CHAPTER 11

FIVE EPIPHANIES

I have lived two lives. That was the ending of the first: that screwdriver falling. Within days, I had made an appointment with a psychiatrist in Manhattan. What followed was a miracle of recovery, a swift, dramatic, and absolute transformation from one way of being to another. I sometimes like to joke that I’ve seen many men go mad, but I’m the only person I’ve ever met who has gone sane. It’s not really a joke, though. Sigmund Freud is often quoted describing the psycho-therapeutic process as a journey from “hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness.” My journey was different: it was a passage from suicidal despair to a fullness of vitality and joy I had not even thought to imagine.

While now I look back on this period and see Christ within it everywhere, at the time, on the surface, he was apparent only in hints and whispers. This was—or seemed—an entirely secular conversion. But it was this conversion that made my ultimate conversion to Christianity possible, and maybe inevitable, because it freed me to trust my own perceptions and reasoning. As long as I was in mental disarray, as long as my actions were self-destructive, as long as my outlook was deluded, any faith I thought to have, any idea of God I formed, seemed to me by definition unreliable, the comforting illusion of a mind in pain. As long as religion might even appear to serve me as an emotional crutch, I dismissed it as a form of weakness. It was only when I felt certain that my inner life was healthy and my understanding was sound that I could begin to accept what experience and logic had been leading me to believe. For others, I know it was Christ who led them to joy. For me, it was joy that led me to Christ.

These crossroad years, these five years of therapy, were emotionally dramatic. They were full of sudden and consequential insights, unexpected thunderclaps of comprehension that permanently changed the way I thought and lived. There were so many of them, I’m almost afraid to set them down here all together. I’m afraid I’ll come across as even loopier than I was, some sort of flighty mystic leaping from inspiration to inspiration like a celestial ballet dancer leaping from cloud to cloud. It wasn’t like that, though. I was just a writer making his way, a little slowed by personal damage, a little late to the game. But a writer, to find his voice, must first find himself. I found myself in an electric season of growth and transition, and the discovery was marked by this rapid series of revelations.

I’m going to make a catalogue of those epiphanies here, because they were not only the souvenirs of my journey to sanity, they were the prized relics I carried with me into a better time. I referred back to them continually in the years that followed. I studied them carefully. They became the basis for the way I thought and for the things I thought. Ultimately, I came to believe they were not so much a series of revelations as fragments of a single revelation, spread out along the five-year path. In effect, I would spend the next decade learning to put those fragments together in their proper arrangement. Only then did I see the meaning of the greater epiphany complete.

A year or two after I entered therapy, I found myself sitting alone at my desk in the late hours of a spring night. I was trying to decide whether or not to end my life. It was the last time I would ever think of killing myself, but it was the worst time; the darkest. I had never considered the idea quite so seriously before.

My wife and I had moved back to Manhattan. We had a baby daughter, Faith. I had a low-level job at a movie studio: not much money, but a steady paycheck with benefits and a flexible schedule that left me plenty of time to write. Ellen and I were both taking freelance work, too, so we were getting by. We had a pleasant one-bedroom apartment in midtown. The neighborhood was good and the rent was low. But it was a small place for a family of three. We had to wall off a dining alcove as a nursery. And our bedroom had to serve double duty as my office, which frequently discommoded my ever-patient and supportive wife.

I was locked away in the office-bedroom that miserable midnight. I was sitting at the same desk I’d been building when I dropped the screwdriver a year and a half before. I had gone in there to work, as I usually did in the evenings, but my work was over now. The baby was in her crib and Ellen was asleep on the living room sofa. I had poured myself a drink—I kept a bottle in the desk drawer like the private eyes did in my favorite novels. I had turned off every light except a desk lamp. I had the radio on, tuned to a baseball game, the volume low. I was just sitting there in the dark, staring into the shadows, smoking cigarette after cigarette, taking an occasional sip of scotch.

I felt a brutal weight of sorrow in me—sorrow and self-pity, a toxic blend. I was a burden to my family, I thought. I thought: My wife and daughter would be better off without me. I don’t know now how serious I was. Serious enough. I was reviewing the various methods by which I might end it all. Walking off the roof of the building seemed the easiest way. I was pretty sure I had the courage for it. I was even beginning to make plans for when I might do it.

One sentence kept repeating itself in my mind, one refrain: I don’t know how to live. I don’t know how to live . . .

Most suicidal people don’t do the deed when their mood is lowest. They’re too depressed. They don’t have the energy to act so decisively. It’s when they start to feel better—that’s when the real danger arises. And I had been feeling better this last year or so, much better off and on. But the therapy that was helping me was painful too. I could only afford to see my psychiatrist once a week, but the process was on my mind every day, every hour, and the obsessive self-exploration was exposing parts of my past and my psyche I would have much rather left hidden away. Plus I still had no real idea of how to get along in the world, how to achieve the things I wanted, the career I wanted, the good life I wanted for my wife and child. I could not find a way to use my particular talents as a writer to convey the vision I wanted to convey. My writing career, such as it had ever been, had ground to a complete halt. I hadn’t had a serious publication in almost five years.

Then, earlier that day, there’d been a bitter little incident; just a small thing, but cruelly calibrated to unbalance me. I was walking across town, downhearted, lost in my own melancholy reverie, when I glanced up and spotted the famous editor who had published my first novel. He was on the same sidewalk as I was, coming right toward me. Jarred out of my meditations, I wasn’t quick enough to realize that he had already seen me and was trying to walk past with his eyes averted, trying to avoid a meeting. Reflexively, I called out hello. He stopped, but only for a second. He was brusque and dismissive, even disdainful. Stone-faced, he said a word or two, then quickly walked on. Like every other editor on the planet, he wanted nothing to do with me. It was a little thing, as I say. But I was already fragile with depression and it broke my heart.

So I came home at the end of the day. I dutifully finished my work. I sat there at my desk with my cigarettes and my scotch, my ballgame and my shadows and my sorrow. I sank into the depths of my anguish and I despaired.

