Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

Atheist Barbara Ehrenreich, best known for her seminal work Nickel and Dimed, wrote a memoir titled Living with a Wild God, which centers on a life-changing mystical experience she had in May 1959 as a seventeen-year-old. She had begun a “quest” at the age of thirteen to find answers to the questions What is the point of our brief existence? and What are we doing here and to what end?46 Ehrenreich was raised by atheist parents, and her efforts to answer these questions were carried out on a strictly rationalistic basis. This led her into what she calls the “morass” of solipsism. She felt there was no way to know right from wrong or true from false.47 But then at age seventeen, on an empty street just before dawn, “I found whatever I had been looking for since the articulation of my quest.” It was an experience that, as others have also said, could not be described. “Here we leave the jurisdiction of language, where nothing is left but the vague gurgles of surrender expressed in words like ‘ineffable’ and ‘transcendent.’”48 There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with “the All,” as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance. . . . “Ecstasy” would be the word for this, but only if you acknowledge [that it] does not occupy the same spectrum as happiness or euphoria, that it . . . can...