In the beginning, I was a selfish, obnoxious brat who somehow thought I was a good boy — and I couldn’t stand Jesus. Protestant Sunday school teachers made a feeble effort to turn me into a Christian as a child, but with no success. They taught me absurd songs like, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” From an early age I knew it was wrong to believe something merely because you could read it in a book or hear a well-known person saying it. I did not know Jesus loved me because the Bible told me so, and I was angry that grown-ups thought I was stupid enough to fall for such obvious nonsense.
And Jesus wasn’t just a made-up character in a storybook, I thought; he was a bad character, who favored letting evil triumph in this world. Turn the other cheek, give bad guys even more than they demand from you, never say a word about putting them in jail or killing them as they deserve, and finally bow down to them and let them kill you — that was the life and teaching of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” That was straight out of the Bible (Matthew 5:39–41; 27:38–50), and anyone who claimed to believe in Jesus but didn’t act like that was nothing but a hypocrite.
Me? As a boy, I favored the way of life of Western heroes I saw on television. They sure didn’t act like Jesus. They killed bad guys or put them in jail; they saved beautiful, admiring girls from the bad guys; and they lived to tell the tale. There was only one problem: it didn’t work in real life.
I got into a few fights with bad boys when I was young. The bad boys always won, and the police cared nothing about putting them in jail for their bad deeds. Obviously I couldn’t save any girls from the bad boys if I couldn’t win the fights, and no girls seemed to have any interest in being saved by me anyway. I started to despair of ever seeing good triumph over evil.
Even worse, although the Western heroes never died in the shows, I knew I was going to die. “What will happen to me after I die?” I once asked my mom. I regret to say that her answer was entirely unsatisfactory. Although she was supposedly a Christian then (though later became a Unitarian), she told me I shouldn’t worry about it because it wouldn’t happen for a long time. What kind of answer was that? I was heading toward a waterfall in a flimsy barrel, and I shouldn’t worry about it because the waterfall was still far away?
With Christians like that, who needs atheists? You will not find it surprising that anger, loneliness, foolish thoughts and feelings, and despair were my daily bread for years—and they were not highly nutritious, to say the least. So it went through years largely filled with boring idiocy, though not entirely. I became a Quaker for a while, because the Quakers were in favor of peace (this was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the Vietnam War), though they couldn’t actually attain the peace they favored. Over the years, I met a variety of other Christians, and they introduced me to the writings of C.S. Lewis, who wasn’t at all like the boring, half-hearted, mediocre Christians in Sunday school. I still didn’t become a Christian myself.
I also wasn’t happy, and I began pondering suicide. I don’t mean to say I was ever on the brink of actually harming myself—far from it. But I was miserable, and it led me to think on the matter nonetheless. As I reflected on it, though, I came to the conclusion that it would be the most idiotic thing I could possibly do. I was Me, with a capital M! I was a city unto myself, my only fortress in a hostile world! How could I ever throw myself, my only beloved self, away into nothingness, or worse than nothingness?
I was alive, and I wanted to keep on living. I didn’t know much, but I did know that. And I had to admit I hadn’t given myself life, and I couldn’t keep myself alive forever. But if there was any way for me to live forever, I was going to find out — and I wasn’t going to give up without the most terrific fight.
Do I Really Have to Become a Christian?
I tried hard to find fulfillment of my desire for limitless life in something, anything, other than the Christian religion I had detested since childhood, but with no success. In every other religion and philosophy I could find, the concept of eternal life seemed deficient, unworthy of acceptance by a fully human person. There was nothing in them like a man who was also the one true God, who conquered death by dying and rising alive, who led the way to boundless fulfillment of every fully human longing for all who would follow him.
I didn’t like it any more than C.S. Lewis did when he was unsuccessfully struggling to avoid believing in God (Surprised by Joy, Chapter 14), but if I really had to become a Christian to attain limitless life, I decided I was going to do it. I turned again to C.S. Lewis for guidance, and I tried to read the Bible with an open mind. It didn’t take me too long to see the truth of the apostle Paul’s words: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). If Jesus conquered death for us, we too could rise again and live forever; if He didn’t, we couldn’t, in the absence of some other way to attain limitless life that no one had yet ever seemed to find.