What I didn’t know, what I couldn’t see, was that it was almost over: this difficult time; I was almost through it. I was already past the most painful phase of my therapy. I would soon experience a series of remarkable breakthroughs. My depression would lift for good, and the past would begin to lose its insidious grip on me. At that black, black moment, I was inches away, just inches away, from finding a light of true peace and gladness within myself.

Within weeks, the first hint of a change in my professional fortunes would make its way to me too. I would win a small poetry prize—a hundred dollars and publication—for a long poem I had distilled, ironically enough, from the transfiguration scene in my disastrous Jesus novel. Again, not a big deal, but a legitimate sign that I was finally starting to find my voice, finally starting to figure out how to say what I wanted to say in a way people could understand. Very soon after that, I would read a novel that would complete that process, changing the trajectory of my work and restoring me to my original purposes. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is a Victorian thriller so brilliant that some scholars suspect it was heavily rewritten by Collins’s good friend and publisher Charles Dickens. Two-thirds of the way through reading the book, I would literally sit up in bed with the shock of understanding. I would suddenly see, like looking through a clock to the clockwork, the mechanics of how the thrilling stories I loved to write could convey whatever vision of the world I had. The moment would mark the beginning of my career; it would be the making of it.

It was all right there, a good life, a joyful life, the life I hungered for, so close to me, a footstep in time, as I sat there at my desk and considered suicide, thinking the same words over and over again: I don’t know how to live.

The baseball game on the radio was a Mets game. I’d been a Yankees fan all my life, but the Yanks were in the doldrums this year and the Mets had assembled an exciting roster of players. I’d become fascinated by them. I identified with them, especially with the two veterans who led the team. They were a mismatched pair. Their contrary personalities seemed to represent something of importance to me. One, Keith Hernandez, the first baseman, was a dark, brooding, cigarette-smoking man-on-the-town type, a student of Civil War history, and a Gold Glove student of the game. Away from the stadium, he was involved in a divorce and a drug scandal. But I loved the thinking man’s way he had reinvented the defensive work of the infield. When I began to experiment with my first crime novels after reading The Woman in White, I would use the name Keith as part of my pseudonym.

The other player, the catcher Gary Carter, was Hernandez’s opposite, a sunny, upbeat, gung-ho future Hall-of-Famer who never stopped grinning and liked to refer to himself as “the Kid.” Carter was a clean-living Christian, and a loud-mouth about it. During postgame interviews, he would frequently thank the Lord Jesus for a victory or a home run. He once said that he could see the interviewer’s smile curdle whenever he did it. I could see it, too, and, in all honesty, I always sympathized with the interviewer. I considered Carter’s exuberant faith a character flaw. It embarrassed me. To paraphrase the cynical hero of one of my own novels: Whenever I heard someone say Jesus as if he really meant it, it made my skin crawl, as if they’d said squid or intestine instead. The rest of the Mets, a talented assembly of scoundrels and troublemakers, openly hated the Kid for his relentlessly clean-cut cheer. But I liked the guy. His all-out play inspired me.

Now, as I sat at my desk in a cloud of smoke and self-pitying sadness, the announcer on the radio described Carter stepping up to bat. It was a crucial moment in a close game. There were men on base in scoring position. Carter smacked a grounder to the outfield. A notoriously slow runner because of his bad knees, he took off down the line as fast as he could. Somehow he managed to beat the throw to first. The single scored the winning runs. It was an exciting moment, but I was barely listening. I hardly cared. I just went on thinking: I don’t know how to live. I don’t know how to live.

When the game was over, the on-field reporter corralled Carter for a postvictory interview. The reporter asked how the catcher was able to run so fast when his knees were so badly damaged from years of squatting behind home plate. If, in that moment, Carter had done his Jesus routine, if he had praised Christ or sung hallelujah, I don’t think his comments would have reached me at all. I think I would have grimaced and shuddered at his happy-talk piety. Then I would have shrugged it off and gone on toying with the notion of self-murder.

But tonight, for some reason—for some reason—Carter decided to leave the religious stuff out of it. Instead, he answered very simply. He said, “Sometimes you just have to play in pain.”

The words jarred me instantly out of my depressive reverie. I remember blinking in the shadows as if waking up. I remember slowly turning my gaze from the empty darkness to the radio. I remember repeating the sentence silently to myself. It seemed to me for all the world as if Carter had heard my thoughts as I sat there. It seemed to me he had heard me thinking, I don’t know how to live, and had responded over the airwaves with the only honest answer there is.

Sometimes you just have to play in pain.

I nodded in the darkness, my eyes growing damp. I thought: Yes. That’s right. That’s it exactly. And I can do that too. I can play in pain. If I have to. I know I can. That’s something I actually know how to do.

I put out my cigarette. I got out of my chair. I turned off the radio. I left the bedroom. I never considered suicide again.

From the very first day I started it, therapy had changed the rules of life for me. Up until then, I considered some of my most self-destructive and disturbing habits of mind to be inborn aspects of my nature. If I was unhappy, I thought it was just the way things were, the world being what it was, and me being who I was. Like a lot of artists, too, I assumed my suffering and whatever talent I had were inseparable. I was afraid that if I lost one, I would also sacrifice the other.

But as soon as my therapy began, I realized, no, none of this was true. My misery was not me and it was not the world and it was not connected to my talent, such as it was. It was just a wound I had sustained in the course of living, a wound that could be healed. It was a broken piece of the psychic machinery, and it could be fixed.

I’ve often wondered what that initial meeting was like for the psychiatrist because for me now it seems poignantly comical. Frantic with hypochondria, pale with depression, edgy with anger, I all but stumbled into his office that day. It was a cramped, windowless room on the ground floor of an ornate apartment building on Manhattan’s west side. I dropped into the armchair and he sat in a high-backed swivel chair a few feet away from me. There was a Freudian couch against the wall to my right, a desk to my left, and hardly any space for anything else.

