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

by Andrew Klavan

all that tumult, all that noise—

Shakespeare was telling us, it seemed to me, that relativism was not just crazy, it was make-believe crazy, because even the people who proclaimed it did not believe it deep down. If, after all, there is no truth, how could it be true that there is no truth? If there is no absolute morality, how can you condemn the morality of considering my culture better than another? Relativism made no sense, as Shakespeare clearly saw.

On the one hand, it seemed prejudiced and dogmatic to cling to moral absolutes. On the other hand, relativism was self-contradictory, mad-scene gibberish. As a writer who wanted to describe reality, how could I steer between the craziness of postmodernism and the rigidity of self-righteous self-certainty?

I had learned how to turn off my ever-so-insistent opinions and simply let the authors speak to me. I had learned to ride a story like a wave, wherever it went.

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—this story, this picture, this song. I had finally sloughed off some of my teenage arrogance and started to listen to those descriptions with an open mind. Without knowing it, I had joined the Great Conversation.

I did not accept the Christian aspect of it then. I couldn’t. It was too alien to my upbringing, too at odds with the mental atmosphere in which I lived. I told myself that Dostoevsky was merely using Christ as a symbol for the reality of moral truth. But never mind. I knew beyond a doubt that the essential vision of the novel was valid. The story’s rightness struck me broadside so that the journey of my heart changed direction. From the moment I read Crime and Punishment—though I did not know it, though it took me decades, though I was lost on

a thousand detours along the way—I was traveling away from moral relativism and toward truth, toward faith, toward God.

So just as my years at university were ending, I was coming to understand what an education was. To escape from the little island of the living. To know what thinking men and women have felt and seen and imagined through all the ages of the world. To meet my natural companions among the mighty dead. To walk with them in conversation. To know myself in them, through them. Because they are what we’ve become. Every blessing from soup bowls to salvation they discovered for us. Individuals just as real as you and me, they fought over each new idea and died to give life to the dreams we live in. Some of them—a lot of them—wasted their days following error down nowhere roads. Some hacked their way through jungles of suffering to collapse in view of some far-off golden city of the imagination. But all the thoughts we think—all the high towers of the mind’s citadel—were sculpted out of shapeless nothing through the watches of their uncertain nights. 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.

Living within such a spiritual sanctuary has an effect on you over the years. Just knowing such a marriage can exist refashions the way you look at life. For me, it put limits on what I could call illusory or meaningless. Other men could believe that subjective experience is by nature relative and unreliable. Other men could reason from suffering to nihilism. Not me. Our marriage gave undeniable substance to the inner experience of true love, and true love in turn shone a light on the redemptive possibilities even of tragedy. Even the kingdom of evil came to seem to me like only the empty space where true love might have been. And when, over time, I had reasoned my way to God, it was our marriage, in part, that made me trust my reasoning. I trusted myself because I had recognized love when I saw it, and it was the fact of our long love that had slowly revealed to me a greater love than ours, the love that was our love’s source and inspiration. It was as if our marriage had guided me through my days from a realm beyond the ordinary, the way a lodestar shines from deepest space yet nonetheless leads you home.

It did rise from time to time, not full-blown depression maybe, but sorrow for no reason; anger for no reason; ugly, tormenting thoughts and a mood of persistent, unshakable melancholy. I called it the Bola—after that string with a weight on each end that some South American Indians used to use for a throwing weapon—because it seemed to come out of nowhere and wrap itself around my throat, growing tighter and tighter until I felt it would strangle me.

I had no mentor. I had never had a mentor, only an anti-mentor in my father.

The newspaper forced me to realize that writing novels, the work I knew I was born for, was not good for me, psychologically speaking. The writing life is brutal on a wounded mind. It really is. So much time spent alone. So much time spent in self-reflection. Emotional wounds heal in other people’s hearts but you have to reopen yours and examine them in order to re-create their painful feelings on the page. 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. When you’re working well, you become bad company, inward-turning, querulous, obsessed. There are plenty of harder jobs, I know. Homemakers, soldiers, cops, firemen, laborers—they all put in tougher days than writers do. But the writing life, so help me, could drive even a sane man crazy. If you’re half crazy already, as I was, it will drive you completely out of your mind. It was healthy for me to be away from it.

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.

