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

  There were four of us, four boys. The eldest was three years older than me. The youngest, fraternal twins, were three years younger. Toward me, the middle child, my father conceived a special animosity.

  Maybe it was because I was stubborn in my opinions. Maybe it was because I was a dreamer off in a world of my own. I don’t know. There was just something about me he could not abide. From my youngest years, he hit me, ridiculed me, and browbeat me in a way he did not my brothers. My older brother once told me that Dad was so unkind to me it actually frightened him. As a result, though I admired his scrappy integrity as a man, and though I would one day emulate his loving-kindness as a husband, I neither liked nor trusted him as a father—never did, never came to.

  When I was in my twenties, my father told me I had always seemed to him a “stern presence.” I suppose he felt I judged him harshly. I suppose I did. I remember thinking as a very young person, maybe only eleven or twelve: This man is not on my side. He is not out to help me but to hurt me. I consciously set out to develop a coldness at my deep center to protect myself from his sarcasm and abuse. I consciously set a perimeter around my point of view. I did not think the world was what he said it was and I would not change my mind to suit him, no matter how he screamed at me or laughed at me. My independence only inflamed his hostility toward me even more. Through my teens and even into my late twenties, our relationship was one long, furious firefight. He wanted me to see the world as he saw it. I refused. He wanted my piece of protected inner territory for his own. I would not give it to him.

  That said, like any son, I grew up within my father’s value system. It was the house I lived in. Even when we were at odds, it was often impossible for me to tell what was my own independent opinion and what was a rebellion against his. His worldview was part of me, so even when I struggled against it, I was engaged in a painful struggle against myself. It became harder and harder for me to know which was which, and who I really was.

  To try to find the answer, I looked for other role models, other men I wanted to be like. That was why the tough guys caught my imagination the way they did. Hemingway, Hammett, and Chandler in books. Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne in the old movies on TV. The characters they wrote about and portrayed were fictional men I could model myself after when real men failed me.

  Ironically enough, there were many ways in which these writers and movie stars simply served to Americanize my father’s Old World values. In tough-guy movies and tough-guy books, Dad’s hostile and hilarious Jewish antagonism toward the powers-that-be was recast into the tight-lipped solitude of the incorruptible American hero. Dad’s fearful-angry, hit-and-hide joke-jabs at authority became Rick Blaine’s small, hidden acts of defiance in Casablanca. I stick my neck out for nobody. My dad’s working-class anti-intellectualism became Jake Barnes’s war-weary existentialism: I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. My father’s Ashkenazi suspicion of group loyalty and high sentiment became Frederic Henry’s heroic desertion from the field of battle in A Farewell to Arms: The things that were glorious had no glory.

  My father was waging a guerrilla war of comedy against the all-powerful Ministry of Earth—because he was a Jew, because he was an up-and-comer with a dozen chips on his shoulder, because he was an ambitious showman who wanted more recognition than he had, because he was the second son of a gruff immigrant tyrant who once punched a man so hard the guy actually rolled out of his pawnshop—because of whatever, whatever makes any of us what we are.

  But the tough guys—the Bogart characters, the Hemingway characters, Hammett’s detective Sam Spade—they stood apart from the mainstream for another reason, a better reason, or at least a reason that seemed more attractive to a young American boy. They stood apart because they had seen the Old World come falling down. The Great War, World War I, had brought an end to the high culture of Europe. The tough guys had seen that culture and its values in ruins. They had set out to form new values, their own values, values by which a modern man might live in a land gone bad.

  It may seem silly—it may actually be silly!—that a 1960s teenager ensconced in one of the most comfortable suburbs in America searched for his male role models among fictional expatriates, world warriors, and private eyes from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. But it did make a kind of sense. Not only did these characters rework my father’s neurotic antagonism toward his environment into something admirable and manly; they were also dealing with issues that were the issues of my day.

  Because my culture, too, the culture of my childhood, was falling, was fallen. The collapse was unfolding on our television screens, in the background of my life. There were murders of high-profile public figures. Martin Luther King Jr. Senator Robert Kennedy—whom I had seen in person when he spoke at a local shopping mall what must have been mere months before his death. There were riots and protests against the way things were. Against racism in the South. Against the war in Vietnam. Against the very capitalism and churchgoing morality that made America what it had been at its height.

  These events seemed far away from the immediate concerns of a self-absorbed fourteen-year-old, but they changed the atmosphere around me. They changed everything. We had grown up playing at being brave American GIs in our backyards. Now college students only a few years older than us were burning the American flag, praising our Communist enemies, and spitting on GIs in airports as they returned home from the battlefield. As children, we had wondered if we would have the courage to fight in a war as our fathers had. Now these kids were dodging the draft and parading themselves as heroes for doing it.