The psychiatrist was a slumped, sad-eyed Jewish man about ten or fifteen years older than me. He had a thin, quiet voice and spoke deliberately as if to make sure every word he chose was just the right one. He had a dry sense of humor, too, and I could tell right away he was smart, which mattered to me very much at the time. How could I expect a mere mortal to heal me if he couldn’t comprehend my towering genius?

He asked how he could help me. In answer, I began talking and talking and talking some more. Over the next forty-five minutes or so, I believe I told him every single untoward, sad, and twisted thing I knew about myself. Bizarre sexual fantasies, homicidal hostilities, deviant desires, and antisocial behaviors, all of it. I had been thinking it over for years, you see. Probing my troubles, investigating their psychic causes. I knew the theories of Freud well, and I knew myself pretty well. Now everything I knew and thought I knew came pouring out of me in a torrent of words. I told all my darkest secrets in that first session with so much brio and abandon that the psychiatrist finally shifted in his seat and shook his head in puzzlement and said in his deliberate way, “Why are you telling me this?”

To which I replied, startled, “I thought you might need to know!”

When the fifty-minute hour ended, I left the little room. I left the ornate apartment building. Made my way back to work on the east side. I walked across Central Park. It was clean and green in the early autumn sunlight. I felt relieved to have that first session over with. I even felt slightly hopeful about the future. Other than that, though, I felt no different than I had before. I had told this doctor things on first meeting him—many things—that I had never told anyone ever. You would have thought making such a complete confession would have had some profound emotional effect on me. It didn’t seem to. The world and I seemed about the same as ever. I shrugged to myself and continued on my way.

The next day at home—we still lived in the Westchester cottage then—I had to make a phone call to arrange an appointment. The phone was on a shelf off the narrow stairway that connected the ground-floor kitchen with the living room on the second floor. I sat on the stairs as I made my call. I remember I got into some minor squabble with a nasty receptionist and ended up slamming the handset down into its cradle with frustration.

Then, without any warning, I buried my face in my hands and began to weep.

I had not cried for years and years and I had not sobbed like this since childhood. My chest throbbed painfully with the force of the convulsions. My whole body shook and it went on and on. I understood. It was a delayed reaction to my first therapy session. I had shoveled three decades of muck out of my consciousness. Now my body was washing the vessel clean. I relaxed and let the process run its course.

The effect of the catharsis was remarkable. When it was over, it seemed as if every symptom of mental sickness had vanished from me for good and all. The anger, the depression, the hypochondria—as if by magic, they were all gone. For days and days afterward, I felt a radiance of light and life rising inside me, a kind of inner dawn. I felt at once still and hilarious, and I knew this was my True and Original Self reborn. My interior cosmos wheeled in harmony with the stars, and the little birds of happiness sang tweet, tweet, tweet . . . and yes, all right, I knew it was temporary. I didn’t think I’d been cured of my lifelong mental affliction in one fifty-minute session. I knew all the old agonies would soon come clamoring back to their home in my brain.

Still, while it lasted, it was a glorious sensation. More than that. I believed that these few days of high peace gave me a momentary glimpse of something true. This, I thought, was who I really was, not that other miserable man I had been living with all these years. This inner harmony was the goal toward which I would be working in my therapy. And it was real. It existed. I was experiencing it right now, like a vision of things to come. There was a long trek of self-understanding ahead of me, I knew. But for those few days, I was allowed to visit the promised land on the other side.

For years, maybe most of my life, I had languished in that typical young intellectual’s delusion that gloom and despair are the romantic lot of the brilliant and the wise. But now I saw: it wasn’t so. Why should it be? What sort of wisdom has no joy in it? What good is wisdom without joy? By joy I don’t mean ceaseless happiness, of course. I don’t mean willed stupidity for the sake of a cheap smile. The world is sad and it is suffering. A tragic sense is essential to both realism and compassion. By joy I mean a vital love of life in both sorrow and gladness. Why not? The hungry can’t eat your tears. The poor can’t spend them. They’re no comfort to the afflicted and they don’t bring the wicked to justice. Everything useful that can be done in the world can be done in joy.

For the first time in what seemed forever, I began to believe that I might make my way back to the man I was meant to be.

The next shock of revelation came only four months later. This one was the most spectacular: the one truly mystical experience I have ever had in my life.

It was December now. My wife had entered the final days of her pregnancy. This was during the first popularity of so-called “natural childbirth,” in which the woman used no painkilling drugs or procedures but endured labor with only breathing techniques and massages to alleviate her suffering. Our obstetrician, a squat, gruff, no-nonsense Italian American woman, responded to the fad sarcastically. “Since when did nature become our friend?” she asked. It was a good question. But we were caught up in the fashion and devoted to the idea.

The truth was, the most positive aspect of “natural childbirth” was probably the least “natural,” the least primitive; a genuine innovation. In “natural childbirth,” husbands relinquished their traditional role of pacing and chain-smoking cigarettes in the hospital hallway during the labor. Adam had probably done something like this during the birth of Cain and Abel, but no more. Instead, in “natural childbirth,” the father served as a “birth coach,” attending his wife in the delivery room. This enabled him to lend her some moral support for what that was worth. But more important—or at least more dramatic—was the fact, it allowed him to witness the birth of his child.

Ellen and I dutifully attended a seemingly endless series of classes during which we practiced the natural childbirth breathing and massage techniques. Even a mere male like myself could see these would be more or less useless against the agonies of labor, but I showed up and did my part. It was during these classes that I noticed I had a powerful emotional reaction to the instructional films that showed real births. The precise instant when the baby slid from its mother into the world always affected me deeply. Every time I saw it, I found it poignant and awesome.

Our teachers instructed us to make a pregnancy kit, a small gym bag full of the tools the birth coach would use to help his wife through her travail. I don’t remember now what this seemingly random collection of objects was (it included tennis balls for some reason) but the bag developed a totemic significance for us. It became an emblem of the comforts of the “natural” approach. On the night my wife went into labor, I calmly escorted her down the narrow cottage steps and picked up the pregnancy bag waiting by the kitchen door. We walked out into the driveway where I calmly rested the bag on the car’s roof and helped my wife into the passenger seat. I then calmly went around to the driver’s side, slid in behind the wheel, and calmly drove away, calmly forgetting the bag so that it tumbled from the car roof to the gravel, not to be seen again until our return home some days later.

