But I had a different credential to share.
The phone rang. “Hi, I’m on a break between seminars. How are you doing?”
“I did it.”
“Did what?”
I just grinned that crazy grin as though she could see me.
“You did what?”
“I took Christ as my Savior.”
“Dikkon! Dikkon, really?”
“It sounds so odd to say.”
“Dikkon!” Her tone changed to frustration. “Oh—they’re starting again in a few minutes. But I’ve got to talk about this.”
I barked a short laugh. “Channa, I get it.”
“What happened? Just tell me quick.”
“I was seeing Dan. We’d been talking for maybe two hours—you know us—and he said, ‘Okay, are you ready for some questions?’ and I said yes, and he asked the questions, and I said yes to each one, and—there I was.”
“What were the questions?”
“I can hardly remember. That’s odd, isn’t it? It’s all a buzz. Wait a minute, let me think. Do I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God? That was one, I think the first one. Do I believe He died to pay the penalty for my sins? Yes. And, let’s see. Do I believe that God will accept Jesus’ death as payment for my sins? And there was another one. Oh! Of course. Do I want to take Jesus as my Savior?”
Channa was silent.
“Yes, that was it. Those were the questions. And there weren’t any answers but yes. No equivocation. Just yes.”
“Wow. How do you feel?”
“Stunned. It’s the same as when I finish writing a book, and suddenly there’s something there on the desk that was never there before, and I made it. It’s the same as when the babies were born, and they were suddenly actually there, after all the waiting, and they were real. I feel ten feet tall and filled with air and not . . . Like I don’t even have a body at this moment—I’m just air.”
“I don’t know what to say. Congratulations.”
I laughed. “I don’t know what to do. I want to keep it quiet for a little. It’s so strange. Channa, I feel so free!”
“Oh, Dikkon, I’m so sorry. They’re calling us back in. I’ll call the minute this session’s over. Dikkon, I love you!”
“You could come too.”
“What?”
“You could come to Christ too.”
“Oh, thank you. How nice of you. But I can’t talk now. I really can’t, but I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“We’ll talk about it soon. I mean it—real soon.”
“I want us to be together.”
“Me too.”
“Good-bye, sweetheart.”
We hung up.
I didn’t know quite what to do. I stood in the kitchen with the phone in my hand. I wandered into the living room and sat down on the couch. I realized I still had the phone in my hand. Dimly, I thought I’d better call Pastor Dan and ask him to keep this strange event quiet for a bit.
“Oh, but I’ve already told a lot of people, Dikkon. If you thought before that we are a loving congregation, you just wait and see what happens to you on Sunday!”
And he was right.
EPILOGUE
If this were a Hollywood movie, it would end here.
But it did not end here.
Three months later, Pastor Dan asked Channa the same four questions. And like me, she said yes, yes, yes, and yes.
The three of us were in Pastor Dan’s office. As Channa said her yeses, I was electric with joy. I was crying. Pastor Dan was crying. Channa, being Channa, was not. Instead she grinned at me and said, “Happy anniversary.” And I remembered that it was, and it was.
Also it was Round Island—times one million.
In May, when our youngest child, Rosalind, was home from college, Channa and I were baptized together in the baptistery at Small Point. Many friends, among them some Jewish friends—which I took to be a particular beneficence—were there.
After our baptisms, Rosalind began frequent meetings with Pastor Dan. Rosalind is a woman of Mediterranean womanliness, and though she is the youngest of our children, she is not to be overlooked. She wears her heart on her sleeve. As she said to me, “I wanted to get to know this guy who took away my parents.”
Later that summer, lying in bed one night, Rosalind, who at that point usually spent her wakeful hours struggling back and forth about Christianity—as a Jew, she encountered many of the same doubts and confusions as her mother and I had encountered—Rosalind suddenly found herself happy and calm. She found herself dreaming of the Christmases and Easters she, her children, and her husband would spend with Channa and me, at home, in Maine. Oh, she thought to herself with happy startlement, I guess I must already be a Christian. How nice!
