I spent Thanksgiving in Charleston, SC, surrounded by my sister and wonderful brother-in-law, both my nieces, their husbands and their children. My sister had instructed me and Booth to set the table with thank you cards, asking each of us to write down what we were “blessed, grateful and thankful” for this holiday. Then we each read aloud someone else’s. And almost every single one — including the kids — thanked God for being in their lives. What a miracle, what a happy accident, I thought, that my tribe feels as I do about the blessings of faith. The gift of family.
At Christmas, I bought my first tree — it sparkles with light and has not a single fir anywhere. I loved it. During the holiday I had lunch with my girlfriend Carmen, and afterward we rode the children’s carousel that our city keeps on the town square for the holiday season. Later, when I looked at the photos, I noticed I was smiling, something I had not seen on my face for a long, long time, through Jeffrey’s illness and beyond. In that moment, I realized I could spend the rest of my life in grief, or I could focus on gratitude – for the years together, the unconditional love, the sweetness. I would look for reasons to smile. The next week I was in Deacon Greg’s office. I told him this story and he said, “Ask Jesus to send you reasons to smile.”
It seemed a stretch at the time – I was not yet speaking to Jesus – and I knew that the “leap of faith” was the main task ahead. I had learned enough to know that Jesus was a role model of character, but I was stuck at the essential question of whether he was a God. I was even more astonished when non-believers, on hearing of my journey, insisted that Jesus – or Moses for that matter – were fictional characters, their life stories mere fables created by power-hungry authors to bolster belief in religion.
As a result, my first exploration was to read books that pinned down the accuracy of the Jesus story. Had he really lived? Had here been eyewitnesses to his miracles, to his parables, to his teachings? What I found is a robust area of study.
In The Case for Christ, Lee Strobel, a journalist in Chicago, relates his story. He came home one day to find his wife reading the Bible. Furious that she was parting from their jointly-held atheism, he set out to disprove her faith. After interviewing theologians and scholars of science, philosophy and history, he concluded, that Jesus had been real, and an inspiration. One of his most telling points is that there was more historic evidence for the existence of Jesus – contemporaneous accounts, eyewitnesses, timelines – than there was for the existence of Julius Caesar.
I read C.S. Lewis of course. Called the apologist for Christ (by non-believers like those at Wikipedia) his quotes are memorable – and soothing. “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Or this one, “Joy is the serious business of heaven.” Or finally this famous one: “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” Somewhere I read that Lewis also said Jesus died “not for men, but for each man.” I liked that.
One of my favorite philosophers is Soren Kierkegaard, so I turned to him next. He would have disapproved of my intellectual pursuit of God, as he believed theologians undermined faith by turning it from an encounter with someone to an idea about something. As he loved to point out, Jesus himself said, “Blessed are those who are not offended by me.” In short, it doesn’t matter if it’s plausible, rationale. It matters that you can feel Jesus in your life, that you choose to follow.
I felt with certainty that God loved me, and maybe that was enough. As I explained to Deacon Greg, I was all-in on the Father and the Holy Spirit. I was just struggling with Jesus. So I re-read Holy Moments by Mike Kelly, a small book that Angelica, now my godmother, had distributed to our class. Kelly said he could summarize Christianity in 10 words: “You were made in the image of God. Act accordingly!” I smiled
Then I read a number of books about people who converted to Christianity, beginning with Paul, the most famous convert of all, on the road to Damascus. Paul is a difficult and contentious character. As his biographer N.T. Wright asked, “How did Saul the Persecutor become Paul the Apostle?” As a Jewish zealot, he had tormented Gentiles for not following Jewish customs, sending many to their deaths. Later, after hearing the Risen Jesus call out to him on the road to Damascus, he became even more zealous about spreading Christianity, going from town to town setting up Christian communities, writing perhaps 14 of the New Testament’s 27 books. For his part, Paul said that he did not so much abandon Judaism as embrace Christianity. If the God of the Jews had sent Jesus to earth, then he was only being loyal to his ancestry.