We reached the hospital in the city and checked in. There followed thirteen hours of brutal labor with no drugs, no spinal blocks, and not even any tennis balls. My wife is the gentlest and most feminine of women, but she has, I swear, a core of iron. Nothing but my absolute insistence would have deterred her from seeing this through to the finish drug free. And while even at twenty-eight I liked to think of myself as a patriarchal tyrant, I tended to limit my absolute insistence to calling for a cocktail before dinner. In more important matters, I trusted Ellen’s judgment and wanted only her happiness.

So, through the night and on into a snowy morning, she was tortured on the rack of her contractions. The only comic relief came from a pretty little blond nurse who took a liking to me—I was a handsome devil then!—and kept running into the room to rub my shoulders in order to help me bear my wife’s pain. Ellen’s reaction to this was unprintable in a book about religion but, trust me, it was hilarious.

Sometime during the last hours of the labor, Ellen discharged some meconium—fetal stool. In our classes, we had been taught that this was a sign the baby might be in some sort of trouble. “Fetal distress” was the nice phrase for it. My wife’s eyes were already glazed with pain and exhaustion, but now I saw the hot-white light of panic come into them. We pressed the alarm button by the bed to call for help. A new nurse hurried in, a serious-looking brunette in her late twenties, as I was. It was strange, but the moment she walked through the door I straightened and she stopped in her tracks and we realized that we knew each other. Ellen and I told her about the meconium. The nurse took one look at Ellen and saw her up-spiraling terror. She sat on the bed and held my wife by the shoulders, peered deep into her eyes, and said forcefully, “This baby is fine.” Ellen believed her and her panic faded away.

The nurse’s name was Ann Christiano. No, it really was. From then on, she tended to us with warmth and kindness and expert skill. She and I tried to figure out where we’d met before, but we couldn’t. In fact, after talking it over, we decided it was unlikely we had ever laid eyes on each other, but the feeling that we were old acquaintances persisted nonetheless. The last time Ellen and I saw her was after the baby came. Mother, father, and child were huddled together, spent, on the narrow hospital bed. Ann Christiano crept in quietly. She raised the bedrail to keep us from tumbling out. She put a blanket over us, all three, and tucked us in—and left us forever. Ellen and I solemnly agreed that, given her name, she must have been an angel sent to us in our hour of need.

When at last our daughter was ready to be born, here is what happened.

I had not been sure what my reaction would be to the gore and mess of childbirth. Some men faint dead away, I’ve heard, while some don’t mind it. I had no way of knowing how I would feel or behave. Birth is a dramatically material business. Great gouts of blood and urine and feces come out of the mother in gushes and floods. From the perspective of a watching husband, it is a deluge that purges your wife of every trace of ladylike delicacy and feminine mystery. This is the woman you love, remember, whose body is erotic to you and alluring in just those places that are now so violently soiled. It’s bound to make an impact on a man’s mind one way or another, and it would be completely understandable if he were shocked or disgusted or repelled. I wasn’t, though. I hadn’t known this up to that moment, but it turned out I had the same attitude toward human gore as I’d always had to human depravity: just because it’s usually hidden doesn’t mean it isn’t always there. When it did become visible, it struck me as a normal thing and I felt no need to look away.

In fact, after a while, as the process went on, I began to formulate a strange idea about it. It began to seem to me that the aggressive, convulsive physicality of this experience was uniting my wife and me in a new level of intimacy. Through the blood and guts of birth, we were being carried into a togetherness that was almost super-temporal: above time, beyond time. Until now, whenever I had read that passage in Genesis about a husband and wife becoming “one flesh,” I had thought it referred to sex. But no—no, that was fanciful, I thought now, a romantic fiction. The old sages had known much better than that. The unity of sex, which was the beginning of this labor and the cause of it, was also just a symbol of a greater unifying power. Even the child herself, this child being born, the one flesh of marriage literally personified, was only a symbol.

Sex, birth, marriage, these bodies, this life, they were all just representations of the power that had created them, the power now surging through my wife in this flood of matter, the power that had made us one: the power of love. Love, I saw now, was an exterior spiritual force that swept through our bodies in the symbolic forms of eros, then bound us materially, skin and bone, in the symbolic moment of birth. Everything we were, everything we were going through—it was all merely living metaphor. Only the love was real.

What happened next, then, was not a vision or an hallucination. It was a spiritual event. I saw it. I felt it. I experienced it, as surely as you would experience a kiss on the lips or a punch in the nose. I have never been through anything else like it. It was as real as it was impossible.

The baby came—that moment came that moved me so deeply whenever I saw it even on film—and the surging torrent of creation swept me away. The borders of my self shattered like a barrier of glass and out I flowed. My consciousness, my psyche, the whole invisible presence of me was carried out of my body on the tide of love. I became not one flesh with my wife but one being beyond flesh with the love I felt for her. My spirit washed into that love and became part of it, a splash in a rushing river. In that river of love, I went raging down the plane of Ellen’s body until the love I was and the love that carried me melded with the love I felt for the new baby we had made together and I became part of that love as well and then . . .

Then, like living water rushing at full speed into the open sea, I saw I was about to flow out into the infinite. I saw that, beyond the painted scenery of mere existence, it was all love, love unbounded, mushrooming, vast, alive, and everlasting. The love I felt, the love I was, was about to cascade into the very origin of itself, the origin of our three lives and of all creation.

This experience was over in half a second. Not a full second; only half. In a reflex of fear, I drew myself back into myself before I could be carried entirely away. I regretted that reflex immediately. Why had I stopped the process? What might I have seen, where would I have gotten to, had I just let it go? Would I have fainted? Died? Would I have touched the gates of heaven? The face of God? If nothing else, a writer’s curiosity should have compelled me to follow the event to its conclusion. As a reporter, I had once dashed into a burning house just to see what it looked like inside. Couldn’t I have let my ego flow into the underlying truth of reality just to see what it looked like inside?

