confused. Her husband turned to look at me, and there were tears in his eyes. We exchanged a long, powerful look that pierced down to something deeper than just empathy and care. I suddenly saw whole dimensions of experience deep in his eyes.
At one level we were a bunch of people talking monetary policy, but at a deep, silent level, it was the whole underplay again: the immortal chords of love, bodies living and dying, souls seeking deep gladness and spiritual peace, the whole thing animated by some mysterious life force, the patterns of life formed by and re-creating the eternal stories.
“Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man’s attitude toward history and nature,” Rabbi Heschel writes in God in Search of Man. “One attitude is alien to his spirit: taking things for granted.” There are holy sparks in every occasion and a cosmic universe in every person.
I did not go on this spiritual journey alone. I consulted dozens of people, seeking, in a rather pathetic and needy way, advice and counsel. The Jews, by and large, didn’t know how to talk to me. Judaism doesn’t really have much of a tradition of entrance and exit. You are born a member of the tribe and there’s not an evangelical tradition. Some of my inquiring emails to my Jewish friends went unanswered. I took my rabbi to lunch and told him of my joint Christian and Jewish background. He said he understood the beauty of the Christian story and was captivated by it himself. “Think of it!” he exulted. “The Lord Jesus Christ dying for our sins!” Thanks, Rabbi.
The Christians were all over me. Word of my spiritual wanderings spread, and before long dozens were praying for me. Loving friends flew in from Chicago and elsewhere to talk and minister. One friend began praying for me and my family and has sent me an encouraging text every Friday ever since. Some Christians crudely sought to woo me over as a sort of win for their team, and they were a destructive force. Most gave me books. I received about three hundred books about faith in those months, only one hundred of which were different copies of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.
I had a few steady companions, including Stuart and Celia McAlpine, who lead a local church, and Jerry Root, a C. S. Lewis scholar. Then there was Anne Snyder, my researcher and colleague at the Times. I actually first gave Anne a job interview because she had gone from Andover, the prep school, to a Christian college, Wheaton. That struck me as an unusual step that probably required some courage. Then, as now, I try to hire people who have some progression on their résumé that doesn’t make sense by the conventional logic of the meritocracy. I want to see that they believe in something bigger than the conventional definition of success.
Anne and I had worked together for three years, and I valued her work tremendously but barely noticed her as a person. We never went to lunch or had coffee, and I recall maybe one perfunctory performance review. I was an inept and absent colleague.
Anne was one of the researchers I worked with on my last book, The Road to Character, especially on the chapter on Dorothy Day. Around this time, we exchanged a series of memos on different chapters of the book, and through them I began to see how radically different the religious consciousness is from the secular one, how big and absurd the leap of faith really is. I was describing Day’s spiritual journey as an effort to achieve superior goodness and understanding; Anne corrected me and argued that it is a willingness to surrender to a truth that is outside yourself. I was always writing as if Day were the prime mover. Anne helped me to see that in Day’s eyes, God is the mover and Day is the one moved upon.
The core of that book was Rabbi Soloveitchik’s distinction between the two sides of our nature, which he called “Adam the first” and “Adam the second,” and which I called the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. I said that Adam I was about majesty and career, and Adam II, the spiritual side, was about the search for goodness and purpose. Anne would send me memos saying that my rendition of Adam II was too New Age, or too drenched in contemporary secular categories. Anne pointed out that Day