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

by Andrew Klavan

Because if there’s one thing every good novelist understands, it’s that our inner world is unreliable and yet there’s no getting beyond it.

the dilemma that caused and defined many of the political and cultural battles of the postmodern era—had been implanted in the conscience of the West by one book of our essential literature: The Gospel According to St. John.

Anyway, God is not susceptible to proofs and disproofs. If you believe, the evidence is all around you. If you don’t believe, no evidence can be enough.

dreamed without ceasing, obsessively. I had a rule that my dreams had to make sense. That is, the stories in them needed to be held together by some sort of internal logic.

“In dreams begin responsibilities,” as the poet Yeats said, and the responsibility not to fall short of my own illusions weighed on me constantly.

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.

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. Now, when I opened the leather box, when I looked down at the gold and silver and gems and US Bonds, it was a bitter, bitter thing.

As an adult, I’ve always disliked pictures like that. I’ve always disliked the effeminate piety of them. They have no weight, no tragedy. It’s a cotton-candy god to me: sugar and fluff.

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

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. The original sin poisoned all history. History’s murders, rapes, wars, oppressions, and injustices are now the inescapable plot of the story we’re in.

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.

Morality especially has come to seem to him completely dependent on his own opinions. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” he says. How wild was this? Shakespeare had predicted postmodernism and moral relativism hundreds of years before they came into being!

And like Hamlet, the postmodernists had dismissed the notion of absolute morality. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

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.

I had learned to ride a story like a wave, wherever it went. This was an important change in me, an essential change. Stories are not just entertainment, not to me. A story records and transmits the experience of being human. It teaches us what it’s like to be who we are. Nothing but art can do this. There is no science that can capture the inner life. No words can describe it directly. We can only speak of it in metaphors. We can only say: it’s like this—

As the story ends, he begins the “new story” of his redemption in the Gospels.

Every good thing we know would be lost to darkness, all unremembered, if each had not been preserved for us by some sinner with a pen.

For the rest, we have been poor and rich together, crazy and sane, happy and miserable, but never wholly out of harmony. I find I can no longer even dream a woman who is not in some sense she. But more than that. Our marriage has taken on a life of its own. It has become a third creation, greater than anything we are individually or together. I like to think we’re perfectly decent people, Ellen and I, but I have all the usual flaws of men and she of women. We’re clearly neither one of us as special as this vessel that contains us. Our marriage shines around us and between us with an otherly light, a sacred habitation for our shambolic humanity. It is soul stuff made visible.

Substitute all of the female pronouns for male, and you at once have my marriage to my husband. This, I think, is what God meant by “the two shall become one flesh”, and this is how we as married people work on getting each other to heaven by living out the gospel in our marriage.

The long sleeps and the heavy drinking, the endless fevers and sunken-eyed solitude. Once you have felt that tide of darkness rising in you, you always know it might rise again.

Ugly, twisted, vicious thoughts flitter through other people’s minds, but you have to seize yours and hold them to the light in order to understand the soul’s shadowy corners. You have to shred your comfortable pieties. You have to tear your illusions to feathers and rags.

As long as religion might even appear to serve me as an emotional crutch, I dismissed it as a form of weakness.

For others, I know it was Christ who led them to joy. For me, it was joy that led me to Christ.

I felt a brutal weight of sorrow in me—sorrow and self-pity, a toxic blend. I was a burden to my family, I thought. I thought: My wife and daughter would be better off without me.

I’ve felt like that before. It’s a lie straight out of hell.

One sentence kept repeating itself in my mind, one refrain: I don’t know how to live. I don’t know how to live . . .

But tonight, for some reason—for some reason—Carter decided to leave the religious stuff out of it. Instead, he answered very simply. He said, “Sometimes you just have to play in pain.”

Yes. That’s right. That’s it exactly. And I can do that too. I can play in pain. If I have to. I know I can. That’s something I actually know how to do.

If I believe in the fellowship of Christ’s suffering, I have to learn to “play in pain” as well.

Up until then, I considered some of my most self-destructive and disturbing habits of mind to be inborn aspects of my nature. If I was unhappy, I thought it was just the way things were, the world being what it was, and me being who I was.

This inner harmony was the goal toward which I would be working in my therapy. And it was real. It existed. I was experiencing it right now, like a vision of things to come.

What sort of wisdom has no joy in it? What good is wisdom without joy?

By joy I mean a vital love of life in both sorrow and gladness.

Everything useful that can be done in the world can be done in joy.

Indeed!

But Freud, in effect, had declared that all spiritual things were merely symbols of the flesh. In the delivery room, for the first time, it had seemed to me that he had gotten it exactly the wrong way round. Our flesh was the symbol. It was the love that was real.

you have to first make the assumption that material is the only reality before you can begin to reason away the spirit.

Which is what is going on even now.

Sade understood that if there is no God, there can be no ultimate morality. There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

So we have to choose. Either there is no God and no morality whatsoever, or there is morality and God is real.

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.

I began to wonder if perhaps the God my zen consciousness was rejecting was not the real God, but an internal one, the voices and opinions and illusions inside my head.

there is plenty we take for morality and truth that is mere prejudice.

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.

“You want to believe in God,” the pastor says, “you’re gonna have to believe in a God of the sad world.”

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?

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.

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.

You cannot know yourself alone, any more than you can see your own face without a mirror.

You cannot know the truth about the world until you know God loves you, because that is the truth about the world.

The choice between idolatry and faith—which is ultimately the choice between slavery in the flesh and freedom in the spirit—is the only real choice we have to make.

Of course. I should have known. Who more than me? Ritual and transition, symbol and reality, story and life—they are intimately intertwined forever. They are the language of the imagination, the language in which God speaks to man. Well, mine is a stiff-necked people, slow to learn.