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

  It was because of my dreams. It was because I was a hero in my daydreams, and I wanted to be what I pretended to be. “In dreams begin responsibilities,” as the poet Yeats said, and the responsibility not to fall short of my own illusions weighed on me constantly. My fantastic self-image rode on my shoulders, a burden that only added to my general feeling of dread. It is not fun to get punched. It is the opposite of fun. When you have been punched, you do not want to be punched again, not ever. I haven’t been in a fistfight for more than forty years, and yet people who have been in fistfights, people who have punched people and been punched, read the fight scenes in my novels and say to me, “You’ve been in fistfights too. You’ve punched people and have been punched too.” It’s not an experience you forget. The fights and the threat of fighting and the appointments to fight and waiting to keep the appointments—all of it was a source of anxiety for me. And to escape that anxiety, I dreamed.

  I dreamed away long hours of every day. At night in bed, before I went to sleep, I would review my collection of completed dreams, the ones that didn’t need any more work, the ones that made sense and were ready to be imagined. I would picture a strip of movie film, complete with sprockets. I would picture it running frame by frame through a viewer, the sort of hand-cranked viewer my dad had in his basement darkroom. On each frame of the film strip there would be a picture of a dream, a different picture, a different dream on each—atom man, boy genius, cowboy, whatever. I would select one and close my eyes and the story would begin to play out in my mind. The dream would soothe me and relax me like reading a book until finally I could sleep.

  All that dreaming and making dreams: it was good practice for a someday novelist, I guess, especially a novelist of adventure and suspense. But it wasn’t a very healthy way to spend a boyhood. Even I knew that, or came to realize it after a while. I was dreaming more and more and becoming less and less aware of the reality around me. I was seven or eight years old, and I was losing the knack for direct experience. I could feel the tactile sense of the world’s immediacy slipping from my fingertips. I could see the light of the present moment dimming into darkness.

  If TV sitcoms idealized the American suburbs of the 1960s, the works of the artistic elite disparaged them ceaselessly, then and now. The songs of Pete Seeger, novels like Revolutionary Road, the stories of John Cheever, movies like Pleasantville and American Beauty, television series like Mad Men: in all of them, that long-ago land of lawns and houses is depicted as a country of stultifying conformity and cultural emptiness, sexual hypocrisy, alcoholism, and spiritual despair. Privilege murders the senses there, the creatives tell us. Gender roles strangle freedom. Family life turns the heart of adventure to ashes. There’s bigotry and gossip and dangerous liaisons behind every closed door. Oh, the soul, the human soul! In the suburbs of fiction, she is forever dying.

  But me, I kind of liked it there. As a little boy anyway. What was wrong with it? You had your trees, you had your sidewalks, you had your birds and squirrels and moms and dads. Kids played in the street through the afternoons and went home past warmly lighted windows in the evenings. There were summer barbecues and baseball games. There were high piles of autumn leaves that you could hurl yourself into. In winter, there were snows so deep you could dig long tunnels underneath the drifts. In spring, there was a flavor to the air that made you yearn for you-didn’t-know-what. If the suburban ideal of the sitcom was false, so are the elite attacks on a way of life that most citizens of the earth would have sold their souls for. Were people miserable there? Maybe, but the truth is people can be miserable anywhere. You can find hypocrites, drunks, and adulterers anywhere you find humanity. Why not live somewhere with some peace and quiet and open spaces and a twenty-minute commute to the city?

  But this world—this suburban world I really did love, this world for which I felt a sentimental, almost nostalgic, affection even as a child—it was sinking away from me, sinking to the bottom of a sea of dreams, visible now only distantly through the wavery undercurrent. I would walk to school and find when I arrived that I could remember not one moment of the journey, not one piece of scenery, not one face or car or incident, only my dreams. I would take long bike rides and come to myself on some strange road, hardly knowing how I got there. Even during games, even during conversations, I would sometimes mentally absent myself to go on some imagined adventure, and come back only half aware of what we had been doing or saying while my mind was gone.