Well, never mind. Here was the baby, ten fingers and ten toes. And here was the happy mother, glowing and triumphant. The visionary moment was over.

But what had happened had happened. I had seen what I had seen. For years, I would try to rationalize it away but I never quite could. I was there. I went through it. Me, my spirit—in the flood of creation, at the delta of the sea of love.

I would never forget it.

After that, I began to haunt churches. Not often, but sometimes. I’d duck into some fine old landmark on my way from one Manhattan location to another. I’d sit in a pew in the shadows. I’d contemplate the icons and the stations of the cross or simply gaze up into the high, vaulted spaces and occasionally launch a prayer just to see what would happen. This was different from the sweaty, desperate, cowardly religiosity that had overtaken me during the worst of my depression and hypochondria. These church visits were spontaneous, contemplative, tentative, and calm.

I had seen something when my daughter was born and I did not know what to make of it. My postmodern skepticism had been shaken and yet . . . I was still at the beginning of therapy. I was just emerging from the haze of craziness and delusion. I did not trust myself. I did not trust that I had seen what I saw. “Why do you doubt your senses?” the ghost of Jacob Marley asks Ebenezer Scrooge. “Because,” Scrooge replies, “a little thing affects them.” Maybe my vision in the delivery room was just a trick of the brain. A release of chemicals under stress.

But such explanations couldn’t entirely silence the voice of the revelation. It raised serious questions about how I was living, what I was doing, and what was happening to me. Here I was in a course of psychotherapy more or less based on the theories of Freud. Therapy was already helping me so much that the work of Freud was becoming like scripture to me. His worldview was beginning to seem to me unassailable. But Freud, in effect, had declared that all spiritual things were merely symbols of the flesh. In the delivery room, for the first time, it had seemed to me that he had gotten it exactly the wrong way round. Our flesh was the symbol. It was the love that was real.

Why, after all, should the flesh be the ground floor of our interpretations? Why should we end our understanding at the level of material things? It’s just a prejudice really. The flesh is convincing. We can see it, feel it, smell it, taste it. It’s very there. It’s a trick of the human mind to give such presence the weight of reality. Men kill each other over dollar bills that are only paper because the paper has come to seem more real to them than the time and value it represents. In the same way, and for the same reason, people destroy themselves and everyone around them for sex: because sex has come to seem more real to them than the love it was made to express.

I had seen that love, seen it with my own eyes. And if that vision was just a release of chemicals, well, so was my vision of the trees and the sidewalks and the whole city. I saw it all through the mechanics and chemistry and electricity of the brain and yet it was still, in some true sense, there. I could head east from Fifth Avenue and reliably reach Madison, turn south from 53rd and get to 52nd every single time. The scientist—or the Buddhist—might declare such perceptions were illusions, but not one of them would head uptown to get to the Bowery. They knew what they knew. They saw what they saw.

So did I. I had seen beyond the scrim of the physical world and it was all love, living love, a love of which our human love, our human lives, were only a manifestation and a symbol. I did not know what to make of it.

Somewhere around this time, I met Doug Ousley, the rector of the landmark Episcopal Church of the Incarnation around the corner from my apartment, the priest who would one day baptize me. His wife had been playing with her babies on the rectory balcony and noticed my wife playing with her baby in the garden down below. The two mothers became acquainted. After Ellen gave Mary a copy of my transfiguration poem, we all got together.

The Ousleys were a comically mismatched couple: she delightfully vivacious, he phlegmatic, taciturn, and mordant. Doug was a dedicated pastor who spent a lot of his time sitting beside sickbeds and tending to his parishioners in their emergency needs. But I sometimes used to tease him that he was the worst priest ever, because he was gruff and sardonic and had none of the stagey warmth or bonhomie many pastors cultivate. In short, he was my kind of guy, and we became close friends.

It was good and helpful to talk religion with him as I tried to reason things through. He was widely read and carefully reasonable and he never preached at me. Sometimes I even attended services at Incarnation to hear his sermons and to enjoy the Bach cantatas sung by his excellent choir, which included Mary, a former professional singer. But really, it was the capacity for love behind his brusque exterior that gave his faith substance for me: specifically his love for his wife over the increasingly terrible years.

I was walking in our neighborhood one day and met Mary on the sidewalk outside the post office. I gave her a friendly hello and without prologue she fell sobbing into my arms. As I stood nonplussed and uncomprehending, she told me her foot had gone numb. I patted her back—there, there—and said it was probably nothing. It was not nothing. It was an early symptom of multiple sclerosis. Over the next twenty-five years, the disease killed that vital and affectionate woman by unbearable inches. And Doug never wavered in his devotion to her, never faltered in his love. It was a tough-guy performance for the ages, and he would not have been able to do it had he not been steeled by faith in Christ. It was a living sermon, his best.

The thing was, in my shiny new state of burgeoning sanity, and in the aftermath of my vision in the delivery room, I was beginning to realize there was a spiritual side to life, a side I had been neglecting in my postmodern mind-set. Strip that spirituality away and you were left with a kind of “realism” that no longer seemed to me very realistic at all.

The spirit did not have to be supernatural. I thought of spirit simply as the pure internal human experience of life. This was the stuff my favorite poet John Keats wrote about: the full mingling of human consciousness with the song of a nightingale, say, or with the frieze on a Grecian urn. In Keats’s greatest poem, “Ode to Autumn,” that mingling becomes complete. The poet becomes one with the season of fruitfulness and death until it has a music as lovely as the songs of spring. In Keats’s poems, the true fullness of reality does not take place outside of human consciousness but in conjunction with it so that

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.¹

If we don’t accept our inner experience as real, then only man’s material desires have any meaning. Our yearnings for pleasure and power are all that’s left. Anything else, anything that seems like absolute spiritual truth or absolute spiritual morality, must only be an elaborate illusion that can be deconstructed back down to those brute facts. This was Nietzsche’s vision, the vision that Dostoevsky opposed in Crime and Punishment even before Nietzsche had written it down. And it was the vision of postmodernism now, too, the source of the postmodernist mission to endlessly analyze our spiritual experiences of truth and beauty in order to get to the materialist “reality” underneath.

