21

Aches lingered in my body for the rest of the day, as if I’d been exposed to toxic fumes and had to wait for the poison to get out of my system. Aside from that, I was happier than I’d been in weeks. As I drove home from the deposition, I was high on the certainty that this was the answer I’d been looking for when I stumbled across that passage in Mere Christianity that night next to Donald’s crib.

C. S. Lewis said that you need to “dust off your mirror” to come to know God. I had memorized the quote by now and could hear the words as if Lewis were standing next to me, speaking them in his British accent: “[God] shows much more of Himself to some people more than others—not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition.” I’d been puzzling over that statement, trying to imagine how one would go about dusting off one’s mirror in order to encounter God. Now, I had the answer.

If it were true that God is the source of good, then to seek God is to seek the good. When I puzzled over why I’d had zero experiences with the divine, the situation wasn’t so confusing when I replaced the word “God” with “the source of all goodness”. I might find myself sitting at the kitchen table, a cheeseburger from a fast-food chain in one hand, a magazine ridiculing celebrities with cellulite in another, using most of my mental energy to stew about why I deserved to live in Tarrytown, and at some point I’d think, “I can’t imagine why I haven’t had any experiences of God!” Then I’d decide with a shrug that the problem must be that God doesn’t exist. When I imagined that same scene with me shouting, “I can’t imagine why I haven’t had any experiences of the source of all goodness!” the problem became clearer.

To get my spiritual “mirror” in the right condition, per Lewis’ advice, I had to seek goodness. I had to try to be good. And, as I had just learned in that horrible, airless room, doing whatever feels nice and labeling yourself “good” doesn’t cut it. To be truly good, you have to shut down the infinite human capacity to rationalize away evil. And I had an idea for how I could go about doing just that, but it would involve getting deeper into Catholicism.

My blog readers often mentioned the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which takes the mountain of teachings that the Church has developed over the past two thousand years and organizes it by topic. They explained that the Church, led by Peter and the other apostles and their successors, were given the authority to teach, explain, and carry on the mission of Jesus. Part of that was designating which of the many letters and documents that were circulating at the time were worthy of being collected in the official Christian library, or Bible. So the Catechism was not supposed to be read instead of the Bible, but since I’d had already read the New Testament cover to cover, my readers suggested that the Catechism would give me the clarity I was looking for when it came to the details of the Christian moral code. I still had fundamental problems with the Catholic Church, but it was my best bet for cleaning my spiritual lens, so to speak.

I’d come to see that the only way for people to shut down the power of rationalization is to adhere to an external moral code, one that they don’t have the power to change on the fly when it gets inconvenient. If God did become a man and did personally found a religion that he continued to guide in its doctrines, one mark it would surely bear is a clear view of right and wrong that did not change over the centuries. This moral code would not vary by region, and it would not flit around like a weathervane as the winds of popular opinion changed. Within Christianity, the only organization that fit that bill was the Catholic Church.

And so I’d come up with an idea: I would try out this Church’s moral code. I would do whatever it told me to do and live the way it told me to live. I would even try to put my heart into it and not just go through the motions.

Part of me was skeptical that anything would come of it. I wasn’t sure that all of this Church’s teachings were perfectly good, case in point being the nonsensical stance against abortion and contraception. I decided to revisit that after the experiment, though, since neither of those issues impacted me right now. In the meantime, I didn’t have any better ideas for where to turn, and I figured that conforming to this ancient moral code would be a good exercise in defeating rationalization, even if the Church didn’t turn out to be what it claimed to be.

When I got back to the house that evening, I snuck into my office before Irma and Donald discovered that I was home. Without sitting down, I dashed out an order on the computer for The Catechism of the Catholic Church. I clicked on the option for rush shipping.

* * *

The UPS delivery man tossed the cardboard box onto the front porch two days later, which was perfect timing. A searing pain behind my right knee left me unable to walk easily or even sit comfortably, and I had taken the day off from work to lie in bed. I was doing some reading on my laptop, rap music blasting through my headphones, when Irma knocked on the bedroom door and brought me the package.

