12

I leaned awkwardly into the booth at the restaurant of the Inn of the Mountain Gods in Ruidoso, New Mexico. I positioned myself to face the main room, so that everyone could see that I was reading a collection of essays by Augustine of Hippo. Occasionally, I would glance over the top of the book to see if anyone had noticed the title and was now running toward me to ask me if I’d gotten to the part where he falls into the Manichean heresy. Every time I saw only disinterested hotel guests milling around the buffet line, I was disappointed.

If the visit to Guero’s had brought out Normal Jen, this vacation to the mountains of southern New Mexico brought out Reading about Christianity Jen, and she had evidently been dying to make an appearance. Joe was the only person who knew about this side of me, and he didn’t seem to have the time or the interest to talk about it. None of my friends in Austin were religious—only one or two even considered themselves spiritual—and most were at least vaguely aware that I was an atheist. I didn’t want to deal with the ribbing I’d get if it came out that I was interested in Jesus, so I kept this part of my life carefully separate from everything else. The result was that I was bursting with a million thoughts on the subject, but had no one to share them with.

Now, being so far away from home made me salivate at the opportunity to have a real conversation about faith without word getting out to anyone I knew. A busboy took my empty plate, then leaned across the table for my drained cup of water.

“Don’t mind my book,” I said loudly, moving it slightly so that it would be directly in his line of vision. “I was just reading it here.” No response. “Yup, got completely sucked in.”

He hesitated as if struggling to communicate something, and I remembered that some of the employees here spoke only Spanish. I pointed to the book again: “Mi libro. Es muy interesante.”

“I speak English,” he said. “I was going to ask if you were planning to go through the buffet line again.” He looked back over his shoulder at the crowd of guests by the hostess stand. “You’ve been here since after breakfast.”

Mortified, I told him I was just about to leave. I fumbled for my purse and paid the bill, leaving a 60 percent tip. I relocated to the hotel’s lobby, where I hoped I would be able to restrain myself from foisting my latest Jesus book on unsuspecting resort employees.

Coming here had been Joe’s idea. Part of it was to celebrate: The Westgate sale was final, we’d gotten rid of Joe’s car shortly after that, and now, in early August, the business finances were finally moving in the right direction. Plus, living with my mom was going as well as could be expected. I still felt like I was going to lose my mind trying to keep Donald quiet while she worked, but we were all getting along well.

The main reason for the trip, though, was to make connections. Joe was here with a group of attorneys from Austin to participate in an annual golf tournament. We’d hesitated about spending the money, but he pointed out that these guys were deeply connected in the local legal world and could be an important source of referrals for him. When my dad offered to pay for our airfare as an early gift for our second anniversary, we decided to do it.

The back of the lobby was enclosed by two stories of window paneling, tilted away from the inside as if to point to the lake and mountains that lay ahead. A single row of upholstered chairs lined the walkway in front of it, with no televisions or stacks of magazines nearby, almost demanding that you sit down and think about something deep.

Joe wasn’t even halfway done with the thirty-six holes of golf they would play that day, and Donald had stayed home with my mom. As I eased into a chair and pulled a new book from my orange travel bag, I felt like I had nothing but time. The sounds of ancient pan flute flowed from the Apache-owned hotel’s sound system, adding to the sense that I’d slipped into a time and place that were totally disconnected from my normal life. I stretched my legs and cracked open Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.

Lewis was an Oxford don best known for his beloved children’s book series the Chronicles of Narnia. He was an atheist before he converted to Christianity; Mere Christianity was his summary of why he believed, based on a series of radio talks he gave to wartime Britain. As I pored over the pages under the watch of the Sarasota Mountains, I was delighted by what a good read this was. What shocked me most was the brilliant simplicity of it. This author was the kind of guy who, along with his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, belonged to an Old Norse reading club at Oxford. If his treatise on Christianity had been an unreadable mess of obtuse references to philosophers I’d never heard of, it wouldn’t have surprised me. Instead, Lewis’ prose was powerful and unadorned, as if he knew these concepts were powerful enough that they didn’t need embellishment.

He began his book by noting that all humans have an innate sense of right and wrong—one that each of us refers to all the time, whether we realize it or not. He pointed out that when people argue about one another’s behavior, they almost always appeal to a universal moral code. If one man steals another man’s seat on a bus and an argument breaks out, the first man wouldn’t make the case that stealing seats isn’t wrong; he’d make the case that he was justified in using the seat, that he hadn’t “stolen” it at all.