  But then, all the rules were shattering like glass. A year before, at thirteen, I would have said—all my friends would have said—that sex was only for married people. A young man might have a premarital fling or two with a bad girl, a loose girl, but when the time came to settle down, you married a nice girl, a virgin. A year later, when I was fifteen, I was having sex with girls who had seemed to me perfectly nice the year before and indeed seemed perfectly nice still, even naked in the park and in my bed. When my father found out what I was up to, he called one of my girlfriends “a whore.” I was not just hurt, I was startled. He didn’t understand: everything had changed. Nice girls did this now. It was what was happening.

  There were drugs suddenly too. Marijuana, LSD, pills of various sorts, and occasionally cocaine. I smoked pot a few times, but I didn’t like it. I never touched the harder stuff. It frightened me. I already knew I wanted to be a writer, and I was worried drugs would destroy my instrument, my brain. Anyway, toking weed, popping pills, snorting powder—it all seemed a bit effeminate to me. My heroes drank. Bogart, Jake Barnes, Philip Marlowe—they all hit the booze. I started doing that at fifteen too. I was soon hiding a pint of scotch outside a ground-floor window. I would leave the house by the front door, scoot around to the side, and retrieve the whiskey, then head off to join my friends.

  The world I had grown up in was spinning away. Through a special program for troublesome kids, I graduated from high school a year early, but later, when a pal brought around a copy of the yearbook for my class, I was shocked by what I saw. All those graduation photographs of scrubbed, brightly smiling teenaged faces, all those nice, mostly Jewish boys and girls I had known. I thought they’d all be college-bound now, profession-bound, marriage and family bound, clean and perfect. But no. Not all. My pal pointed to picture after picture: This girl had gotten pregnant and had had an abortion; this girl had left school to have her baby in secret; this boy had run away from home to California; this boy and this boy had been arrested for drug use. There were overdoses. There was a suicide and a suicide attempt. There was even one boy, one of my best friends in elementary school, who had taken LSD while in the city one day and then stepped in front of a subway train.

  In the ruined world after the Great War, the tough-guy writers had tried to build new moral codes of their own. In my peaceful and comfortable subur
b, I tried to do the same. I tried each tough-guy’s system on for size. I tried Jake Barnes’s existentialism. I tried Sam Spade’s nihilism. I even tried Rick Blaine’s watchful detachment. I imitated these characters and tried to bring my habits of mind into line with theirs.

  But each code seemed somehow insufficient to my purposes. Just as I wanted my daydreams to make sense as stories, I wanted my personal philosophy to make sense too. And I couldn’t help noticing that at the core of many tough-guy fictions, there was actually something that was not so tough.

  For instance, I love the movie Casablanca. Who doesn’t? No matter how many egghead critics declare Citizen Kane to be the greatest American movie, we all know it’s Casablanca in fact. A brokenhearted nightclub owner stands aside from the great struggle of World War II, but when his old lover returns to him, he finds, in moral sacrifice, his better self. The story is so grand and romantic, it makes real life seem too small. But I remember, when I was in my teens, it occurred to me that the uplifting end of the film redeems a main character who has really not behaved very admirably through the rest. If you strip Rick Blaine of Humphrey Bogart’s wry, cool persona—if you take away the background music and the wonderful dialogue and the exotic locale—you’re left with a guy who’s kind of a crybaby for most of the picture. You’re not going to fight World War II because your girlfriend dumped you? Really? I mean, dude, it’s World War II! Boo-hoo and all that, but get some perspective! Act like a man!

  Likewise, it came to seem to me that the romance of Hemingway’s alcoholic drifters in The Sun Also Rises was essentially a romance of weakness and brokenness. The war has left the world in ruins. We drink. We fish. We wander about. We complain a lot. Then we’re done.

  As for Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, well, he was different. He was genuinely hardboiled. He sent the woman he loved to the gallows just because. That’s hardboiled, for sure. But really, what sort of reason was that, when you came down to it? It wasn’t as if he stood for justice. He stood for nothing. He believed in nothing. He did what he did because he was who he was and it was good for business. Again, when you took away the romance of the story and the glamour of the character, it was essentially the philosophy of a small-town shopkeeper. I do what I do because I am what I am. I do what’s good for business.

  One by one, the tough guys disappointed me as my father had disappointed me.

  But then—then I read Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and I discovered Philip Marlowe.

  If there is one paragraph in all of fiction that transformed my life more than any other, it’s the second paragraph of The Big Sleep. Professionally, it made me want to become a crime writer. Personally, it gave me an ideal of manhood that sticks with me still.

  As the story begins, tough guy Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe has been summoned to the stately mansion of the elderly reprobate General Sternwood. Marlowe describes what he sees as he steps through the mansion’s front door:

  The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.2

  I remember I felt something swell inside me when I read this. I don’t know why I grasped the idea of it so quickly. Maybe it was because it spoke into my old daydreams of rescuing girls from danger, I’m not sure. But for whatever reason, I understood the idea at once.