So, I had to wonder, did He or didn’t He? Were those who proclaimed His resurrection liars, body-snatchers, clever myth-makers, seeking to control the gullible masses by deceiving them? Were they merely mistaken — mass-hallucinating or taken in by unknown tricksters with remarkable power to pull off a fake resurrection — or misinterpreting what they saw, heard, and touched with their own hands? Or were they simply, almost incredibly, telling the truth?
Their opponents’ first reported story was that they were lying (Matthew 28:11–15), which appeared far more likely than that they were merely mistaken, but there seemed to be a fatal flaw in the story. However, while people may often lie to get themselves out of trouble, rarely do they lie to get themselves into trouble. Absolutely never do they lie to get themselves into trouble if their aim is to survive and control the gullible masses, which will not occur if they get into really big trouble and suffer martyrdom. If there was any truth in the Bible accounts, then the apostles knew they were facing really big trouble for proclaiming the Resurrection, and they did it anyway. They must have really believed what they were saying.
What if there was no truth in those accounts, and the whole thing was a fabrication by clever tricksters and myth-makers of a later age? Well, it couldn’t have been a much later age, because it was historically verifiable that the Roman Empire was taken over by Christians within a few centuries, with no blood shed but their own — they, too, must have really believed what they were willing to die for. It was ascertainable, as well, that the Christians were already widespread and well known a mere 30 years or so after the (alleged) Resurrection, when the emperor Nero saw fit to blame them for the burning of Rome. I had to think it more likely than not, at least, that there was no fabrication, that the story of the Resurrection and its consequences was true from the beginning.
But was “more likely than not” good enough? If the Creator of the universe was so concerned for the wisdom and well-being of his rational creatures, I had to wonder, why did he not provide indisputable proof of the truths he wished them to accept? Why did Jesus Christ show Himself unmistakably to one man who doubted the truth of His resurrection, and yet proclaim, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” (John 20:24–29)?
At the time I could not have explained my faith, any more than C.S. Lewis could say how he came to believe. When he set out to go to the zoo one day, he said, he did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God; when he got to the zoo, he did believe (Surprised by Joy, Chapter 15). It was the same for me. I, too, found myself coming to believe, coming to be born again, but with little more knowledge of how and why it was happening than when I was born the first time.
At long last, upon reflection, I think I came to understand better how and why it happened as it did. When something is indisputably evident, then it can be accepted with little or no free and rational choice. But the right use of the power of free and rational choice, above all, is what makes a person fully human. To have this power is to be made in the image and likeness of God; to use it rightly is to become like God, who freely and wisely chose to create the universe. Those who believe without having seen, then, are blessed because they freely choose what they have good reason to believe, but the evidence does not force them to believe. St. Thomas Aquinas, I learned, says this is why they have the “merit of faith” (see Summa Theologica II-II, Q. 2, A. 10).
And that was what I did. Did I have good reason to believe I was created by a God who wanted me to hope for limitless life? You bet I did! What was the alternative? At best, that my desire to live forever was a meaningless, unexplainable illusion, to which I should respond “ho-hum” and try to forget about it — until my barrel went over the waterfall and smashed me up forever. At worst, that I was living in a nightmare fantasy in which a vicious creator gave me this desire, only to laugh like a maniac when it wasn’t fulfilled. You tell me: which belief is the best supported by evidence and rational inferences? And which belief is the most consistent with living a free, rational, fully human life?
The suffering and death of Jesus before His Resurrection, which I found so loathsome as a boy, turned out to fit in perfectly with this belief, and with my long-suppressed desire for good to triumph over evil. The Western heroes who always made good triumph over evil in this life weren’t real. Bad guys often won out in this life. By letting the bad guys do their worst, and showing that they still couldn’t win in the end, Jesus had shown the only realistic way toward the ultimate victory of good over evil.