It’s a flattering philosophy for intellectuals, no doubt. Endless analysis is what they’re good at. But the reductiveness and meaninglessness of the enterprise are creations of the enterprise itself. That is, you have to first make the assumption that material is the only reality before you can begin to reason away the spirit.

One night, walking along 8th Street in the East Village, I saw some adolescent boys, out too late and unattended. They were playing an arcade video game set up on the sidewalk, piloting a digital spacecraft through starlit infinity, blasting everything in their path to bits. Now and then, the machine would let out a robotic shout of encouragement: You’re doing great! So the urchins flew on through the make-believe nothingness, destroying whatever they saw, hypnotized by the mechanical praise that stood in for the human voice of love. That, it seemed to me, was postmodernism in a nutshell. It ignored the full spiritual reality of life all around it in order to blow things apart inside a man-made box that only looked like infinity. You’re doing great, intellectuals! You’re doing great.

Much as Freudian-style therapy was helping me, I wanted something more. My research into Christianity had given me a lot of respect for its tragic vision of love. In the Bible, and in the minds of great theologians, Christ represented Love Despised, Love Rejected, Love Crucified in the world. That was a love I could believe in. It was in keeping with the things I saw around me. But it was a love that was ultimately triumphant in the miracle of the resurrection and in the hope of faith. And I did not have faith, and I did not believe in miracles. Church doctrines seemed absurd to me. Born of a virgin. Resurrected from the grave. Coming in glory to judge the living and the dead. I could not buy into any of it.

To get around that roadblock, I tried the nondoctrinal Universalist church for a while—the “Church of Amorphous Rambling,” in which I’d been married. But the church experience itself was alienating to my contrarian artist’s soul. The ferociously radical-to-the-death Jesus of the Gospels was transformed here into a bland cheerleader for socially acceptable niceness. That made no sense to me. No one ever got himself crucified for organizing a charity golf tournament. As one friend, a lapsed believer, said to me of the church experience, “The services are pretty. It’s the tuna casserole of it all I can’t stand.”

I couldn’t stand the tuna casseroles either. I stopped going to church.

Instead, I came to zen and, through zen, I had my next epiphany—or satori, as the zen folks call it. The word is sometimes translated as sudden enlightenment or awakening, but my old friend Jack Kerouac wonderfully rendered it “a kick in the eye.” That’s what it was for me.

Zen, by definition, is impossible to define. The path that can be spoken of is not the true path, and all that. The legend goes that the practice even began in silence, with the Buddha’s famous Flower Sermon. Siddhartha held up a white lotus to his followers and said . . . absolutely nothing. No one understood him, except one disciple, who smiled. And with that smile, zen began.

It’s really more a practice than a philosophy. Basically, you sit cross-legged and focus on nothing but your breath. This is called zazen, seated meditation. Sometimes as you sit, you count your breaths as an aid to concentration. Sometimes you focus on a koan, a sort of riddle that serves as a spur to enlightenment. What is the sound of one hand clapping? What was your original face before you were born? That sort of thing. Ultimately, you sit there and try to think nothing. Thoughts arise. You let them go. Monsters from your unconscious rear up. You release them. You enter a zone of mental emptiness.

All of this is supposed to lead to a breakthrough—satori, enlightenment—which leads to pure consciousness and awareness without inner interpretation, which, in turn, gives rise to a sense that what you thought was reality is nothing more than an illusion. The way is easy, as one zen master put it. Don’t seek the truth. Just let go of all your opinions.

Zen appealed to me because it seemed to offer a way to achieve what I had tried to achieve in childhood: a method of breaking free of the fog of daydreams and inner voices to see reality as it was. It was zen I had been trying to invent when I was eight years old, and now I had found it waiting for me. All I had to do was sit and breathe.

Now, of course, there is no competition in zen. You can’t seek to do it better than anyone else. You can only sit. You can only breathe. There’s no way to be good or bad at it. But oh brother, let me tell you, I was great at it! I could sit and breathe with the best of them. I cracked koans like they were walnuts. If you wanted to know the sound of one hand clapping, you only had to ask me. Your original face before you were born? No problem; I knew. I was an all-around World Champion Zazen Guy, no question. I’m convinced to this day that only an unreasoning prejudice against Western dilettantes kept me out of the Zen Hall of Fame.

The effect of meditation on me was wonderful too. At this time, due to budget cuts, I had been laid off from my job at the movie studio. I had found work writing news for a radio station located in Times Square. It was high-pressure work, churning out copy under half-hour deadlines from about three in the morning to around ten. When I was done for the day, I would come home and play with my daughter for an hour or so. Then I’d work for four hours at my own writing. Then I’d read from my stacks of books for two hours. Then I’d sleep a few hours; then I’d start the round again. I was constantly exhausted, constantly in motion, and often in severe pain: overdosing on coffee gave me an excruciating urinary infection that lasted for months.

But through my zen meditation, I remained focused and clearheaded as never before. The other newswriters and I would sometimes entertain ourselves between broadcasts by playing games of wastepaper basketball, tossing crumpled pieces of wire copy at the trash basket for a quarter a throw. Zen so sharpened my mind that I couldn’t miss. I would frequently come home with my pockets bulging with change. It wasn’t exactly enlightenment, but it was a legitimate ten- or fifteen-dollar add-on to my take-home pay. Finally, my colleagues caught on and the basketball games ended.

I would not only practice zen while sitting but also while walking around the city. I would clear my mind and focus on the buildings, the traffic, the trees, pavement, scenery, and faces—just as I had done as a boy trying to beat my daydream addiction. This time, with the aid of zazen breathing, I learned how to overcome the mind’s resistance to emptiness. The city scenery grew clearer to me. I became more alert and aware.

