The Great Good Thing (18 page)

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 through 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.

It's a flattering philosophy for intellectuals, no doubt. Endless analysis is what they're good at. But the reductiveness and meaninglessness of the enterprise are creations of the enterprise itself. That is, you have to first make the assumption that material is the only reality before you can begin to reason away the spirit.

One night, walking along 8th Street in the East Village, I saw some adolescent boys, out too late and unattended. They were playing an arcade video game set up on the sidewalk, piloting a digital spacecraft through starlit infinity, blasting everything in their path to bits. Now and then, the machine would let out a robotic shout of encouragement:
You're doing great!
So the urchins flew on through the make-believe nothingness, destroying whatever they saw, hypnotized by the mechanical praise that stood in for the human voice of love. That, it seemed to me, was postmodernism in a nutshell. It ignored the full spiritual reality of life all around it in order to blow things apart inside a man-made box that only looked like infinity.
You're doing great, intellectuals! You're doing great.

Much as Freudian-style therapy was helping me, I wanted something more. My research into Christianity had given me a lot of respect for its tragic vision of love. In the Bible, and in the minds of great theologians, Christ represented Love Despised, Love Rejected, Love Crucified in the world. That was a love I could believe in. It was in keeping with the things
I saw around me. But it was a love that was ultimately triumphant in the miracle of the resurrection and in the hope of faith. And I did not have faith, and I did not believe in miracles. Church doctrines seemed absurd to me. Born of a virgin. Resurrected from the grave. Coming in glory to judge the living and the dead. I could not buy into any of it.

To get around that roadblock, I tried the nondoctrinal Universalist church for a while—the “Church of Amorphous Rambling,” in which I'd been married. But the church experience itself was alienating to my contrarian artist's soul. The ferociously radical-to-the-death Jesus of the Gospels was transformed here into a bland cheerleader for socially acceptable niceness. That made no sense to me. No one ever got himself crucified for organizing a charity golf tournament. As one friend, a lapsed believer, said to me of the church experience, “The services are pretty. It's the tuna casserole of it all I can't stand.”