Good Friday

I am a religious man. But mine is not the great faith of the peasant in the field who believes because God is simply present to him. Nor is my faith the result of a road to Damascus experience. My faith developed from a thought process so long and tedious that it took me years to get to the point where I made the leap. But it wasn't really a leap, because I was so faithless in my reasoning that I made sure my leap of faith was but a footstep, one footstep left at the end of the faithless, tedious, years-long process.

This was the tedious process of the cynic who had grown so cynical, in the words of my old friend John Franco, that he had even become cynical about his own cynicism and so had unaccountably become an optimist.

How I got to the point where I believed that the blood of Chirst, falling to the ground in this world, had transformed it, can only be understood in its full implications if you first know that I had so disbelieved in Christ that I mocked him with the most terrible mockery. I detested Christianity, I laughed at Christ, I proclaimed myself a pagan, I was a cult of one.

What actually started the turnaround was a simple conversation with a friend of mine, Michael Gorman, a surfer dude who had washed up on the shores of upstate New York. All that he did was say a kind word about Jesus as a "great teacher" in a conversation with me about some profound metaphysical question that we were examining. It was not remarkable for someone to speak of Jesus that way. But it was remarkable for me to listen to it and not immediately dismiss it out loud. Michael said it with sincerity and I can still see his face when he said it, and he seemed almost as though he was being very careful to say it in a certain way, perhaps because he was worried that I would, in fact, dismiss it out loud. But I didn't. I allowed and affirmed a kind word about Jesus in my presence.

How arrogant was I that I needed to condescend to allow and affirm a kind word about Jesus in my presence? More arrogant than I can even understand today. It seems as though it was another life. But the special gift of that moment was that I thereafter allowed myself to think about Jesus and even to take him seriously as a historical figure.

I was the postmodern poster boy. Two decades before I had even heard of "deconstructionism," I had deconstructed every aspect of the world and history that I could bother to turn my attention to. Was I good at it? I was incredibly good at it. In fact, I spent all the time and energy available to me engaging in it. I felt as though I owed no respect to anything or anyone. Institutions were meaningless to me. I considered marriage a joke. No, actually, I didn't consider it a joke, because there was nothing that even struck me as funny about it. I found it utterly bizarre that anyone would even consider it. When friends got married, I regarded it as insulting to me personally.

That should put some perspective on how deeply I resented religion, particularly Christianity, and more particularly Jesus Christ who, as I said, I mocked as ridiculous.

Is it clear, then, how much I was committed to never having anything at all to do with the Christian faith?

My next admission of Christ into my vocabulary came from conversations with another friend, Raymond, who spoke of Christ as a "principle," the "Christ principle." That was consistent with my somewhat scholarly interest in things that generally fall into the category of "the occult." No, I was not interested in "the occult" as a lifestyle, but rather after the fashion of the writer Colin Wilson, who saw in the occult a body of evidence for human potential. My friend's use of the term "Christ principle" was inoffensive to me because for me it didn't directly refer to either Christianity or the person Jesus, but to a notion of human transcendence that appealed to my own desire to be superior.

I was so comfortable with my own atheism that it didn't bother me in the least to throw around the "Christ principle." It had its own attractiveness as a way of framing human potential.

But the importance for me was that I had, in my sublime arrogance, indirectly readmitted Jesus Christ as something that I was even willing to think about.

The real and tedious process of reaching my faith, however, came with my allowing the world I had so thoroughly deconstructed to be reconstructed in my mind. For that I can thank the great philosopher Edmund Husserl who, as poorly as I understood him, helped me have my deconstructed cake and eat it too. It was Husserl who helped me understand how I understood the world and helped me clarify how I thought.

That clarification brought me to a place where I was able to gain great results when I undertook professional projects. And just as I began to gain mastery over certain phases of my work, and began to think clearly about things in my deconstructed world, I realized that I was even more alien to that world than I had ever understood. I say alien to, not alienated from, because despite my long efforts at deconstruction, my sense was never that of simple alienation. Despite my low regard for the construction of society, I nonetheless felt absolutely present in that world. So it came as something of a shock to realize how alien I was to that world, without the characteristic sense of alienation. I wasn't alienated because I could only feel on top of a world that I had so thoroughly deconstructed. And there I was putting it all back together again, wonderful arrogant intellectual snot that I was.