Then one day, I was walking up Fifth Avenue. I was on that beautiful stretch along the border of Central Park where the hexagonal pavement stones lie shaded under the canopied branches of plane trees. I don’t remember exactly where I was or where I was headed. Perhaps I was passing Temple Emmanuel on 65th Street. Perhaps it was the sight of that grand Romanesque Revival synagogue that suggested something to me. I don’t know. I just know that all at once, two words spoke themselves into my consciousness:

No God.

And with that: satori! Or some dabbler’s version of it anyway. Suddenly, my mind stopped. The chatter in my mind, the internal conversations, the reflections, the value judgments, the opinions, the daydreams, the very sense of myself—they all vanished on the instant. The static of consciousness shut off and the avenue came into focus like turning a lens. Colors became gloriously sharp and clear. The green of the budding leaves, the brown of the branches, the silver-gray of the paving stones, the blurred yellow of the passing cabs, the white clouds, the blue sky—they were so vibrantly and entirely there that I was breathless. I continued up Fifth Avenue awestruck, looking all around me, like a child at his first fair. Reality had become a wonderland.

Wherever I’d been headed, I forgot it now. I simply strolled on, enjoying the stridently vivid scenery. Whenever the clarity began to fade, whenever the noise of my mind started up again, I had only to reignite the experience with the same words that had begun it:

No God.

Soon I realized I was approaching the Metropolitan Museum of Art. How perfect. How beautiful the paintings would appear to my heightened consciousness. I went in and wandered the halls of the European galleries. Sure enough, the Christs and the Virgins and the pagan gods and the landscapes and the still-lifes seemed nearly three-dimensional with pure presence.

It was here in the museum, after another half hour or so, that the rush of awareness finally began to recede. The kick in the eye was over. Life became only life again.

What was I to make of this then? No God? Atheism? Was that the secret to enlightenment? It seemed the very antithesis of my epiphany in the delivery room and yet the experience was just as real. For an hour or so on Fifth Avenue and in the museum, I had stumbled onto something like the clarity and presence I had been seeking on my walk to school when I was eight years old. And it had all started with that one revelation: no God. Even after it was over, I only had to speak those words to myself, and I would get a taste of that clarity again.

Given that my idea of spirituality was not necessarily supernatural, atheism made a certain amount of sense to me at that time. After all, Freudian therapy was bringing me closer and closer to a kind of sanity and peace I had never dreamed of having. And there was no more confirmed atheist-materialist than Sigmund Freud. He had replaced the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with the Id, Ego, and Superego, three functions of the mind. He had replaced the fall of man with a story about a primal patricide in earliest times—that was how he explained our universal sense of guilt. He had essentially rewritten the story of Christianity into a new myth of the death and resurrection of our own flesh. For him, all our highest thoughts could be reinterpreted as expressions of our often thwarted and rechanneled erotic impulses.

If atheist Freud was leading me to sanity, and if the phrase No God was leading me to zen enlightenment, then it seemed integrity demanded I give up my agnostic uncertainty and declare myself an atheist.

So I tried it. I did. I put aside all thoughts of an outer spirit or of a living love beyond my own consciousness. I skewed my reading to favor atheist writing. Shaw, Kafka, Nietzsche, Freud and more Freud, and then more. The problem was, the atheist reasoning of these writers never held together for me. I wanted even my daydreams to make sense, remember, and these writers did not. Even Freud, whom I loved so much, used flimsy logic often based on nothing more than his own opinions and a few isolated exchanges with his patients. Why was a made-up primal murder more convincing than Original Sin? Why were pleasure and pain the last words in human motivation? So much of human history proved there was more to us than that. It was simply that materialist prejudice at work again. It was not convincing on the merits.

Then, in my atheist reading, I came upon the writings of the Marquis de Sade. It marked a watershed in my thinking. Nowadays, “the divine Marquis” is sometimes depicted as a naughty rogue who enjoyed what the British call “a bit of the slap and tickle,” a libertine who brought a needed dose of sexual freedom into a pinched and hypocritical era. That’s not how I saw him at all. Sade—from whom we get the word sadism—was a violent psychopath who brutally tortured servants and prostitutes for his own pleasure. (When even the French imprison you for your sexual practices, you know you’ve crossed the line!) He was also a philosopher of genius.

Sade understood that if there is no God, there can be no ultimate morality. There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Unlike Freud and other atheists, though, Sade followed mad Hamlet’s logic with unswerving honesty. Without morality, he said, we are only responsible to our natures, and nature demands only that we pleasure ourselves in any way we like, the strong at the expense of the weak. “Nature, mother to us all, never speaks to us save of ourselves . . . prefer thyself, love thyself, no matter at whose expense,” he declared. And then, with wonderful wit, he added: “Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.”² All of this, he illustrated with graphic passages of pornography depicting tortures, rapes, and murders in a way intended to be sexually arousing. And his work is arousing. It’s also repulsive. And to my eyes, it’s evil.

Here, at last, however, was an atheist whose outlook made complete logical sense to me from beginning to end. If there is no God, there is no morality. If there is no morality, the search for pleasure and the avoidance of pain are all in all and we should pillage, rape, and murder as we please. None of this pale, milquetoast atheism that says “Let’s all do what’s good for society.” Why should I do what’s good for society? What is society to me? None of this elaborate game-theory nonsense where we all benefit by mutual sacrifice and restraint. That only works until no one’s looking; then I’ll get away with what I can. If there is no God, there is no good, and sadistic pornography is scripture.

But the opposite is also true. That is, if we concede that one thing is morally better than another, it can only be because it is closer to an Ultimate Moral Good, the standard by which it’s measured. An Ultimate Moral Good cannot just be an idea. It must be, in effect, a personality with consciousness and free will. The rain isn’t morally good even though it makes the crops grow; a tornado that kills isn’t morally evil—though it may be an evil for those in its way. Happy and sad events, from birth to death, just happen, and we ascribe moral qualities to them as they suit us or don’t. But true, objective good and evil, in order to be good and evil, have to be aware and intentional. So an Ultimate Moral Good must be conscious and free; it must be God.