Wright argues that the heaven and hell construct of current Christian theology, the question of salvation, was popularized in the Middle Ages. For Paul and other first-century Christians, what mattered was “not saved souls being rescued from the world and taken to a distant heaven, but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world.” This resonated with me. Jesus came not to offer us heaven, but to make our lives on earth more joyous.
My favorite of these books of and about converts was by Andrew Klavan, whose The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ is a memoir filled with raw honesty and deep belief. I envied him his certainty. For Klavan, the journey began as a matter of literature. He burned with ambition to be a writer, and believed that any serious author had to understand the classics, the Enlightenment — and the Bible. His father, a secular Jew who saw religion as a matter of cultural habit, was furious when he barged into his son’s room to find him reading the New Testament. And threatened that if Andrew ever converted to Christianity, he would disown him.
Later I would read The Price to Pay: A Muslim Risks All to Follow Christ. Author Joseph Fadelle, whose father was a direct descendant of Muhammad, risked everything — family, inheritance, home and even his life — to follow Christ. He had a dream in which he saw a Jesus-like figure offering him The Bread of Life. He began a decade-long search to baptism — earnest, pleading — so he could receive Communion. They threw him in prison, tortured him, starved him. He did not waiver. Twice his brothers tried to kill him, putting a fatwa on his head that still exists, though he and his family — with help from Iraq’s tiny Christian community — escaped to France years ago.
How a wuss I am, I thought. This man was made to suffer — as Jesus, John, Paul and many early Christians had — and I was struggling with the idea of Jesus as a deity? Later, one cousis took exception to my conversion — saying it felt like there had been a death in the family — and I smiled. At least she didn’t put a fatwa on me!
After that came literary detours – Was Paul a good guy or bad? Why was Mary so important to Catholics? Was that really the blood and body of Jesus? I was in a rut.
Finally, in late January, I needed a procedure – stem cell injections in my left knee. I gathered what I called my Posse of Girlfriends to take me to and from the doctors’ office. Then I prepared for a weekend in the house, recovering via hobbling. There, something magical happened. I discovered The Chosen. I binge-watched it twice – all three seasons – and suddenly I began to understand the magic of Jesus, the miracles, the sermons. Perhaps, I thought, he was the most important figure in world history.
Shortly afterward I flew to Atlanta to attend the baptism of my great niece Arden, then 7. (Doctors want you up and walking as soon as possible, and Atlanta Hartsfield Airport was a good test!) As I walked around the chapel beforehand, I was tickled that I knew most of the stories behind each stained glass window. The ceremony was reverential, and touching. I wondered why His love was eluding me. Here I am with Arden’s parents — my niece Nicole, and her husband Mark — and their priest.
That night, I reviewed the magic of the day. I was sad my sister hadn’t come. She had just received awful news— her cancer had returned. As I sat in the airport terminal, thinking of my sister, of Arden and Booth and Jeffrey, waiting for a delayed flight as announcements interrupted reverie, I began to pray.
And in that moment, in that unlikely venue where aviation and alienation meet, I knew I could not live without Jesus one more minute.
I needed someone to pray to, someone who would be there for me always, someone who could soothe me through the ups and downs, the traumas and heartbreaks. After that, I began to talk to Jesus, every morning and every night, crediting him for the good in my life and thanking him for sending warning signs, things that arrested my attention and changed my course. I was no longer alone. I knew He loved me. As he had said, he was there to bring us peace, and joy, and for me, the word.
When I had told my sister, at Thanksgiving, that I was studying to be a Catholic, she was not pleased. Channeling our parents, all those years of Hebrew school, the weekly trips to temple for Sabbath services, she questioned how I could believe that a man could be a God. I suggested that every religion has foundational figures who teach morality. Did Moses come down from the mountain holding tablets written by God, I asked, or was that allegory, a way to underscore the importance of the Ten Commandments? She looked thoughtful. Before she started a new round of chemotherapy, I called and told her of my decision. She was gracious. “I don’t understand it,” she said, “but if it makes you happy, that’s all I need to know.”
To be continued
Such a beautiful journey. Thank you for including us. Can’t wait to know more….