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

  It was, looking back on it, a small and even a prideful prayer: an intellectual’s hesitant experiment, three words intended to test the waters of belief without any real mental commitment.

  God’s response, on the other hand, was wildly generous, an act of extravagant grace.

  I woke up the next morning and was immediately aware that everything had changed. I had changed—the tenor of my imagination had shifted—and that had changed everything. I somehow knew right away it was the prayer that had done it and I soon saw what it was that the prayer had done. There was a sudden clarity and brightness to familiar objects and to the details of my wife’s, my daughter’s, and my son’s beloved faces. But it wasn’t just that. I often had such moments of heightened clarity these days. This was different. This was more. The world was not merely bright but also full. The coffee in the mug, the hand that set the mug in front of me, the eyes that looked at me, those green eyes I had loved as if forever—they were alive suddenly with meaning and value. They were imbued with what they meant to me. I felt what they meant to me with a new power. My love of them. My pleasure in them. My joy.

  As I walked outside, as I made my way to my office through the quaint and lovely back streets of South Ken, the pastel townhouses and iron gates and stone steeples from another age all presented themselves to me suffused with this new quality: my own delight in them.

  What is this? I asked myself. What is this thing?

  And I answered back: I am feeling the joy of my joy.

  That was it. The joy of my joy. The life of my life spoken back to me by the world. That was what my three-word prayer—Thank you, God—had won for me. In even the little light of even that little gratitude, I was finally seeing existence as it was, not as an empty natural process of birth and death but as the miraculous creation of a personal Spirit: I AM THAT I AM. The joy of my joy was what I had felt slipping away from me when I was eight years old, what I had tried so hard to see again, both then and later through zen meditation. But I had made a mistake: I had tried to do it alone.

  You cannot know yourself alone, any more than you can see your own face without a mirror. This was what I had learned in therapy. As my belief in Freud’s insights had crumbled over the years, I had wondered: If Freud was wrong in his most basic assumptions, how had Freudian therapy transformed my life so completely? The answer was the love. It wasn’t the theories or interpretation of therapy that had redeemed me. It was the love. I had loved my mentor and he loved his patients. He had been able to reflect me back to myself because of his wisdom, but he had been able to reflect me truly because of his love.

  So it was now with all the world and God. Reality is the same for everyone, but your experience of reality is yours alone. You cannot know that experience fully by yourself, you cannot experience that experience fully by yourself. It must be reflected back to you by its source, its creator, and only his love can reflect it back to you as it actually is. You cannot know the truth about the world until you know God loves you, because that is the truth about the world.

  In saying my little prayer, I had finally opened my heart to reality. And I could finally—finally—feel the joy of my joy.

  Well, in any case, I know a good thing when I see one! Clearly, for whatever reason, this prayer business was powerful stuff. I tried it again that day and again the next day and again the next. Each day the prayers grew longer and more detailed. Five minutes long, ten minutes, fifteen, now and then even twenty or thirty. But sure enough, every day the result was the same: a refreshed awareness of gratitude, a full consciousness of life and meaning, the joy of my joy.

  Prayer became my daily practice. I would do it once a day, while walking to work or when alone in my office. It wasn’t easy at first. I didn’t have any religious tradition to turn to. I had to learn how to pray from scratch. Anyway, I wasn’t interested in reciting other people’s prayers, no matter how time-tested or beautiful they might be. If I was going to talk to God, I wanted to talk to him directly and in my own way.

  But what was I supposed to say? What words was I supposed to use? Did my prayers have to be pious and formal or could I just rap and jabber as I would with anyone? And who was this God I was talking to? Was it the old guy with the long, white beard from the Sistine Chapel? Was it some vague New Age spirit without a face or personality? Or was it really just me? Was I just talking to myself, practicing some elaborate form of self-therapy?

  I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure. After a lifetime of agnosticism, it was all very new. I had to feel my way.

  I experimented. I tried different kinds of prayers. Could I ask for stuff? I wondered. Did it have to be good stuff? Serious stuff? Moral stuff? Did I have to pray for world peace? Or could I put in a request to win the lottery? The truth was—just being honest—I didn’t care a fig about world peace. I didn’t believe there would ever be world peace, the world being what it was, so the only reason I could think to pray for it was to show God what a great guy I was—and then maybe he’d let me win the lottery. But, in fact, I found to my surprise that deep down I didn’t really care if I won the lottery either. I wasn’t rich, but I had enough money. I had my work, my love, the bright world. I was ambitious for more, but I wanted to earn it, not have it flashed down on me out of the sky. So did I even want to ask God for anything? It was complicated.