(And she had an idea who that husband might turn out to be—a strong and thoughtful young Christian man from her college in Virginia—which idea has proven to be correct.)
Two days later, with her mother, in Pastor Dan’s office, Rosalind answered four questions, and she was born again.
Shortly thereafter, when I was teaching the adult Bible class before services, Jenn, one of Pastor Dan’s three daughters and Sam’s Sunday school teacher, burst in. “Come quick!”
Not alarmed, because Jenn was grinning from ear to ear, but moving with urgency, I hurried to Sam’s classroom. Channa had just arrived there from choir practice. Jenn prompted Sam, “Tell your father what you just told me.”
“Jesus is my hero. I love him.”
“You want to follow Jesus for your life?”
“Yes.”
Complex theological statements are not among Sam’s skills. He is a young man of utter honesty. He will not say he believes something until he does. He requires a long time to work complicated ideas into a concept that he is able to state simply. One of the gifts Sam has given his parents and his siblings is our experience of his plain, simple, and practical honesty.
“Yes,” Sam said. “Yes, I do.”
Lena and James, as Jews, explore the worlds—and the worldviews—to which they adhere. They continue to ask us questions.
There are precepts of evangelical Christianity that are off-putting to those who are not, at first, inclined to go this way. We know that.
One difficult precept is Bible-believing Christianity’s certainty of its rightness. That certainty comes to the Christian only by the movement of the Holy Spirit within, and it comes only when the person has been called. Another difficult precept is doctrinal. How can there be predestination and free will at the same time? How does that work?
When Channa and I are asked, we do our best to explain.
My father and I—the two of us, we burned over the wrong things, and our flames drove us in different directions.
Dad took thirty years to recover from the death of his mother—he burned about it, and that burn, as he explained, kicked his verse into gear and drove him through a half century of literary prominence. As for me, for thirty-eight years, I burned at the guilt-stake of not warning others about an accident before it happened. In my imagination, I concocted fantastical conversations between the devil and me, elevating my youthful neglect of responsibility into a Job-like confrontation of biblical proportions that had cost me my soul.
Ah, poets.
And their sons.
Both Dad and I suffer from an innate tendency to elevate what are ordinary human occurrences into symbolic hyperbole. We do this, first, because we love the words that we can surround them with—how wonderful we find that creativity!—but, second, we do it because we are afraid that we might be just ordinary, flawed human beings after all.
I was sixty years old when I answered four questions from Pastor Dan and acknowledged that I am, in fact, just an ordinary, flawed human being after all. As an ordinary, flawed human being after all, I answered yes to Pastor Dan’s four questions because I needed forgiveness and love of a greater nature—of a redemptive and a salvific nature—than what I re
ceived from my ordinary, flawed human-being father.
I needed forgiveness and love that comes only from our ultimate Father.
The difference between Dad and me is this. Dad delighted in Christian thought and in the poetic ecstasy that may arise from it and from the natural world that surrounds us. At the same time, he agonized about the power of death over our human desires. He asserted again and again that there is an equal struggle in the universe and in the human soul between the power of good and the power of evil. We are devil and angel, as he so often preached. We have the intelligence to yearn after redemption, but our intelligence sometimes blocks our success at finding it. Art—creating a beautifying answer while using our own creativity—art was the answer for Dad.
I, on the other hand—I knew myself to be eternally damned. It took me many years of increasingly strict Judaism before I was able to articulate this concept, even in my mind. It wasn’t until Dad died and I was truly lost that I was compelled from outside of myself, one March morning in Maine, to cross the road and to learn I could be eternally saved. Then it took me nine months of intense study and testing to make my way to eternal salvation; yet then I was born anew.
Dad was a man who could hold two opposite truths in his mind at the same time; he was a poet. For him, that’s how it worked. That’s how he trained me. I was not at ease with that training, though I was habituated to it and though I loved my dad.
For me, at last, there is a single salvific statement, which now acts within my life.
God wins.
NOTES
[1] Premiere Generation Ink 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 9–10.
[2] Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 202–03.
[3] T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 4: 1928–29 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 39n3.
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