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

by Andrew Klavan

About five years before, after a lifetime of agnosticism, I had come to believe in God. It started as a tentative experiment in prayer. Soon I was praying every day and the experience was undeniably powerful and transformative. I could see that praying had improved my life in any number of ways and so I was committed to it. But there was no system of thought attached to the practice, no church, no documents of any authority—nothing even particularly supernatural, if you except the presence of God himself.

That was why so many decades later, when I felt myself called to faith in Jesus Christ, when, distraught and in confusion, I drove up into the mountains to question the integrity of my convictions, to cross-examine my motives day after day, week after week, month after month, I had to ask myself: Was this a real religious conversion or was it merely the final stage in the process of assimilation that had begun in my hometown so long ago? Was I putting on the whole armor of God or merely joining the church of the majority?

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.

With great pomp and sacred ceremony, they had made me declare what I did not believe was true—and then they had paid me for the lie with these trinkets! I felt that I had sold my soul.

If there is a higher, spiritual, supernatural world, it stands to reason that this everyday, material, natural world is only the language in which it speaks to us.

Jacob Marley’s tormented ghost asks Scrooge the one question on which everything depends: “Man of the worldly mind, do you believe in me or not?” The immortal soul might just be an illusion thrown up by the deceived senses. But if it’s truly there, all the rest follows naturally: the justified pangs of conscience; the reality of love; the unity of personality through past, present, and future; the miracle of redemption.

The knowledge of good and evil was not some top-secret catalogue of nice and naughty acts that popped into Eve’s mind when a talking snake got her to eat the magic fruit. The knowledge was built into the action of disobedience itself: it’s what she learned when she overruled the moral law God had placed within her. There was no going back from that.

It made sense to me too—natural sense, not supernatural—that after that history was complete, a man might be born who could comprehend it wholly and re-create within himself the relationship at its source. His mind would contain both man and God. It made sense that the creatures of sin and history—not the Jews alone but all of us—would conspire in such a man’s judicial murder. Jesus had to die because we had to kill him. It was either that or see ourselves by his light, as the broken things we truly are. It’s only from God’s point of view that this is a redeeming sacrifice. By living on earth in Jesus, by entering history, by experiencing death, by passing through that moment of absolute blackness when God is forsaken by God, God reunites himself with his fallen creation and reopens the path to the relationship lost in Eden. Jesus’ resurrection is the final proof that no matter how often we kill the truth of who we’re meant to be, it never dies.

How wild was this? Shakespeare had predicted postmodernism and moral relativism hundreds of years before they came into being! Like Hamlet, the postmodernists were declaring that language did not describe the world around us. It was just “words, words, words.”

But there was one big difference. Hamlet said these things when he was pretending to be mad. My professors said them and pretended to be sane.

The seed of the answer was planted in me by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. I was about twenty when I read it. It changed my life.

The moment the service was over, however, I realized I had been wrong, utterly wrong. It struck me full force right away: the ceremony did matter. It was like a living story representing a truth that could not be otherwise told. It changed something in me on the instant. It created a mysterious but tremendous difference in the relationship between my girl and me.

I was a fool in so many ways and really half insane by then. But somehow—and not for the last time in my life—I had managed to stumble into the great good thing.

Title

Sometimes you just have to play in pain.

But now I saw: it wasn’t so. Why should it be? What sort of wisdom has no joy in it? What good is wisdom without joy?

My consciousness, my psyche, the whole invisible presence of me was carried out of my body on the tide of love.

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.”

Given that my idea of spirituality was not necessarily supernatural, atheism made a certain amount of sense to me at that time. After all, Freudian therapy was bringing me closer and closer to a kind of sanity and peace I had never dreamed of having. And there was no more confirmed atheist-materialist than Sigmund Freud. He had replaced the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with the Id, Ego, and Superego, three functions of the mind. He had replaced the fall of man with a story about a primal patricide in earliest times—that was how he explained our universal sense of guilt. He had essentially rewritten the story of Christianity into a new myth of the death and resurrection of our own flesh. For him, all our highest thoughts could be reinterpreted as expressions of our often thwarted and rechanneled erotic impulses.

So we have to choose. Either there is no God and no morality whatsoever, or there is morality and God is real. Either way makes sense, if you’re speaking strictly about logic. I didn’t reject Sade’s outlook on logical grounds. I rejected it because I found it repulsive and I knew it wasn’t true just as I know that one plus two always equals two plus one, though neither I nor anyone else can prove it. So, too, I know that a Nazi who tortures a child to death is less moral than a priest who gives a beggar bread—and that this is so even in a world that is all Nazis everywhere. In the chain of reasoning that took me finally to Christ, accepting this one axiom—that some actions are morally better than others—is the only truly nonlogical leap of faith I ever made.

Meditate on nothing long enough, and you soon achieve inner nothingness. I assume if you meditated on turtles, it would be turtles all the way down.

Ah, but it may lead you to the great A'Tuin (from Pratcher's Discworld)!

There came a therapy session near the end where I was talking about these things: dark things, sorrowful things, ugly things too. In the midst of it all, I began to laugh. I couldn’t stop myself. I laughed and laughed, twisted and doubled over in the patient’s chair, clutching my belly with one hand, wiping my eyes with the other. It wasn’t hysterical laughter. It wasn’t tragic laughter either. It wasn’t even happy laughter really. It was just laughter, pure laughter, pure hilarity, pure mirth. Something—no, everything—struck me as funny. Really funny. Funny at its core, in its very nature: my past, my sorrow, my future, this moment; life; everything. I laughed and laughed. I couldn’t stop.

Reminiscent of the charismatic "Holy Laughter" episodes.

The fifth epiphany. The fifth fragment. The truth of suffering. The wisdom of joy. The reality of love. The possibility of clear perception. The laughter at the heart of mourning. I had them all now, all the pieces I needed. The five revelations that were really one revelation: the presence of God.

I am a Jew. Even now, even in Christ—I would say never more so. I’m proud of this, belligerently proud. Mine is a uniquely great people. We represent about .2 percent of the world. Not 2 percent. Point two. Statistically almost zero. Yet make a list of the most consequential individuals who have ever lived and Jews will be thick among them, from Moses, David, Jesus, and St. Paul to Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. Around one-fifth of all Nobel Prizes have gone to people of Jewish heritage, more if you only count the science prizes. Point 2 percent of the population. About thirteen million souls. There are single cities with more people in them than that. And these Jews, these thinkers of thoughts, these writers of books, these doctors, inventors, entertainers, tradesmen—these are the single most despised and put upon people on the face of the planet, bar none.

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.

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.

What were my five epiphanies if not tenets of Christian faith? The truth of suffering was the knowledge of the cross. The wisdom of joy was the soul’s realization through relationship with God. The reality of love was the personality of the Creator as only Jesus had ever revealed it. The possibility of clear perception was the sign that we were made in God’s image, that we had the ability to know his good as our good, even if only through a glass darkly. Then there was the laughter at the heart of mourning, my bizarre but ever-present sense that, despite our grief and fear and suffering, some essential comedy lived at the center of tragic existence. What could that be if not the realization that this life is not what we were meant for, that death is not what we were meant for, that who we are is not who we’re supposed to be? Even the lowest form of humor—maybe especially the lowest, the most basic form—suggests that we were intended to be something higher than ourselves.