  I hardly even saw the trees anymore. I had always—have always—had a sort of mystic fondness for trees. To this day, my mind is nowhere more at peace than in a forest. As a boy, I would lie under this one particular maple in our backyard. I would lace my fingers behind my head and watch the pattern of leaves against the sky. It was one of my favorite pastimes, no kidding. There was an apple tree I liked to climb in our front yard near the street. I would hide in the branches for hours sometimes, watching people pass and cars go by. The autumn change of colors all over town, the whisper of breezes in high parkland pines, the weirdness of weeping willows at the roadside, the boy squirrels chasing girl squirrels up the trunks of oaks in crazy spirals like squirrels in a cartoon, the rare scarlet cardinal meditating in the deep foliage. As an aspiring tough guy, I was embarrassed by how much these things delighted me. They were secret pleasures I did not discuss with anyone.

  But over time I found that, whenever I was among the trees, I wasn’t really there at all anymore; I was dreaming. I would make special trips to the backyard to lie beneath the maple. I would try to recapture the sensation of watching its branches against the sky. I would try to concentrate on the patterns and colors that had once fascinated me. But my mind would drift away into dreams.

  It bothered me. I missed the trees. I missed the walk to school. I missed my friends and my games and the weather and the whole wide world—not just the facts of them but the presence and awareness of them, the being there with them. It was all dreams for me now. Nothing but dreams.

  I had reached that stage in an addiction when you notice that the pleasure of the thing is gone. You didn’t really want that last cigarette or drink. You didn’t really enjoy it. You just had to have it. With me, the boy me, it was fantasy. Fantasy like mist—mist like ivy—twining around me, enclosing me. I didn’t like it anymore. I just couldn’t make it stop.

  So I did what most addicts do at that juncture. I resolved to break the habit. From now on, I decided, I was going to pay attention. Maybe not to everything, maybe not all the time. I would begin with something small, something manageable. The walk to school, say. Yes, that would do it. I would pay full attention during the walk to school. No more daydreams. I would focus on what I saw. I would listen to the sounds—the birds, the breezes, the passing cars. I would smell the air. I would live in the experience of the moment.

  I was eight years old.

  I began the project on a Monday morning in autumn. I banged through the front-door screen with my books beneath my arm and marched off to school resolutely alert.

  Now, anyone who has ever practiced any of the Eastern-style mindfulness techniques, zen or yoga or tai chi or suchlike, knows just how incredibly difficult it is to do what I was trying to do. To be aware, to be present in the moment, to silence your own interior jibbering and face life naked-minded is, as I would later learn, the entire goal of some spiritual enterprises, the very essence of enlightenment. No wonder too. It’s hard. Most of the time we can’t even unglue our noses from our screens and devices long enough to pay attention to our internal dialogue, let alone break out of that dialogue into pure existence. Try it. Try it for sixty seconds. Complete inner silence. Not one word of thought. Utter awareness. It’s hard.

  But I tried. I walked along. I focused diligently on the tremulous green lobes of the neighbor’s pachysandra. I wondered if I’d forgotten to bring my math book. No, I had it. Now where was I? Back to awareness. The lofty clouds billowing over the sky above the ghost house. Would there be kickball at recess?
I liked kickball. I could see myself sending a solid shot over the heads of the outfielders. No, no, that’s no good. Focus, focus. Look at the texture of the Macadam where it meets the stone curb. Ah, now, I’m doing it! My mind is clear. That’s amazing! It’s as if I’ve invented a whole new way of thinking. I’ll become the first truly enlightened child. Aliens will come to earth searching for our wisest human and discover, through their advanced brain scans, that it’s me. They’ll implant their alien powers in me, powers that will allow me to govern the world. With my mind so clear, so focused, I’ll be able to use those powers more wisely even than the president . . .

  And then I was at school and could not remember how I had gotten there.