  The knight of chivalric legend had never been real. Don Quixote had tried to emulate him and gone mad because life was not that way. But here, in the present day, even the ideal of the knight, the chivalric image of him, had been frozen into impotence on a stained-glass window, a window like a church’s but in a sinner’s mansion now. And here came a new fiction—a creation of the new city, a man of the modern world, a private eye—who carried that old ideal inside him, who would bring the hero on the stained glass back to life, not in irony like Quixote but in tragic earnest. Marlowe was a new American man determined to carry the old European ideal into the moral wasteland of the urban West.

  “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,” Chandler famously wrote of his central character. “He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”3

  A man of honor in a world of corruption. Now that was a tough guy.

  I read all of Chandler’s Marlowe novels, all his short stories, even a collection of his letters. I loved his writing like no writing I’d ever encountered before. I had my role model now. I wanted to be like Marlowe. I wanted to tell stories like Chandler’s.

  I wish I could report that this transformed me into a better person. More knightly, more noble, more chaste. Not at all. I was a teenager. I was angry. Foolish. And increasingly, I was twisted inside. What I imitated most in Marlowe was his heavy drinking.

  But reading Chandler did have some good effects on me over the long run. For instance, I came upon this piece of advice in his letters: “The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least when a professional writer doesn’t do anything else but write. He doesn’t have to write . . . But he is not to do any other positive thing . . .”4 I began to follow that advice. I wrote my first full novel when I was fourteen. And yes, as a novel, it was every bit as excellent as you would imagine, but as a first exercise in self-discipline, it wasn’t bad at all. That discipline became a habit and the habit solidified. It made me a productive writer even in the worst of times. It created a little space of sanity in days of deepening madness. I’ve written at least four steady hours, and usually more, every day for most of my life, and I think it saved my life at times.

  There was also this. The image of a man carrying the ideals of a civilization within him, even when those ideals have crumbled around him, stuck with me through those chaotic years. I wanted to know more about those ideals. I wanted to learn where they came from. I wanted to hear the underlying reasons for them before joining my generation in deconstructing them and throwing them away.

  So, after reading through the Marlowe novels, I turned to the old stories of knighthood. I started reading the Arthurian legends. Thomas Mallory and Chretien De Troyes, the Gawain poet, Tennyson, the Once and Future King. I always loved tales of adventure, and what could be more adventurous than the wars and duels, romances and adulteries of Camelot? Even as I continued to neglect my work at school, at home I studied the knights of the Round Table.

  These stories were dense with Christian imagery. Of course they were. The church had virtually invented the code of chivalry as a way to convince real medieval knights to stop being the violent louts they were. In fiction, knights were courageous warriors for Christ, and ladies were virtuous in the Holy Virgin’s name. The climactic Arthurian adventure—the quest for the Holy Grail—in most versions of the story was a search for the chalice from which Jesus poured wine at the Last Supper.

  As it turned out, too, the symbols from these legends were strewn throughout all my favorite books. In Chandler’s original Marlowe story, the knightly detective was actually named Mallory. The Maltese Falcon’s link to the Crusades gave the story overtones of the quest for the Holy Grail. The Grail mythology virtually dictated the plot of The Sun Also Rises—and that, in turn, connected the novel to T. S. Eliot’s magnificent poem The Wasteland. Here was another writer—Eliot—who had seen the great culture of the
West collapse and had tried to reconstruct its values within himself. I could see now why the poet had ultimately become a Christian.

  In fact, by the time I was fifteen or so, I had begun to understand that Christianity was central to everything I had been reading. It was Christian ideas that had powered European culture, and it was belief in those ideas that had fallen when Europe’s culture fell. The empty church in which Jake Barnes couldn’t pray, the Holy Grail that Sam Spade found to be worthless, the stained-glass window that held Chandler’s knight helpless, and the fragments of literature that Eliot shored against his ruins: these were the sad remnants of a founding faith that had all but gone out of the intellectual world.

  I was only a boy still and I didn’t understand much, but I began to understand that at the heart of all Western mythology, all Western civilization, all Western writing, all Western thought, and every Western ideal, there stood a single book, the Bible, and a single man, Jesus of Nazareth.

  I decided I ought to find out more about them both.

  CHAPTER 6

  READING THE BIBLE

  I had no religious motives in reading the New Testament. I wanted to be a writer. Christian symbolism was everywhere in the writing I admired. I wanted to know where the symbols came from. That really was all.

  Of course, my family did not own a Bible with the New Testament in it. I had to go to the store and buy one. I don’t remember where I got it, but the copy I bought is on the desk beside me as I write. A forty-five-year-old volume now, its binding is worn to the glue, its brown cover cracked and broken. Poignantly, I noticed only recently that it was published by Thomas Nelson, the same company that contracted me to write this book.

  I decided to start with The Gospel According to Saint Luke. I think this was because I liked Christmas and Luke includes the Christmas story, which I had never read in the original. My older brother had recently left for college and I had inherited his coveted bedroom, down on the ground floor away from my parents’ and younger brothers’ rooms upstairs, so that’s where I was when I started. It was a weekday evening, around dinner time. I closed my door, lay down on my bed, cracked open the book, and began to read.