The Great Good Thing (22 page)

There had been one annoying neurotic symptom that had
remained with me after my therapy. Every now and then, I would find myself in an internal, imaginary argument with my father. This was not my real father anymore, of course. He and I had come to a distant but peaceable understanding with each other. This was what the psychologists call an
introject
, the idea of my father that lived in my own mind, and now spoke to me as a part of myself. When these arguments with introject Dad got started in my head, they would become compulsive, addictive. I would get a rich, sickly pleasure out of rehearsing them over and over. By an effort of will, I had trained myself to stop them as soon as they began, but it bothered me that the old man, even in imagination, still had this sort of power over me.

But the moment I finished
The Uncanny
, the internal arguments stopped, never to return. As the weeks went on, I knew I had become free in a new way, a special and uncommon way. With William Faulkner, I understood that the past is never dead, but like Richard Storm, I had now come to feel—truly feel—that the past was past. If the past isn't past, what is?

In this new mental freedom, I came to see that the dilemma I had been wrestling with—my love of a culture that had done so much evil and yet produced such lasting beauty—was only my personal portion of the greater human paradox. We are never free of the things that happen. Every evil weaves itself into the fabric of history, never to be undone. Yet at the same time—at the very same time—each of us gets a new soul with which to start the world again.

It would take a few more years, but I would finally come to understand that I had, in effect, reinvented the doctrines of Original Sin and Salvation. This paradox, my paradox, was the riddle solved by the incarnation and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He offered a spiritual path out of the history created by Original Sin and into the newborn self remade in his image. It is the impossible solution to the impossible problem of evil. All reason says it can't be so. But it's the truth that sets us free.

I would come to feel that the West's enduring hatred of the Jews only made sense in light of the truth of both that indelible sin and that miraculous salvation. In the Bible, the Jews are “chosen” in the sense that God selects them as his doorway back into the world after the separation of the Fall. As such, they represent all people everywhere, a microcosm of what we are like in relationship to God. Seen in that context, the statement “the Jews killed Christ,” begins to make sense. It means we all killed Christ, all humanity, to the last woman and man. To limit that killing to the Jews is a simple act of racist denial and willed blindness, an attempt to say, “They did it, Lord, not us; not us.”

The Holocaust was the crucifixion compulsively reenacted on a grand scale: an attempt to kill God's people in order to extinguish the Light of the World that shows us as we are. Sigmund Freud called this the “return of the repressed,” a concept he discusses, not so oddly enough, in his essay “The Uncanny.” According to this idea, we bury the trauma and guilt of our past—in this case, the murder of God—and then
we keep reenacting that trauma helplessly, in this case through the murder of God's people. The things we can't face come back and back to us, shaping our actions, getting bigger and bigger, until finally we either face the cause of them or they destroy us. Europe, in the end, was destroyed. It was their great culture that died in those death camps. The Jews—and their God—live on.

There are some people who say that an evil as great as the Holocaust is proof there is no God. But I would say the opposite. The very fact that it
is
so great an evil, so great that it defies any material explanation, implies a spiritual and moral framework that requires God's existence. More than that. The Holocaust was an evil that only makes sense if the Bible is true, if there is a God, if the Jews are his people, and if we would rather kill him and them than truly know him, and ourselves.

O
ne winter's night near the end of the last millennium, I lay in bed reading a novel. I was in midlife at this point, around forty-five years old; still living in London, in a pleasant block of flats on the border of South Kensington and Earl's Court. It was around midnight. My wife was asleep beside me. My teenage daughter was asleep in her room down the hall. My nine-year-old son was asleep in his room beside hers.

The novel I was reading was a sea story by Patrick O'Brian. It was one of his wonderful series of adventure novels set during the Napoleonic Wars. The series featured a British naval captain named Jack Aubrey and his friend, a surgeon named Stephen Maturin. Like Holmes and Watson or Jeeves and Wooster, Maturin and Aubrey are a mind-body pair. Aubrey is a bluff, handsome, go-straight-at-'em warrior. Maturin is a dark, ugly, sometimes tormented philosopher. Making my way through the series, I had become emotionally invested
in both these make-believe men. But Maturin, I came to feel, often acts as a stand-in for the author, so I identified with him a bit more.

I don't remember exactly which of the books I was reading that night. But just as I was starting to doze off, I reached a scene in which Maturin also went to bed. O'Brian described him climbing wearily into his hammock on whatever ship he was in at the time. Then, with a single sentence, the author told how the Catholic surgeon said a brief prayer just before he fell asleep.

The scene came at a break in the chapter. It was a good place to stop for the night. As I lay the book by the clock on my bedside table, I thought to myself,
Well, if Maturin can pray, then so can I.

It seemed an almost random thought, but it wasn't really. For some time I had been wondering whether I might let go of my agnostic resistance and allow myself to believe what I knew deep down I had come to believe. The logic of good and evil supported me in my half-buried faith. So did the undeniable reality of certain inward experiences: the experiences of beauty and truth and of love above all. My old objections—that faith might be a crutch in hard times or some other form of neurosis—were simply no longer plausible. The hard times had been over for quite a while. And bizarre as it was even to myself, I was not neurotic anymore. I was at least as sane as any man I knew.

As I closed my eyes, I thought very quickly of the people I loved tucked up in their beds all around me. I thought of
the life I had—a life of writing, and family, and traveling the world. The life I'd always longed for. I thought of the happiness and sanity and inner peace I'd never expected and which was still such a daily visceral pleasure to me.

And I prayed. I prayed:
Thank you, God.
And then, like Maturin, I fell asleep.

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 wasn'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.”