  Total failure. I’d hardly paid attention for more than a consecutive couple of seconds before the dreams overtook me. But I was not yet discouraged. I tried again a second day. Again, I couldn’t get more than three or four steps before my concentration was broken by a random thought and the thought became a chain and the chain became a dream and I was gone, gone, gone.

  It was dispiriting. It was even disturbing. Was my whole life going to be strangled by a clinging ivy-mist of dreams?

  Then, on the third day: a breakthrough.

  I was walking on the longest straightaway of the journey, the stretch of Piccadilly Road that ran from the ghost house to where you turned up Devon to the school. I was passing lawn after sloping lawn and leaf-hidden home after home, psychically trying to claw the tendrils of fantasy from my mind so I could see clearly. There’d be moments of awareness, seconds of naked reality. And then a drifting thought. And the tendrils would twine back around me, thicker than before.

  I was about two-thirds of the way to the corner, almost out of time, frustrated to the point where I was beginning to consider abandoning the entire experiment. Then suddenly I spotted a high tree branch off in the distance against the backdrop of the September sky.

  I don’t know what it was about that branch that caught my full attention. Something, though, because I can remember the look of it to this day. It was the branch of an oak tree, I think. Far off, in the backyard not of the house right in front of me, but of the house behind that one. It was a single branch jutting out two or three feet beyond the tree’s green crown, near the top. The stouter part of it was bare, colored that white-brown-gray branch color there’s no good name for. (Who ever says “taupe”?) But there was a cluster of dark green leaves near the tip of it, where the main arm forked into dwindling twiglets. The sky behind the leaves was very blue with a single small, white cumulus cloud slowly drifting through it.

  And I saw it, really saw it. The branch, the sky, the cloud, the whole scene. I broke through my thoughts and my dreams and myself and I was just there, completely there. I stopped walking. I stood with my schoolbooks held low against my leg. The cooly yearning autumn breeze stroked my cheeks and stirred my hair and I gazed at that branch and my mind was silent. My attention was turned completely outward. No fantasy, only the world. I saw it all.

  What a disappointment it was! There was nothing to it. It was just a branch, that’s all. Real enough but cold, empty of emotional presence. It held no sweetness, no pleasure, no beauty. It was not like the high branches of my backyard oak when I lay under it, or the branches of my apple tree when I climbed on them and hid among them. I was fond of those; I loved them. This—this faraway branch—it was just a fact. A lifeless pattern. A branch against the sky, some leaves, a drifting cloud. This wasn’t what I had been looking for at all. This was nothing. A branch. A cloud. The sky. Nothing.

  I came back into myself, let down, deflated. I understood at once what had gone wrong, the flaw at the heart of my whole experiment. I don’t remember now what eight-year-old words I used to describe my understanding to myself, but the gist of it was this: The world had no beauty of its own. The beauty of the world was created in the human experience, in me. The very fact of beauty, the very idea that something could be beautiful, only existed in me. The point was not to see the world. There was nothing out there to see, nothing worthwhile at any rate, just shapes, just patterns. The point was to experience the world, to know it simultaneously both without and within.

  But I had lost the talent for living like that, and I could not get it back again merely by staring.

  How then? How could I reclaim the world and my life in the world? How could a person free himself from the prison of his own consciousness in order to know the beauty of the world as it existed only within his consciousness?

  Ah, well—that was a puzzle way beyond the abilities of an eight-year-old, even a puzzle-loving eight-year-old like me.

  And so I left the branch behind. I left the world behind. I went on my way to school, that day and all the days that followed, in solitude, cut off from reality, surrendered to stories, addicted to dreams.

  CHAPTER 3

  BAR MITZVAH BOY

  There were three main synagogues in our town, as I remember it. Each represented a different degree of religious observance, light, medium, or heavy: Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox. We were Conservative by my dad’s decree. We had a Seder meal at Passover. We went to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. We lit candles on the eight nights of Hanukkah. We even fasted on Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Atonement. We went to Hebrew School, too, twice during the week, I think it was, and maybe a third time on Sundays. There we were supposed to learn Hebrew and the Bible and ultimately prepare for our bar mitzvahs.