As long as I was in mental disarray, as long as my actions were self-destructive, as long as my outlook was deluded, any faith I thought to have, any idea of God I formed, seemed to me by definition unreliable, the comforting illusion of a mind in pain. As long as religion might even appear to serve me as an emotional crutch, I dismissed it as a form of weakness. It was only when I felt certain that my inner life was healthy and my understanding was sound that I could begin to accept what experience and logic had been leading me to believe. For others, I know it was Christ who led them to joy. For me, it was joy that led me to Christ.

Ultimately, I came to believe they were not so much a series of revelations as fragments of a single revelation, spread out along the five-year path.

Sometimes you just have to play in pain.

But as soon as my therapy began, I realized, no, none of this was true. My misery was not me and it was not the world and it was not connected to my talent, such as it was. It was just a wound I had sustained in the course of living, a wound that could be healed. It was a broken piece of the psychic machinery, and it could be fixed.

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. Why not? The hungry can’t eat your tears. The poor can’t spend them. They’re no comfort to the afflicted and they don’t bring the wicked to justice. Everything useful that can be done in the world can be done in joy.

Love, I saw now, was an exterior spiritual force that swept through our bodies in the symbolic forms of eros, then bound us materially, skin and bone, in the symbolic moment of birth. Everything we were, everything we were going through—it was all merely living metaphor. Only the love was real.

Then, like living water rushing at full speed into the open sea, I saw I was about to flow out into the infinite. I saw that, beyond the painted scenery of mere existence, it was all love, love unbounded, mushrooming, vast, alive, and everlasting. The love I felt, the love I was, was about to cascade into the very origin of itself, the origin of our three lives and of all creation.

Why, after all, should the flesh be the ground floor of our interpretations? Why should we end our understanding at the level of material things? It’s just a prejudice really.

I had seen that love, seen it with my own eyes. And if that vision was just a release of chemicals, well, so was my vision of the trees and the sidewalks and the whole city. I saw it all through the mechanics and chemistry and electricity of the brain and yet it was still, in some true sense, there.

It was not nothing. It was an early symptom of multiple sclerosis. Over the next twenty-five years, the disease killed that vital and affectionate woman by unbearable inches. And Doug never wavered in his devotion to her, never faltered in his love. It was a tough-guy performance for the ages, and he would not have been able to do it had he not been steeled by faith in Christ. It was a living sermon, his best.

If we don’t accept our inner experience as real, then only man’s material desires have any meaning. Our yearnings for pleasure and power are all that’s left. Anything else, anything that seems like absolute spiritual truth or absolute spiritual morality, must only be an elaborate illusion that can be deconstructed back down to those brute facts. This was Nietzsche’s vision, the vision that Dostoevsky opposed in Crime and Punishment even before Nietzsche had written it down.

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

One night, walking along 8th Street in the East Village, I saw some adolescent boys, out too late and unattended. They were playing an arcade video game set up on the sidewalk, piloting a digital spacecraft through starlit infinity, blasting everything in their path to bits. Now and then, the machine would let out a robotic shout of encouragement: You’re doing great! So the urchins flew on through the make-believe nothingness, destroying whatever they saw, hypnotized by the mechanical praise that stood in for the human voice of love. That, it seemed to me, was postmodernism in a nutshell. It ignored the full spiritual reality of life all around it in order to blow things apart inside a man-made box that only looked like infinity. You’re doing great, intellectuals! You’re doing great.

If there is no God, there is no morality. If there is no morality, the search for pleasure and the avoidance of pain are all in all and we should pillage, rape, and murder as we please. None of this pale, milquetoast atheism that says “Let’s all do what’s good for society.” Why should I do what’s good for society? What is society to me? None of this elaborate game-theory nonsense where we all benefit by mutual sacrifice and restraint. That only works until no one’s looking; then I’ll get away with what I can. If there is no God, there is no good, and sadistic pornography is scripture.

That is, if we concede that one thing is morally better than another, it can only be because it is closer to an Ultimate Moral Good, the standard by which it’s measured. An Ultimate Moral Good cannot just be an idea. It must be, in effect, a personality with consciousness and free will. The rain isn’t morally good even though it makes the crops grow; a tornado that kills isn’t morally evil—though it may be an evil for those in its way. Happy and sad events, from birth to death, just happen, and we ascribe moral qualities to them as they suit us or don’t. But true, objective good and evil, in order to be good and evil, have to be aware and intentional. So an Ultimate Moral Good must be conscious and free; it must be God.

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

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. Hardly a leap really. Barely even a step. I know it’s so. And those who declare they do not are, like Hamlet, only pretending.

