the call to baptism, I examined my theology and I saw that—in theory at least, philosophically at least—I was, in fact, a Christian, yes. I believed in the Father,
the loving Creator: I had seen his power with my own eyes. I believed in the Holy Spirit, the communication between God and man: I had experienced it for myself through prayer and it had brought my life to fullness. And because I believed that man was made in God's image, I also believed it was possible that, at the right moment in history, a man could be born who was God incarnate. I believed in Christ . . . in theory; philosophically. The possibility of the incarnation followed logically from everything else.

I went home and began to reread the Bible. In the light of these realizations, I understood it in a new way. This great story each life was telling, this great story all history was telling, this story of the spirit all flesh was telling: here it was, beginning, middle, and end. The Bible was the story God wanted to tell us about himself—about himself and us. I'm not a literalist. I believe this book of all books contains different genres: myth, legend, poetry, and history too. It would have to. No single genre could convey all the wisdom it has to convey. But all the genres of the Bible are part of its overall story and, within that context, all are true and uniquely true.

There was, however, one part of the story that had to be absolutely factual in order to verify the truth of the rest: the Gospels. In order for me to accept the call to baptism, it was not enough for me to believe in the
possibility
of Christ—Christ in theory. It was not enough for me to feel—as I did feel—that the Jesus story said fully and precisely and uniquely what I believed to be the truth about God and our relationship with God. For me to accept baptism, the Jesus story had to be
true on every level, not just as myth but as myth and history combined. That was the whole point. Christ's life proved and fulfilled the Bible's story of God. For me to accept baptism, I had to believe in Christ's reality—in the reality not just of his life but also of his miracles and death and resurrection.

But how could I? Such things don't happen. Look around you. There are no miracles. There can be no resurrection. The clockwork world is all in all.

But
such things don't happen
, I knew now, was the ultimate irrational prejudice of the human mind: the belief that the symbols of reality are more real than the reality they symbolize. That's us all over. We believe that money is more valuable than the work it represents, that sex is more essential than the love it expresses, that an actor is more admirable than the hero he portrays, that flesh is more alive than spirit. That's the whole nature of our deluded lives, the cause of so much of our misery. One by one, we let idolatry ruin each good thing. Without faith, we can't help ourselves. Without faith, we can no more see through our materialist prejudice than we can see through the big blue bowl of the sky and into the eternity beyond. The choice between idolatry and faith—which is ultimately the choice between slavery in the flesh and freedom in the spirit—is the only real choice we have to make.

I was reading the gospel of Mark when the sky, as you might say, opened, and my own resistance at last gave way. Mark has been called the existential gospel: the unadorned story of Jesus' failure and execution. In the oldest versions we have, the book ends abruptly. Jesus is crucified and buried.
Three of his women followers come to anoint his corpse after the Sabbath. They find his tomb empty. A man dressed in white tells them Christ is risen. The women run away in terror. That's it. That's the end.

Scholars believe that the concluding verses have been lost. That's the way it reads to me too: a jagged finale, edited by time. When I went through it again, it seemed, in this, to have been fashioned by providence to speak to me directly. All my life, God had set the full truth of himself aside in order to reach me in my unbelief—just like the Christian ballplayer who had stopped preaching Jesus long enough to communicate the idea I needed to hear. God had given me the pieces of the puzzle one by one until I could assemble them myself into the picture of that face that had watched over me on my first Christmas Eve. Now he had even torn the last page off his gospel for me and shown me only an empty tomb—something I could accept, something I did accept, something I believed in by this time with all my heart because I knew it made sense of everything else.

I saw the empty tomb and I had faith.

It was now that I began the five months of self-examination that provided the contents of this book. Driving the winding roads through the mountains, taking longer and longer detours to give myself time to pray longer and longer prayers on my way to work, I cross-examined myself endlessly: Was my Christian faith nothing more than some Freudian longing for divine parental love? Was it some sort of angry strike against my father? Was it a Jew's desire for assimilation into
the greater culture? Was it the resurgence of an old neurosis? On and on.

Yet, in the end, I found my faith remained. I was, after all, still the boy who insisted that even the stories of his daydreams make sense. The story of Christ's life, death, and resurrection not only made sense in itself, it made sense of everything I had experienced and everything I had come to know. It made sense of the world.

The day I made my mind up, I drove down out of the mountains, wild-eyed—more like a hermit returning from a vision-trek in the wilderness than some suburban guy who had taken the long way round to work. I could hardly believe what had happened to me. I could hardly believe what I was going to do. I sat down at my desk and wrote a rather frantic and inarticulate e-mail to my old friend Father Doug Ousley in New York. I told him I wanted to be baptized. I was afraid that, knowing me as well as he did, he would think I had lost my mind again. He was surprised, in fact. He had thought I was so stubborn I would resist until I was at the point of death.

I broke the news to my wife the next morning as we had our coffee together in bed. Normally, I entertained and amused the poor woman with every thought that went through my head in something like real time. But for some reason, this experience had been different. I had faced the struggle of conversion alone. I did not know how she would react to it.

For most of her life, Ellen had been an atheist, a down-to-earth realist with only a small, and mostly ironic, strain of Irish mysticism in her. When I had first started praying, she
hadn't followed me into faith. I used to tease her that since she always adopted my point of view in the long run, she ought to do it right away and save time. Oddly enough, only one of us found this joke amusing.

But about a year before, Ellen herself had been through a dramatic transformation. After a long illness, her mother had died in her arms. Ellen had come home from the experience greatly changed. For days, it was as if there was a nimbus of light around her. Every sentence she spoke was a gem of condensed wisdom. It was like living with some kind of sibyl. She told me she had seen her mother's spirit leave the world. It left a mark on her. She had believed in God ever since.

So she accepted my decision easily. My children did as well.

But I still had to tell my parents and brothers. My mother, I knew, would shrug it off. It was religion. It had no meaning to her, one way or the other. My brothers were sure to greet the news with their usual humor and grace. My father, though . . . it would break his heart. He would feel it as a failure, an insult and a betrayal of his race. It would devastate and infuriate him.

Dad was in his late seventies, still vigorous. Our relations were friendly but distant. When we were together, we made small talk about movies and the latest technology. I never spoke to him about anything that mattered, my family or my feelings or my work.