didn’t serve the poor because she wanted to find some purpose in her life so she could rest contentedly and be happy with herself. What Adam II really sought, she wrote, was devotion and obedience to “absolute truth, objective truth.”
In these memos, Anne tried to usher me into a deeper understanding of Soloveitchik’s worldview. She wrote: “By becoming aware of an external reality that demands one’s loyalties and lays out a specific bounded path, Adam II ultimately does find fulfillment, but the goal is not to rest at the place of self-satisfaction. There is so much more, and beyond oneself. There is a truth to stake a life on. And the grasp of this truth will permeate everything. Staking a claim on it will cost.”
In the early months of Day’s conversion to Catholicism, she met some Catholic women who had agreed to hold off on sex until marriage. Day admired them lavishly, for their sacrifice and the dignity in that withholding. I was flummoxed. In my world, prohibitions on premarital sex had gone away with the Victorians. I was old-fashioned enough to believe that you should have sex only with someone you love, but sex is a form of communication, and it is appropriate to have sex with someone you are committed to, as a way of deepening and exploring that bond, and having fun.
Anne explained the orthodox Christian view. Day was not puritanical. She was an intensely sensual person who did not regard sex as something dirty. But, ultimately, she saw marriage as a sacred covenantal bond, a one-flesh creation, a mutual obedience to and movement toward God. Sex, too, is not just a physical coupling but a spiritual union, a way of giving your entire person entirely to another, a “whole life entrustment,” an act of total and naked honesty, the consummation of two people’s loving journey to become one.
Its place is thus within the covenant of marriage. In Day’s view—and in Anne’s as well—to have sex outside and before marriage is to cheapen and isolate it, to diminish the ultimate gift implied by the act. To reserve sex for marriage, that one-flesh creation, is to preserve the loftiness and true beauty of sex, to keep it from being dragged into the materialistic shallowness of the world.
I had been around orthodox believers, Jewish and Christian, at different times of my life, but I was not the sort of person who invited vulnerable conversations about faith, or much of anything else. So I didn’t know what orthodox faith really involved, how much surrender to the vertical axis required, and how much it reoriented an entire life. I eventually learned that Anne was sensitive to all sorts of sins that I had never even considered, including impenitence, the failure to seek proper penance for your sins. She felt spiritually tarnished by things I took for granted—such as the consumerism of a luxury mall. I later came to see that she experiences different states of the soul at different times of the day, or at different times of her life. Sometimes, depending on what she is doing and what the circumstances are, she feels close to God, but other times far away.
As we worked on the book, I would sit in my little apartment and write these memos. Anne would write me back, and the correspondence became much of the spine for The Road to Character, especially the chapters on Day and Saint Augustine. The mesmerizing subject I kept dragging her back to was agency and grace. I am a product of the meritocratic culture. In that culture, you take control of your life by working hard and producing results. At some instinctive level I treated my journey to faith as a homework assignment: If I did all the reading and wrote the final papers, certainty would come. I sort of knew this was ridiculous, but it was how I was wired.
As work on the book progressed, I was captivated by Day and Augustine, and really wanted to understand faith as they experienced it. Anne had suggested I read a book called A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken, about a couple coming to faith in Oxford. I wrote a memo with fifteen questions about the book and faith generally. Anne answered each question as best she could. She never led me. She never intervened or tried to direct the process. She hung back. If I asked her a question she would answer it, but she would never get out in