Because postmodernism is right in this at least: there is plenty we take for morality and truth that is mere prejudice. There is much we accept as wisdom that is only cultural habit. There is a great deal we mistake for reality that is simply a trick of the light. It is not a bad thing to clear the mind of the false god of our inner voices.

Some traits are in your nature, born with you. Some scars are written in your flesh indelibly, the signature of history. And some brokenness is simply inherent in the human condition.

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.

The Holocaust is not the worst thing that ever happened in history. It’s worse even than that. It lives in a darkness beyond history. It’s the Marquis de Sade’s philosophy brought to fruition: hell on earth. The Holocaust is beyond art too. It’s the opposite of art, the opposite of Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” the opposite of a world imbued with and understood through the human spirit. Stories of humanity during the event—even true stories like Schindler’s List or The Hiding Place—are so anomalous as to amount to sentimental lies. There was no humanity, and so there can be no true fictions about it, no paintings, no music. I’ve visited those death camps. Art has no power there. Even the birds don’t sing.

In Manhattan, at least, PC had begun to curtail and poison nearly every intellectual conversation. You could hardly express an opinion without finding yourself condemned for it, especially if the opinion was obviously true. It was as if people thought reality could be lied into submission. If you would only say the world was what it wasn’t it would magically become what you said it was.

Europe, in the end, was destroyed. It was their great culture that died in those death camps. The Jews—and their God—live on.

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.

The joy of my joy. The life of my life spoken back to me by the world. That was what my three-word prayer—Thank you, God—had won for me. In even the little light of even that little gratitude, I was finally seeing existence as it was, not as an empty natural process of birth and death but as the miraculous creation of a personal Spirit: I AM THAT I AM.

You cannot know yourself alone, any more than you can see your own face without a mirror. This was what I had learned in therapy. As my belief in Freud’s insights had crumbled over the years, I had wondered: If Freud was wrong in his most basic assumptions, how had Freudian therapy transformed my life so completely? The answer was the love. It wasn’t the theories or interpretation of therapy that had redeemed me. It was the love. I had loved my mentor and he loved his patients. He had been able to reflect me back to myself because of his wisdom, but he had been able to reflect me truly because of his love.

So it was now with all the world and God. Reality is the same for everyone, but your experience of reality is yours alone. You cannot know that experience fully by yourself, you cannot experience that experience fully by yourself. It must be reflected back to you by its source, its creator, and only his love can reflect it back to you as it actually is. You cannot know the truth about the world until you know God loves you, because that is the truth about the world.

Whoever God was, he was unlikely to be fooled by any show of righteousness or even seriousness on my end. If this really was God I was talking to, I could be pretty sure he already knew my corrupt and hilarious heart. There was nothing to hide and no point in trying to hide it. I might as well tell him everything as straight as I could.

Joy. The joy of my joy. There through everything. A shocking sense of vitality and beauty present in both happiness and in the midst of pain. The only thing I can think to compare this experience to is the experience of an excellent story—reading a great novel, say, or watching a great movie. The scene before you might be a happy one or a sad one. You might feel uplifted or you might feel heartbroken or you might feel afraid. But whatever you feel, you’re still loving the story. Through prayer, I came to experience both pleasure and sorrow in something like that way. In God, the life of the flesh became the story of the spirit. I loved that story, no matter what.

But one of the most important things I had learned—one of the central principles of my reclamation—was this: the very fact that the mind can be deceived implies that it can be not deceived, that it can know things rightly—deep things—beauty, truth—just as they are.

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?

A man who slips on a banana peel and falls into a puddle of mud is funny not because of his pain but because of the contrast with his sense of dignity. He feels he is something high, but he has become something low and ridiculous.

But such things don’t happen, I knew now, was the ultimate irrational prejudice of the human mind: the belief that the symbols of reality are more real than the reality they symbolize. That’s us all over. We believe that money is more valuable than the work it represents, that sex is more essential than the love it expresses, that an actor is more admirable than the hero he portrays, that flesh is more alive than spirit. That’s the whole nature of our deluded lives, the cause of so much of our misery. One by one, we let idolatry ruin each good thing. Without faith, we can’t help ourselves. Without faith, we can no more see through our materialist prejudice than we can see through the big blue bowl of the sky and into the eternity beyond. 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.

I saw the empty tomb and I had faith.

I saw my own sin and suffering on the face of everyone who prayed, and I understood that tuna casseroles can also be part of the language of love.