It was going to be a lot harder to actually practice a faith. I was always proud, striving, taking control. They don’t make the eyes of needles big enough.
Anne was hanging back, for professional, moral, and spiritual reasons. She really did believe that Aslan was on the march, not her or me. I’d had many friends who were Christian, but now I was asking them a bit more about how they lived. I learned about the spiritual disciplines and concepts that formed their daily and annual routine—prayer journals, fasting, tithing, silent retreats, Bible study, accountability groups, healing prayer, constant direct contact with the poor, discussions of spiritual warfare, the presence or absence of God, genuine rage at God for those long stretches of absence. To me, corporate life meant working for a big company. For them, it meant worship in community.
Many people, as I say, sent me books. But the wisest sent me back to the story. If you want to have babies, make love. If you want to explore faith, read the Bible and pray. Religion is not theology, despite the tendency of bookish people to want to make it so. It is not sensation, despite the tendency of mystical people to want to make it so. It is betting your life that a myth is true. Billions of Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others have bet their whole lives—organized their lives and often surrendered their lives—on a supposition that a certain myth is true. It was necessary to return, again and again, to the biblical story.
So I kept going back to the stories, wondering if they were true, or, more precisely, letting the stories gradually sink into this deeper layer inside that was suddenly accessible. Walker Percy says that good fiction tells us what we know but don’t quite know that we know. The Bible is like that, too.
Anne was not around for a lot of the journey. The first several months of my wandering were what Anne calls “the golden period.” We exchanged memos and learned about each other. But there was not even a thought of romance. My private life was on its own separate track, which she knew little or nothing about. She had her beaus, whom she would vaguely mention and whom I referred to collectively as the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Something much bigger was going on, and it was all engrossing. Our conversations were about cathedrals, not courtship.
As you can probably anticipate, the golden period did not last. By the fall of 2013, strong emotional feelings existed between us. I was in a tumultuous period of life, living alone in an apartment, desperately lonely, so the emotions hit me with force.
Two thoughts occurred simultaneously: We cared for each other deeply. And any possible relationship between us was doomed.
Anne is twenty-three years younger than me, a daunting age gap. Moreover, she had been my researcher for years when I was still in my first marriage. Though we knew there had been nothing romantic or wrong between us during this period, it didn’t take a cynic to see how outsiders could tell our story. I’m a semi-public person, and it didn’t take a communications genius to understand what that version of the story would do to her reputation. Nonetheless, by the fall of 2013, I was getting to the emotional place where I was ready to start dating again, and I wanted to try dating Anne. She balked, and asked friends and clergy for advice. She instituted a series of clean breaks—periods when we had no contact at all so she could step back and understand what was happening. Then, in late December, she moved away to Houston to take a job writing about the immigrant experience there. I moved my social life to New York, found a wonderful group of new friends, and eventually entered into a serious relationship with a deeply thoughtful woman there.
HANGING ON THE LIP
There is a Muslim saying, Whatever you think God is, He is not that. Some cosmologists say there are an infinite number of universes, and in one of them there’s a person just like you sitting in a place just like the place you are sitting. That’s a weird idea, but even that idea is not as weird and incomprehensible as God.
The hard part of faith, Kierkegaard wrote, is that it requires infinite surrender to something that is absurd. This requires infinite resignation. Kierkegaard used the story of Abraham and Isaac to illustrate the immensity