But I'm not getting you, dear reader, anywhere near the truth here. I had terrible moments of fear as well. Fear of death. Fear of sickness. Fear of losing myself to anything other than myself. I was still a human being, arrogance notwithstanding. With women I was possessive, then dismissive, always jealous. "Womanizing" wouldn't exactly capture it. If it had been money instead of women that I wanted, I would have been a billionaire by the time I was thirty, but probably not as unhappy. I had very early on even dismissed happiness as an idiotic goal for human beings. Who, I used to say, wants to be happy? What was the point of that?

At some point along the way I started to take more notice of one other thing, and that thing was evil itself. I had been a Nietzschean on the question of evil. In other words, I didn't worry about evil because I was beyond it. My motto was "never pity, never regret." Power was the real deal, but not the traditional "power" of the world, not financial power or political power, that sort of power. But rather the power of a person free of the world's petty concerns. I should hasten to add that none of this was to be at the expense of others, not in theory anyway. I liked people. I cultivated friendships. I always wanted to be a good friend. But I was nonetheless committed to a sort of power that no one really has, and yet I had no interest higher than that. As I said earlier, I had become my own religion, and therein came the falling apart.

But now I was actually pondering evil as an independent thing, as a palpable existing thing, and not something merely attached to the actions of men. Evil, I began to think, was a thing in itself, and that it was not merely the sum of a billion daily evil acts committed by men and women in the world. Not only could I sense its existence; I could sense it pushing up against me.

I must have begun to think my way toward God because I somehow understood that I was going to need him, not because I loved him. It was a sorry thoughtless thoughtfullness about God that started me on my way toward him. It was, as I often accuse my friend Frank Evans of doing with regard to his life, an endless calculation and re-calculation of the deconstructed and then reconstructed world in front of me. I was to go over these things again and again. What were these things in front of me? How did they get here? What do they mean? Why this instead of that? Why this instead of nothing? What lay beyond it? What lay behind it?

Somehow, after years of that, it began to fall into place. There had to be a god, and that god would in fact be God. He made the whole thing. Designed it all. And he was no less a person than a human person, but infinitely more a person, more himself than anything was itself.

And so my poor weak faith began. It blossomed into the conviction that God would not leave us here simply to our own flimsy devices. He would speak directly to us, at some point, and let us know where we stood with him. Ask how I came to that conclusion and I can only say that it was a gift that I found at the end of a long road of intuition into the nature of things. And there, just a little farther beyond the end of that road was, of course, Jesus Christ. He was God speaking directly to us. Demonstrating with his miracles that he had power over the world. Demonstrating with his teachings that he was the truth. Demonstrating with his death and resurrection that he had transformed the world and altered the very shape of reality.

It might all sound like a monumental struggle within me to get to that place, but "monumental" and "struggle" would barely capture it. I got knocked around pretty good. I got my ass kicked because my path, which wound and wound its way around the abyss, was a wavering path through experience. My interest in things went through a way of dispossession of things, as T.S. Eliot would put it.

And so, as it always does, it came down to a simple precipice, with no "my way" but down. God's way was the only alternative. And my leap of faith that day in 1982, probably in late September, brought with it the first of the three little miracles that God gave me.

I went into the church that day, St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York (I needed a big church), because I literally had nowhere else to turn. I had simply painted myself into a corner and the paint just wouldn't dry this time. A better way of saying it was my cousin Bill Peterson's favorite expression: up shit's creek without a paddle.

On my knees in front of St. Joseph's altar inside St. Pat's, I didn't offer love, I just begged for help. I believed for the first time as an adult, in that moment. When I entered the cathedral I was still in doubt. Only on my knees did the faith finally wash over me. Prior to that I had only thought my way up to that point. My leap, my step, only put me in the place where I could receive this gift, which only God can bestow.

