The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

  For years, maybe most of my life, I had languished in that typical young intellectual’s delusion that gloom and despair are the romantic lot of the brilliant and the wise. But now I saw: it wasn’t so. Why should it be? What sort of wisdom has no joy in it? What good is wisdom without joy? By joy I don’t mean ceaseless happiness, of course. I don’t mean willed stupidity for the sake of a cheap smile. The world is sad and it is suffering. A tragic sense is essential to both realism and compassion. By joy I mean a vital love of life in both sorrow and gladness. Why not? The hungry can’t eat your tears. The poor can’t spend them. They’re no comfort to the afflicted and they don’t bring the wicked to justice. Everything useful that can be done in the world can be done in joy.

  For the first time in what seemed forever, I began to believe that I might make my way back to the man I was meant to be.

  The next shock of revelation came only four months later. This one was the most spectacular: the one truly mystical experience I have ever had in my life.

  It was December now. My wife had entered the final days of her pregnancy. This was during the first popularity of so-called “natural childbirth,” in which the woman used no painkilling drugs or procedures but endured labor with only breathing techniques and massages to alleviate her suffering. Our obstetrician, a squat, gruff, no-nonsense Italian American woman, responded to the fad sarcastically. “Since when did nature become our friend?” she asked. It was a good question. But we were caught up in the fashion and devoted to the idea.

  The truth was, the most positive aspect of “natural childbirth” was probably the least “natural,” the least primitive; a genuine innovation. In “natural childbirth,” husbands relinquished their traditional role of pacing and chain-smoking cigarettes in the hospital hallway during the labor. Adam had probably done something like this during the birth of Cain and Abel, but no more. Instead, in “natural childbirth,” the father served as a “birth coach,” attending his wife in the delivery room. This enabled him to lend her some moral support for what that was worth. But more important—or at least more dramatic—was the fact, it allowed him to witness the birth of his child.

  Ellen and I dutifully attended a seemingly endless series of classes during which we practiced the natural childbirth breathing and massage techniques. Even a mere male like myself could see these would be more or less useless against the agonies of labor, but I showed up and did my part. It was during these classes that I noticed I had a powerful emotional reaction to the instructional films that showed real births. The precise instant when the baby slid from its mother into the world always affected me deeply. Every time I saw it, I found it poignant and awesome.

  Our teachers instructed us to make a pregnancy kit, a small gym bag full of the tools the birth coach would use to help his wife through her travail. I don’t remember now what this seemingly random collection of objects was (it included tennis balls for some reason) but the bag developed a totemic significance for us. It became an emblem of the comforts of the “natural” approach. On the night my wife went into labor, I calmly escorted her down the narrow cottage steps and picked up the pregnancy bag waiting by the kitchen door. We walked out into the driveway where I calmly rested the bag on the car’s roof and helped my wife into the passenger seat. I then calmly went around to the driver’s side, slid in behind the wheel, and calmly drove away, calmly forgetting the bag so that it tumbled from the car roof to the gravel, not to be seen again until our return home some days later.

  We reached the hospital in the city and checked in. There followed thirteen hours of brutal labor with no drugs, no spinal blocks, and not even any tennis balls. My wife is the gentlest and most feminine of women, but she has, I swear, a core of iron. Nothing but my absolute insistence would have deterred her from seeing this through to the finish drug free. And while even at twenty-eight I liked to think of myself as a patriarchal tyrant, I tended to limit my absolute insistence to calling for a cocktail before dinner. In more important matters, I trusted Ellen’s judgment and wanted only her happiness.

  So, through the night and on into a snowy morning, she was tortured on the rack of her contractions. The only comic relief came from a pretty little blond nurse who took a liking to me—I was a handsome devil then!—and kept running into the room to rub my shoulders in order to help me bear my wife’s pain. Ellen’s reaction to this was unprintable in a book about religion but, trust me, it was hilarious.

  Sometime during the last hours of the labor, Ellen discharged some meconium—fetal stool. In our classes, we had been taught that this was a sign the baby might be in some sort of trouble. “Fetal distress” was the nice phrase for it. My wife’s eyes were already glazed with pain and exhaustion, but now I saw the hot-white light of panic come into them. We pressed the alarm button by the bed to call for help. A new nurse hurried in, a serious-looking brunette in her late twenties, as I was. It was strange, but the moment she walked through the door I straightened and she stopped in her tracks and we realized that we knew each other. Ellen and I told her about the meconium. The nurse took one look at Ellen and saw her up-spiraling terror. She sat on the bed and held my wife by the shoulders, peered deep into her eyes, and said forcefully, “This baby is fine.” Ellen believed her and her panic faded away.

  The nurse’s name was Ann Christiano. No, it really was. From then on, she tended to us with warmth and kindness and expert skill. She and I tried to figure out where we’d met before, but we couldn’t. In fact, after talking it over, we decided it was unlikely we had ever laid eyes on each other, but the feeling that we were old acquaintances persisted nonetheless. The last time Ellen and I saw her was after the baby came. Mother, father, and child were huddled together, spent, on the narrow hospital bed. Ann Christiano crept in quietly. She raised the bedrail to keep us from tumbling out. She put a blanket over us, all three, and tucked us in—and left us forever. Ellen and I solemnly agreed that, given her name, she must have been an angel sent to us in our hour of need.