I ripped open the brown box and stared at the book it contained. I chortled under my breath to imagine how horrified I would have been if I could have seen this moment through a crystal ball when I was younger. Actually, I was slightly horrified now.

Just as I was about to turn off the music to focus on reading, a new song began. As soon as I heard piano chords over tinny beats, I grabbed the player. I always skipped this one. Even though it was one of my favorite songs, I hadn’t heard any more than the first three seconds—just long enough for me to hit the Next button—in years. It was Tupac Shakur’s Changes, and the lyrics told the tale of his own life. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I let it play.

Wake up in the morning and I ask myself if life’s worth living. Should I blast myself? Tupac began.

There were plenty of rappers who included the occasional social justice screeds about ghetto life in their albums, but Tupac was different. To listen to his music was to know that he saw reality with a clarity that most people did not. He had seen evil; so had others. The difference was that he couldn’t get over it. Occasionally he would veer into the territory of popular club music, but he never strayed far from the topic of evil. His most impassioned songs angrily recounted the cesspool of the human experience that he’d seen in his life in the ghetto, stories of babies abandoned in dumpsters, young lives snuffed out through pointless violence. His lyrics offered no solutions. There was simply a question that roiled under the surface: “How, how could this be?”

In that sense, he reminded me of C. S. Lewis. Both men were gripped by the problem of evil, and both men had encountered it firsthand: Tupac on the streets of the ghetto, Lewis in the trenches of World War I. I ached to think of what could have been if Tupac had come across Lewis’ writings. He might have recognized someone who shared his burden, who also spent his whole life wrestling with what we’re supposed to do about the atrocities that take place in the world every day.

When referring to starry-eyed people who bleat about how God is a part of everything, even cancer and slums, Lewis said, “The Christian replies, ‘Don’t talk damned nonsense.’ For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world. . . . But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.” Tupac’s lyrics throbbed with the pain of someone who was aching to join the fight but was never sure where to enlist. He wondered aloud if there would be ghettos in heaven and spoke of how his anguish made it difficult to pray sometimes. In “Hold On Be Strong” he cried that even God had turned his back on the ghetto youth, but quickly added, I know that ain’t the truth.

I looked down at the open Catechism. I didn’t know exactly what was in these pages, but I was pretty sure that whatever rules it contained, Tupac had broken every one of them. Before he died in a rain of bullets in front of a Las Vegas casino, Tupac used his music to glorify drugs, objectify women, insult cops, and glamorize violence. He’d gone to jail for sexual assault charges, which he’d denied, and many believed that he was at least tangentially involved in the murder of rapper Biggie Smalls. But I could not believe that he was in hell.

One of Joe’s best friends and fraternity brothers from Yale was Tupac’s lawyer, and he once told me a story about something that happened shortly after he’d gotten the infamous rapper out of jail. His secretary announced that Tupac was here to see him, which caught him off guard because they didn’t have an appointment. He nervously wondered what he was doing there, since they had no further business to take care of now that Tupac was free. Paralegals froze and attorneys stared when they saw the world-famous celebrity and his entourage swagger through the office, their chains and rings gleaming. Our friend braced himself as he heard the group getting closer.

A group of beefy men entered. They parted, and Mr. Shakur walked through the middle, pausing before the lawyer’s desk, his posse of stone-faced friends arrayed behind him. He extended his hand and said he’d only come by to say thank you for visiting him in prison. He died a few weeks later.

Like most people who struggle with evil, Tupac also sought beauty. He studied jazz, poetry, and ballet. He had an extensive library that one man described as a “sea of books” upon seeing the collection after Tupac’s death. And even as he immersed himself in a life of violence and anger, he still turned to God. He once told an interviewer that “I try to pray to God every night unless I pass out.” Most people in his position would have drifted into functional atheism, pretending that they didn’t believe in God so that they could live as they pleased without guilt.