  My mom helped out with all this, of course. She prepared the meals, chauffeured us to temple, and so on. But she made it clear she was only doing her duty by my dad. She would tease him about it. She would say, “You know you’re just doing this to please your dead father.” My paternal grandfather died when I was very young. My clearest memory of him was of seeing him close to the end of his life. “Prepare yourself,” my father had told me and my older brother as we climbed the narrow stairs to his apartment. “He doesn’t look good.”

  I remember a shockingly withered and gentle creature swamped by the wing chair from which he could no longer rise. In his youth, however, he was a stern and intimidating traditionalist apparently, a tough-guy pawnbroker who kept a kosher house and expected his two sons to do the same. My mother felt Dad maintained Jewish practices in our house only for fear of his memory.

  My dad acknowledged—ruefully—that there was some truth to that. But our Hebrew rituals and schooling were important to him personally too. He saw the world as a gentile world forever hostile to its Jews. He didn’t want us to retreat an inch in the face of its bigotry. They’ll still kill you, even if you try to pretend to be one of them, so don’t humiliate yourself with cultural surrender. That was the general idea.

  But also, and more reasonably, there was this. My father wanted us, his sons, to know our own people. He wanted us to take their history seriously. He didn’t want us to leave our heritage behind.

  Which was fair enough, in theory. But in practice, there was a problem with it, a big problem with all of it—with the high holy days and the Hebrew School and the bar mitzvahs—one big problem that troubled my heart from an early age. My parents did not believe in God.

  My mother, for her part, was a stone atheist, like her mother before her. I’ve never met anyone else as firm as she was in her disbelief. Oh, sometimes she would make some vague gesture toward the idea of a deity. She felt it was her duty as a mother, I think. She didn’t want to pull the metaphysical rug out from under her children’s feet too abruptly lest they bruise themselves plummeting into the existential abyss. She’d tell us things like: God is the people who love you. Or: There’s something out there; no one knows what for sure. But, of course, you can’t fool kids with that sort of mealy-mouthed malarkey. I knew where she stood. As I got older, I could even coax her true opinion out of her from time to time. If you ask me, it’s all a lot of hooey.

  Of my father’s beliefs, I’m not quite as sure. He was close and canny about them, not just with us but
with himself as well, I think; maybe even with God. It was not in his nature to openly defy a Gigantic Invisible Jew who could give you cancer just by thinking about it. But by the same token, he wasn’t simply going to kowtow to the Power. He felt the need to give the Lord a little zetz from time to time—a Yiddish smack—of sarcasm, disrespect, and disbelief. I think he prayed when things troubled him; it couldn’t hurt. The father he appeased with his observances was sometimes his own father and sometimes the Big Father in the Sky. He hedged his bets: he took Pascal’s Wager but held half of his cash in reserve in case the game turned out to be some kind of cheap hustle.

  In any case, for child me, the larger point was this: God was not a living presence in my home. We did not say grace before meals. We did not kneel down by our beds at night. We were not told to pray in times of hardship. We were not referred to the will of God in matters of morality. Aside from collecting pennies for UNICEF on Halloween and occasionally putting quarters aside for the United Jewish Appeal, we did no volunteer work and had no charity life of any kind.

  For me, this rendered our Jewish observances absurd. I was the boy, after all, who demanded that even his daydreams make some kind of sense. I became frustrated with a mystery story if even a single thread of the plot was left loose. And I had what I would call a very Jewish insistence on the rational basis for any supernatural belief. I could see that the magnificent four-thousand-year-old structure of Jewish theology and tradition was, at its core, a kind of language for communicating with the divine presence. Subtract the Almighty and what was the purpose of it? It was just an empty temple, its foundations resting on nothing, its spires pointing only toward the dark.