  When at last our daughter was ready to be born, here is what happened.

  I had not been sure what my reaction would be to the gore and mess of childbirth. Some men faint dead away, I’ve heard, while some don’t mind it. I had no way of knowing how I would feel or behave. Birth is a dramatically material business. Great gouts of blood and urine and feces come out of the mother in gushes and floods. From the perspective of a watching husband, it is a deluge that purges your wife of every trace of ladylike delicacy and feminine mystery. This is the woman you love, remember, whose body is erotic to you and alluring in just those places that are now so violently soiled. It’s bound to make an impact on a man’s mind one way or another, and it would be completely understandable if he were shocked or disgusted or repelled. I wasn’t, though. I hadn’t known this up to that moment, but it turned out I had the same attitude toward human gore as I’d always had to human depravity: just because it’s usually hidden doesn’t mean it isn’t always there. When it did become visible, it struck me as a normal thing and I felt no need to look away.

  In fact, after a while, as the process went on, I began to formulate a strange idea about it. It began to seem to me that the aggressive, convulsive physicality of this experience was uniting my wife and me in a new level of intimacy. Through the blood and guts of birth, we were being carried into a togetherness that was almost super-temporal: above time, beyond time. Until now, whenever I had read that passage in Genesis about a husband and wife becoming “one flesh,” I had thought it referred to sex. But no—no, that was fanciful, I thought now, a romantic fiction. The old sages had known much better than that. The unity of sex, which was the beginning of this labor and the cause of it, was also just a symbol of a greater unifying power. Even the child herself, this child being born, the one flesh of marriage literally personified, was only a symbol.

  Sex, birth, marriage, these bodies, this life, they were all just representations of the power that had created them, the power now surging throu
gh my wife in this flood of matter, the power that had made us one: the power of love. Love, I saw now, was an exterior spiritual force that swept through our bodies in the symbolic forms of eros, then bound us materially, skin and bone, in the symbolic moment of birth. Everything we were, everything we were going through—it was all merely living metaphor. Only the love was real.

  What happened next, then, was not a vision or an hallucination. It was a spiritual event. I saw it. I felt it. I experienced it, as surely as you would experience a kiss on the lips or a punch in the nose. I have never been through anything else like it. It was as real as it was impossible.

  The baby came—that moment came that moved me so deeply whenever I saw it even on film—and the surging torrent of creation swept me away. The borders of my self shattered like a barrier of glass and out I flowed. My consciousness, my psyche, the whole invisible presence of me was carried out of my body on the tide of love. I became not one flesh with my wife but one being beyond flesh with the love I felt for her. My spirit washed into that love and became part of it, a splash in a rushing river. In that river of love, I went raging down the plane of Ellen’s body until the love I was and the love that carried me melded with the love I felt for the new baby we had made together and I became part of that love as well and then . . .

  Then, like living water rushing at full speed into the open sea, I saw I was about to flow out into the infinite. I saw that, beyond the painted scenery of mere existence, it was all love, love unbounded, mushrooming, vast, alive, and everlasting. The love I felt, the love I was, was about to cascade into the very origin of itself, the origin of our three lives and of all creation.

  This experience was over in half a second. Not a full second; only half. In a reflex of fear, I drew myself back into myself before I could be carried entirely away. I regretted that reflex immediately. Why had I stopped the process? What might I have seen, where would I have gotten to, had I just let it go? Would I have fainted? Died? Would I have touched the gates of heaven? The face of God? If nothing else, a writer’s curiosity should have compelled me to follow the event to its conclusion. As a reporter, I had once dashed into a burning house just to see what it looked like inside. Couldn’t I have let my ego flow into the underlying truth of reality just to see what it looked like inside?

  Well, never mind. Here was the baby, ten fingers and ten toes. And here was the happy mother, glowing and triumphant. The visionary moment was over.

  But what had happened had happened. I had seen what I had seen. For years, I would try to rationalize it away but I never quite could. I was there. I went through it. Me, my spirit—in the flood of creation, at the delta of the sea of love.

  I would never forget it.

  After that, I began to haunt churches. Not often, but sometimes. I’d duck into some fine old landmark on my way from one Manhattan location to another. I’d sit in a pew in the shadows. I’d contemplate the icons and the stations of the cross or simply gaze up into the high, vaulted spaces and occasionally launch a prayer just to see what would happen. This was different from the sweaty, desperate, cowardly religiosity that had overtaken me during the worst of my depression and hypochondria. These church visits were spontaneous, contemplative, tentative, and calm.

  I had seen something when my daughter was born and I did not know what to make of it. My postmodern skepticism had been shaken and yet . . . I was still at the beginning of therapy. I was just emerging from the haze of craziness and delusion. I did not trust myself. I did not trust that I had seen what I saw. “Why do you doubt your senses?” the ghost of Jacob Marley asks Ebenezer Scrooge. “Because,” Scrooge replies, “a little thing affects them.” Maybe my vision in the delivery room was just a trick of the brain. A release of chemicals under stress.