  That said, there was one important aspect of prayer that was clear to me right away. Whoever God was, he was unlikely to be fooled by any show of righteousness or even seriousness on my end. If this really was God I was talking to, I could be pretty sure he already knew my corrupt and hilarious heart. There was nothing to hide and no point in trying to hide it. I might as well tell him everything as straight as I could.

  At first, I overreacted to this idea. I became overstrict in my honesty, just as I had been when I first entered therapy. I would try to parse every selfish motive behind even my most kindly petitions. After all, if you’re praying for the starving children of Africa in the secret hope God will be impressed with you and give you a hot new car, why not skip the hypocrisy and ask for the car directly? It’s not as if you’re fooling anyone.

  After a while, though, it began to seem to me that I was thinking too much about perfect truth-telling. It was a waste of prayer time. The human heart is so steeped in self-deception that it can easily outrun its own lies. It can use even meticulous honesty as a form of dishonesty, a way of saying to God, “Look how honest I am.” So I let it go. I let it all go. I just flung wide the gates to the sorry junkyard of my soul and let God have a good look at the whole rubble-strewn wreck of it. Then I went ahead and told him my thoughts as plainly as I knew how.

  I went on praying. I prayed every day. Every day, the joy of my joy grew more present to me. And God became more present to me as well.

  There is an old play called The Ruling Class by Peter Barnes. I saw the movie version when I was seventeen or so. It’s about a mad English lord who decides that he’s really Jesus Christ. How does he know? “Simple,” he says. “When I pray to Him, I find I am talking to myself.” That’s a clever line. But I had the opposite experience. As the days, then weeks, then months and ultimately years of prayer continued, I slowly became convinced that I was not talking to myself at all. The revelations, the insights, the guidance, and the gifts that were given to me through prayer were all too unexpected. The presence of the Other was simply too real. I wasn’t crazy, after all. Not anymore. I’d put a lot of work into making sure of that. My other internal experiences were sound enough. My love lasted. My friendships were true. I could tell the difference between beauty and a poke in the eye.

  And I could feel God there. I could feel myself growing closer to him as I prayed. I could feel myself coming to know him better. He was not like anyone else I had ever met. He was certainly not like my parents, no matter what Freud said. Every time I projected my father’s traits or my mother’s traits onto him, I soon discovered I had strayed from his reality. That wasn’t him at all. And he w
asn’t like myself either. Whenever I imposed my own judgments or moral understanding on him, I invariably found that I had falsely limited his capacity for forgiveness and love. Despite my attempts to get him to conform to my preconceived philosophical notions of him—despite my occasional attempts to manipulate him into being who I wanted him to be—I found I could not change him, nor force him from his grace. It was he, rather, who changed me. It was I who began to try to move in his direction.

  Five years of prayer went by. Like any five-year span, it included both good times and bad. There were successes and failures, pleasures and sufferings, some births and the deaths of more than one person I loved. There were periods of great peace and contentment and periods of struggle. There were even a few periods of shattering grief. I prayed through all of it, and the result of my prayers was always the same.

  Joy. The joy of my joy. There through everything. A shocking sense of vitality and beauty present in both happiness and in the midst of pain. The only thing I can think to compare this experience to is the experience of an excellent story—reading a great novel, say, or watching a great movie. The scene before you might be a happy one or a sad one. You might feel uplifted or you might feel heartbroken or you might feel afraid. But whatever you feel, you’re still loving the story. Through prayer, I came to experience both pleasure and sorrow in something like that way. In God, the life of the flesh became the story of the spirit. I loved that story, no matter what.

  During this time, we moved back to America. It was odd. The goodness of living overseas just ran out somehow. For six and a half years, I had immersed myself in the life of Britain. My children had gone to British schools, my friends had been British, I followed British news and politics, watched British shows on television, and learned a good deal about British history and customs. Then, almost overnight, without thinking about it or knowing why, I changed. I found myself frequenting ex-patriate bars, reading American newspapers, sitting up late at night and leaning close to my computer to try to hear baseball games on the staticky broadcasts of early Internet radio. I knew it was time to go home.

  At first, Ellen and I just assumed we would return to the East Coast. It was the place we knew best. We traveled back there a few times, scouting around our old haunts for a place to live in suburban New York or nearby Connecticut.

  Then one day, as we were driving through the area looking at houses for sale, my wife said to me, “You know, every time we go house hunting, you get kind of grumpy.”

  It was true. I considered it. “It’s because I don’t want to come back here,” I told her. “It feels like the past to me.”

  “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 lowe
st, 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.