Lewis suggested that this is because we are all born with the same core sense of right and wrong. Cultures may disagree as to the details of their moral codes, but, underneath it all, we know goodness when we see it. He called this the Law of Nature.

“If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring . . . Christian morality to Nazi morality,” he wrote. “The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other.”

I’d been waiting for him to bring God into the picture, and that’s when he did it. He suggested that we humans are aware of these unseen laws because of our souls’ connection to their origin. God isn’t some man in the sky who tells us to be nice and loving, Lewis explained. God is the very source of all goodness. Our yearnings for a perfectly peaceful world are yearnings to be in union with God—and that union is the entire purpose of human existence.

I stopped. This depiction of God was more interesting than the caricature I’d always imagined—and I would have loved to have thought about it more but, oh, the pan flute. At some point in the past hour it had changed from lovely ambiance to musical torture. It seemed to be the same short clip played on an infinite loop—either that or my appreciation of the subtleties of pan flute song composition was totally lacking. It was invading my brain like a parasite, my thoughts overridden every few seconds with the sounds of the same few whistle-like notes.

I escaped outside to the paths in front of Mescalero Lake, where the only sounds were waves lapping against the lakeshore and the occasional hum of a golf cart motor. The mountains rose up just behind the lake, looming over it as if on guard. The hills themselves had a mysterious hazy quality, despite the fact that I saw no fog or smoke or other sources of haze. I understood why the Native Americans believed that this was sacred land.

I wondered about the Apache who lived here hundreds of years ago. What would they think of Lewis and his Law of Nature?

I knew what the first European settlers who encountered them would say. The Mescalero Apache were one of the most feared tribes of the Old West. They were skilled guerilla fighters who raided settlements and earned a reputation for violence and ruthlessness. The Westerners who encountered the Apache would probably point to them as a prime example in the case against Lewis’ Law of Nature: To these natives, brutality and killing were a way of life, the settlers would say. They had an entirely different moral code that seemed to have no overlap with that of civilized people.

I looked from the mountains down to the golf course, where the descendants of those same settlers now laughed and drank beer. Though the Apaches technically owned this place, it had only been given to them after everything else was taken away. And so the Apaches would probably point to white people to make the same case: These newcomers trampled across the natives’ ancestral homeland without a second thought toward how it might impact the people who had been living there for generations. They claimed ownership over that which could not be owned, and, to the Apache, appeared to have an entirely different and irreconcilable notion of right and wrong.

Yet when I considered this tragic clash of civilizations, walking on the very land where it took place, I did see a common thread of morality.

When the Apache attacked the settlers, they said they were defending their homeland. The settlers may have disagreed about who owned the land, but they never said that people don’t have a right to defend their homes. The settlers justified their own actions by saying that the land didn’t belong to the natives—or, on the rare occasions that they did admit that the land may have been theirs, they rationalized their choices in the name of progress.

“Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him,” Lewis said in defense of the Law of Nature. “Men have differed as regards to what people you ought to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first.”

I traced the side of the lake by walking the golf cart path. When I reached the side furthest from the hotel, I paused. I took in my surroundings through a new lens, much like I’d done when I looked around the room at my mom’s house after considering that Jesus might exist. Only a few moments before, I’d seen the tourists and the resort’s Apache owners as fundamentally different people. The Apache spirituality that was woven all through the grounds struck me as mainly being an attempt to enhance the visitor experience.

But now I remembered the statues of dancing warriors at the front of the hotel, the beads and fringe of their deerskin garments shooting out like flame, frozen in an eternal moment from a sacred ritual, and I saw a people reaching out to something real and extant. I thought of all the evils that had been committed by both sides in the wars that once scorched this land, and I saw the tragedy of people who, in their hearts, knew better.

The sun drew close to the tops of the mountains, and the sky’s color was darkening to match the lake’s ancient blue. I slid my book back into my travel bag and walked the gravel path back toward the resort.

Back in the room, I shuffled through the resort’s literature while I waited for Joe to return. I picked up a brochure from the top of a stack on the table by the door and flopped onto the bed to peruse it. For some reason I flipped it over to the back first, where there was a quote from the Apache warrior Geronimo: “There is one God looking down on us all. We are all the children of one God.”