  But such explanations couldn’t entirely silence the voice of the revelation. It raised serious questions about how I was living, what I was doing, and what was happening to me. Here I was in a course of psychotherapy more or less based on the theories of Freud. Therapy was already helping me so much that the work of Freud was becoming like scripture to me. His worldview was beginning to seem to me unassailable. But Freud, in effect, had declared that all spiritual things were merely symbols of the flesh. In the delivery room, for the first time, it had seemed to me that he had gotten it exactly the wrong way round. Our flesh was the symbol. It was the love that was real.

  Why, after all, should the flesh be the ground floor of our interpretations? Why should we end our understanding at the level of material things? It’s just a prejudice really. The flesh is convincing. We can see it, feel it, smell it, taste it. It’s very there. It’s a trick of the human mind to give such presence the weight of reality. Men kill each other over dollar bills that are only paper because the paper has come to seem more real to them than the time and value it represents. In the same way, and for the same reason, people destroy themselves and everyone around them for sex: because sex has come to seem more real to them than the love it was made to express.

  I had seen that love, seen it with my own eyes. And if that vision was just a release of chemicals, well, so was my vision of the trees and the sidewalks and the whole city. I saw it all through the mechanics and chemistry and electricity of the brain and yet it was still, in some true sense, there. I could head east from Fifth Avenue and reliably reach Madison, turn south from 53rd and get to 52nd every single time. The scientist—or the Buddhist—might declare such perceptions were illusions, but not one of them would head uptown to get to the Bowery. They knew what they knew. They saw what they saw.

  So did I. I had seen beyond the scrim of the physical world and it was all love, living love, a love of which our human love, our human lives, were only a manifestation and a symbol. I did not know what to make of it.

  Somewhere around this time, I met Doug Ousley, the rector of the landmark Episcopal Church of the Incarnation around the corner from my apartment, the priest who would one day baptize me. His wife had been playing with her babies on the rectory balcony and noticed my wife playing with her baby in the garden down below. The two mothers became acquainted. After Ellen gave Mary a copy of my transfiguration poem, we all got together.

  The Ousleys were a comically mismatched couple: she delightfully vivacious, he phlegmatic, taciturn, and mordant. Doug was a dedicated pastor who spent a lot of his time sitting beside sickbeds and tending to his parishioners in their emergency needs. But I sometimes used to tease him that he was the worst priest ever, because he was gruff and sardonic and had none of the stagey warmth or bonhomie many pastors cultivate. In short, he was my kind of guy, and we became close friends.

  It was good and helpful to talk religion with him as I tried to reason things through. He was widely read and carefully reasonable and he never preached at me. Sometimes I even attended services at Incarnation to hear his sermons and to enjoy the Bach cantatas sung by his excellent choir, which included Mary, a former professional singer. But really, it was the capacity for love behind his brusque exterior that gave his faith substance for me: specifically his love for his wife over the increasingly terrible years.

  I was walking in our neighborhood one day and met Mary on the sidewalk outside the post office. I gave her a friendly hello and without prologue she fell sobbing into my arms. As I stood nonplussed and uncomprehending, she told me her foot had gone numb. I patted her back—there, there—and said it was probably nothing. It was not nothing. It was an early symptom of multiple sclerosis. Over the next twenty-five years, the disease killed that vital and affectionate woman by unbearable inches. And Doug never wavered in his devotion to her, never faltered in his love. It was a tough-guy performance for the ages, and he would not have been able to do it had he not been steeled by faith in Christ. It was a living sermon, his best.

  The thing was, in my shiny new state of burgeoning sanity, and in the aftermath of my vision in the delivery room, I was beginning to realize there was a spiritual side to life, a side I had been neglecting in my
postmodern mind-set. Strip that spirituality away and you were left with a kind of “realism” that no longer seemed to me very realistic at all.

  The spirit did not have to be supernatural. I thought of spirit simply as the pure internal human experience of life. This was the stuff my favorite poet John Keats wrote about: the full mingling of human consciousness with the song of a nightingale, say, or with the frieze on a Grecian urn. In Keats’s greatest poem, “Ode to Autumn,” that mingling becomes complete. The poet becomes one with the season of fruitfulness and death until it has a music as lovely as the songs of spring. In Keats’s poems, the true fullness of reality does not take place outside of human consciousness but in conjunction with it so that

  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all

  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.1

  If we don’t accept our inner experience as real, then only man’s material desires have any meaning. Our yearnings for pleasure and power are all that’s left. Anything else, anything that seems like absolute spiritual truth or absolute spiritual morality, must only be an elaborate illusion that can be deconstructed back down to those brute facts. This was Nietzsche’s vision, the vision that Dostoevsky opposed in Crime and Punishment even before Nietzsche had written it down. And it was the vision of postmodernism now, too, the source of the postmodernist mission to endlessly analyze our spiritual experiences of truth and beauty in order to get to the materialist “reality” underneath.