So we have to choose. Either there is no God and no morality whatsoever, or there is morality and God is real.

Either way makes sense, if you’re speaking strictly about logic. I didn’t reject Sade’s outlook on logical grounds. I rejected it because I found it repulsive and I knew it wasn’t true just as I know that one plus two always equals two plus one, though neither I nor anyone else can prove it. So, too, I know that a Nazi who tortures a child to death is less moral than a priest who gives a beggar bread—and that this is so even in a world that is all Nazis everywhere. In the chain of reasoning that took me finally to Christ, accepting this one axiom—that some actions are morally better than others—is the only truly nonlogical leap of faith I ever made. Hardly a leap really. Barely even a step. I know it’s so. And those who declare they do not are, like Hamlet, only pretending.

After reading Sade, I abandoned atheism and returned to agnosticism. I couldn’t quite bring myself to follow my own logic to its conclusions. That is, I couldn’t quite bring myself to accept the existence of God. But I knew the road to hell when I saw it and I chose to go home by another way.

This left me trying to reconcile my zen revelation—No God—with the experience I had had in the delivery room of a living love outside myself. I began to wonder if perhaps the God my zen consciousness was rejecting was not the real God, but an internal one, the voices and opinions and illusions inside my head.

Because postmodernism is right in this at least: there is plenty we take for morality and truth that is mere prejudice. There is much we accept as wisdom that is only cultural habit. There is a great deal we mistake for reality that is simply a trick of the light. It is not a bad thing to clear the mind of the false god of our inner voices. That, I came to think, was the idea behind my satori.

In any case, during the months that followed my experience on Fifth Avenue, zen slowly lost its appeal for me. Sitting still and thinking of nothing, which had once sharpened my sense of life, now began to feel like an experience too much like death, a waste of precious moments that could be spent in action and vitality and self-awareness. Prolonged mental silence seemed a rehearsal for the grave. What’s more, like postmodernism, zazen enforced its own conclusions. Meditate on nothing long enough, and you soon achieve inner nothingness. I assume if you meditated on turtles, it would be turtles all the way down.

And in fact, with an empty mind, a mind quieted through meditation, I had not found the world a Buddhistic illusion in the least. I had seen that world more clearly, that’s all. That clarity—that was the fourth epiphany.

There was just one more to come.

By now, my therapy was nearing its conclusion. My anger, depression, and hypochondria were all things of the past. I was working well and effectively. I was publishing successfully. I was thriving economically. My home life was a joy. It had only been a few years since that moment when I sat in darkness contemplating suicide but both my interior and exterior lives were utterly transformed. I was ready to bring the therapeutic process to an end.

I faced this moment with both eagerness and regret. I had come to love my psychiatrist—my first and only mentor—as I had never loved any man. I’d been broken and he had healed me. It was clear we had developed a relationship beyond the normal therapeutic one. Under other circumstances we would surely have been friends. I knew I could come and visit him whenever I wanted. But it was going to be a sorrow to me to stop seeing him on a regular basis. Still, I was certain this was the right thing to do. It’s true that the unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life is not worth examining. I needed to be free of ceaseless self-scrutiny in order to live.

I entered a kind of mourning period then. After that first therapeutic breakthrough when I had wept on the stairs, it had seemed to me the possibilities for renewal and personal transformation were infinite. But, of course, in the end you discover you are still yourself, no matter what. Some traits are in your nature, born with you. Some scars are written in your flesh indelibly, the signature of history. And some brokenness is simply inherent in the human condition. I was grieving over my limitations and the unchangeable past, mourning the ideal childhood I hadn’t had, and the ideal parents my parents couldn’t be.

I remember one day I was passing the building that had housed the radio station where my father worked most of my life. The station was gone now and the building was being remodeled. I went inside. I rode the elevator up to the floor where the radio station had been. The place had been gutted: walls removed, wires dangling from the ceiling, carpeting torn up. But smell is the sense of memory, and the place smelled the same, a unique smell radio stations had back then, a product, I suppose, of hermetic soundproofing and recirculated air. I drew in that smell and walked through the ruins. I could make out hallways and corners where I had once run and played as a child. I found the newsroom where the gruff reporters had stopped working long enough to kid around with a little boy. I stood in the space where my father’s studio had been, where my father had stood at his microphone creating his amazing array of comical characters with their infinite variety of voices. I thought: It should have been so much fun. We had everything. A roof over our heads and food to eat, an intact family, a father working at a job he enjoyed for good money; a fortunate life. Our house should have been filled with gratitude and charity and rejoicing.

I knew I had to grieve the past, then let it go. Otherwise I would miss the gift these last few years had given me: a miraculous second chance to live out just such a life—a life of gratitude and charity and rejoicing—in a new family of my own.

I left the gutted station and the unchangeable truth of the past, and let them both trail off into the distance behind me.

There came a therapy session near the end where I was talking about these things: dark things, sorrowful things, ugly things too. In the midst of it all, I began to laugh. I couldn’t stop myself. I laughed and laughed, twisted and doubled over in the patient’s chair, clutching my belly with one hand, wiping my eyes with the other. It wasn’t hysterical laughter. It wasn’t tragic laughter either. It wasn’t even happy laughter really. It was just laughter, pure laughter, pure hilarity, pure mirth. Something—no, everything—struck me as funny. Really funny. Funny at its core, in its very nature: my past, my sorrow, my future, this moment; life; everything. I laughed and laughed. I couldn’t stop.

Finally, coughing, giggling, gasping, I managed to force out the question: “Why . . .? Why am I laughing? Why can’t I stop laughing?”

And my psychiatrist, my beloved mentor, my beloved friend, said quietly, “Because this is who you really are. This is how you really see the world.”

The fifth epiphany. The fifth fragment.

The truth of suffering. The wisdom of joy. The reality of love. The possibility of clear perception. The laughter at the heart of mourning.

I had them all now, all the pieces I needed. The five revelations that were really one revelation: the presence of God.