If even I could see this, surely God would, too. I weighed the Catechism in my hands. The idea was that this Church’s teaching was divinely inspired. If it tried to tell me that Tupac Shakur was in hell, that God didn’t factor in his upbringing amidst violent radicals and his life amidst poverty and street warfare, that was going to be a problem. Even I, as someone who only knew him through his art, saw some goodness in him—a goodness that counted for something—despite all of the horrible things he did. And if this book told me that there was no hope for him at all, I didn’t think I could believe that its ideas came from God.

* * *

I dug through the Catechism for hours, flipping pages in my bed as the bricks on the neighbor’s house lost their cream-colored glow, becoming a dusky gray in the setting sun.

At first it didn’t look good. “Outside the Church there is no salvation,” said paragraph 846. God didn’t become a man, let himself be tortured to death, and found a Church for nothing. So, yeah, you can’t get to heaven without all of that, it explained.

However, the next paragraph, quoting the Vatican II document Lumen gentium, said that people who, through no fault of their own, do not know Jesus but who seek God and try to do what is right—“those too may achieve eternal salvation.” What it seemed to be saying is that the woman in rural China who lives a life filled with love for others has encountered Jesus, even though she may not know his name. It’s the person of Jesus who does the saving, not some magical properties of the vowel sounds in his name.

But what about Tupac? That “through no fault of their own” part might be a little problematic in his case. He’d certainly heard of Jesus—he had a cross tattoo on his back—but he wasn’t exactly the epitome of a person whose every action was calibrated to achieve the greatest good.

His situation posed the question: What does God do with believers who are jerks? They really do believe and in their own way try to be good, but they also do a lot of bad stuff, too. Are they assured of a place in heaven?

The Catechism basically said: If you’re a believer and a jerk, you don’t walk right in to heaven after you die. “All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.” (1030) Heaven is the place of perfect good and perfect love. To enter it while in a disposition of selfishness or hatefulness or unkindness would be like entering into a gleaming clean house with muddy boots; the house would not be clean anymore.

So the question with Tupac was, was he “in God’s friendship” in some way? He encouraged listeners of his music to do drugs, but railed against drug dealers selling crack to kids. He referred to his sexual escapades with women in the most vulgar of terms, yet penned a touching ode to his mother in which he said it was his honor to be able to pay her bills for her.

The Catechism emphasized the fact that sin was no joke. If Tupac committed even half the offenses against the natural law that he said he did in his lyrics, it wasn’t looking good for him. To sin was to turn your back on God, the very source of all goodness. By living the life that he lived, Tupac had cooperated with the same force that was responsible for the babies abandoned in dumpsters. He was aiding and abetting the very enemy that he so deeply hated.

In a move that was both frustrating and respectable, the Church didn’t make final proclamations about who goes to hell. It simply said that people who choose to turn their backs on God completely, in their hearts or in their actions, can expect to end up there; God respects our free will and won’t make us hang out with him forever if we don’t want to.

I would never know which category Tupac fell into. I could only hope that in his final moments he had turned to God one last time and cried out for forgiveness.

And I could pray.

The Catechism explained that praying for the souls of the dead is a tradition going back to the first Christians and to the Jews before them. On the walls of the catacombs, where the earliest Christians worshipped, there were scrawled prayers for friends who’d died during persecutions. The living sent their love for the deceased into the spiritual world, like adding water to a stream that would eventually float their lost friends home.

My music player had been shuffling on all Tupac’s songs, and Changes began again. Once again I heard the voice that had an intimate knowledge of poverty and loss. I heard the words of a person who despised the evil he saw all around him, even as he participated in it himself. As the song neared the close, I recognized that his voice carried the unmistakable tones of a man who knew he did not have much longer to live.

I slid off the bed and dropped to my knees. I pressed my eyes shut as I waited for a wave of pain to pass through my leg. When it had gone, I folded my hands, leaned my head forward, and poured out the most sincere prayer I had ever said, for the soul of Tupac Shakur.