And I could only pray for help and ask for forgiveness for the rotten bastard that I had become.

On the very next day, the first of the the three little miracles occurred. My friend Ben Smith called me and told me that there was a job open at the small publishing firm where he worked. If I came in and spoke to the boss, I would probably be hired. I was suddenly lifted out of the painted-in corner or handed a paddle on shit's creek. Take your pick.

Not so strangely, that job, as flimsy as it was in economic terms, put me in a position to do and learn things as a writer that would take me down a whole new path. I was, needless to say, still freakishly stupid about a lot of things, but at that point I had turned my accounts over to God and God alone. As I began to love God, I began to love people again. As I began to love people, I began to love my country again. As I began to love my country, I began to feel as though my time and my place in the world were suddenly synchronized. The deconstructing was finally over. The reconstructing had equalized the deconstruction, brought it back to par, so to speak, and the energy of deconstruction was now the energy of discovery, and the principal thing being discovered was the full texture of the moral universe.

I don't mean to imply that these changes produced an unbreachable happiness. It was quite breachable, but it was happiness. I was going to have to make so many more mistakes from that point that a detailed account of the next several years would be enough to dissuade anyone that any change had occurred with me at all. The struggle to align myself with God had only begun. That was a miracle in itself. That was the really big miracle. That God had washed over me with faith at all. Simply for my homely act of falling on my knees, God had come by and picked me up in his limousine. Everything had changed.

The second of the three little miracles occurred in late July, 1986. It was, I think, a Sunday night. I was at another job, working a weekend shift. I got a call from my sister. Our beloved mother had had a stroke. She wasn't expected to survive. I left the office building where I was working in midtown Manhattan and walked a few blocks to, of course, St. Patrick's. Inside I went to my favorite place, the chapel of the Virgin behind the main altar. I prayed for my mother and asked for only one thing, that the Virgin bring her gently to God. I was only there for fifteen minutes, because the Cathedral was closing. I went back to work. My sister called back a while later. Mother was dead. She had died while I was praying in the chapel to the Virgin to take her gently to God.

I've always been grateful for that, the second little miracle.

All of this is so abstract, so lacking in real detail, that I can only thank any reader who has made it this far and wrap up with the third little miracle.

It was 1993, in the Spring. My wife and I were struggling financially. I was going through a crash and burn business venture, and was also involved in a threatening and difficult effort to drive a handful of drug operations first out of our building and then out of the neighborhood. People were threatening to kill me nearly on a daily basis. More and more of my time was going into putting pressure on the police to get busy working on the situation and less and less time was available to keeping my little business afloat. I frankly did not understand why I felt compelled to fight these drug operations so ferociously, and I didn't like the financial collapse, especially at that point in my life.

I went over to the Church of the Immaculate Conception a few blocks away. By habit, I was now watching my back everywhere, even in church, so I sat in front of a pillar so that no one could see me from the back of the church and no one could sit behind me. This was far more a practical matter than it was paranoia. It was simply taking into account the daily threats.

I prayed very personally. I said, "you know Lord, this is just painfully uncomfortable, to again be broke like this." I think that I literally had less than a dollar's worth of change in my pocket. "Could you explain this whole deal to me, Lord?" At the exact moment that I was having those thoughts as my prayer, a very attractive Asian woman sitting on the other side of the church got up and crossed in front of the altar, genuflected, and then came directly up the aisle to where I was sitting. She reached out and handed me a hundred dollar bill. She said to me exactly these words: "The Lord told me to give this to you. I don't know why." As my jaw fell open she walked away. I never saw her again.

After that day, things improved immediately, and have stayed steadily on the good side for us. I still have the hundred dollar bill. That was the third little miracle.

It would be a good thing to end this by saying that as kind as those three little miracles were to me, the deepening of my faith to the point where I can write, as I did at the beginning of this that "I am a religious man," is the very kindest thing that God has done for me. Far more important than God pulling me out of the abyss is my ability to write those words and mean them.

That's my meager attempt to thank God on this Friday that we call Good.