When I was thinking about this, I came across a helpful illustration in a story about a really tough bad guy, Stalin, who later became the Communist dictator of the Soviet Union. Before the Russian Revolution, the story goes, Stalin was arrested and put in a prison camp. One of the soldiers’ grim amusements was to make the prisoners run between two lines of soldiers while the soldiers whacked them with rifle butts. Most of the prisoners were terrified and ran as fast as they could, but not Stalin. Stalin walked between those lines of soldiers — slowly —while they were hitting him as hard as they could and blood was streaming down his face, to show them they could never beat him down, no matter how hard they tried.
I couldn’t help seeing that Stalin wasn’t the originator of that kind of behavior. Jesus was. “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” was even tougher than Stalin, and He showed that the bad guys could never beat Him down even when they killed Him.
Well, All Right — But What Kind of Christian?
And so, incredibly, I decided to become a Christian — but what kind of Christian would that be? I looked again to C.S. Lewis, especially in his book Mere Christianity, for guidance. He said a mere Christian must belong to a church, but he declined to say which church. It was obvious from the Bible, too, that Christians were supposed to belong to a church (Matthew 16:18, 18:17; 1 Timothy 3:15). But, the question remained: which church?
I still knew it would be irrational to believe everything in the Bible without knowing why it should be believed. Nevertheless, I decided to read the Bible with as open a mind as possible, to see if it could tell me which church was the right one—if there even was a right one. (I had a Protestant Bible, so it had fewer books than a Catholic Bible, but it turned out to be good enough for the purpose.)
Though I had never been a believing Protestant, I had readily absorbed the Protestant view on one point: the Catholic Church must be rejected. (I had particularly admired the story of the great Martin Luther defying the Catholic Church to take a wife who had been a nun, though I then cared nothing for the Christian religion that Luther had claimed to reform and purify.) Now the Bible itself, in which the Protestants claimed to place their faith, led me to question whether their view of the Catholic Church was the true one.
In the Bible I saw bishops (Philippians 1:1); the founding of the Church of Christ upon Peter (Matthew 16:18); the exaltation of the apostles who ruled the Church (Acts 15); the great importance of baptism, which I had never received as a boy (1 Peter 3:21); and the continued offering of the Body and Blood of Christ, through which a man could be condemned by receiving unworthily (1 Corinthians 11:29). I saw the holiness of matrimony, partaking of the everlasting union of Christ and His Church (Matthew 19:3–9; Ephesians 5:22–33). Most importantly for my purpose at the time, I saw the great prayer of Christ that all who believed in him should be one, and visibly one, so that the world would know that the Father had sent him to save the world (John 17).
Was the Catholic Church the one that had this visible unity from the start? Was the Catholic Church “merely” the Christian Church, from which the others had unjustifiably split off? I had to think these things might well be true, if the Bible itself could be believed.
But should the Bible be believed? If so, why? I came to see that, if there was any good explanation, it had to be the one provided by the Catholic Church: the Bible should be believed on the authority of the Church; the Church should be believed because it received its authority from God Incarnate, Jesus Christ; and Jesus Christ should be believed because He has conquered death, which no mere man could do.
“Lord, I Believe; Help My Unbelief!”
Uncertainty remained. Could it be overcome? By now I knew the prayer of St. Thomas the Apostle, that man of immortal memory who had said, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). I could see that, if God did love His human creatures as alleged, and if He had power to become a man and conquer death as it seemed He had probably done, then He could and would hear my prayer and help me, even if I was not sure it would happen. I did pray for help in believing with certainty in all that was good and true, if God was there to hear and help me. I know now that the God of all truth and goodness did help me to pray and to believe.
The choice was between life and death. My Creator — yes, by now I knew it would be far too silly to think I didn’t have a Creator — had made me so that I might freely choose life. To have faith in my Creator, I didn’t need to leap blindly into anything; I only needed to choose to take one long step of faith, praying for help, with my eyes wide open, across a bottomless abyss.
So I freely chose to believe, though God must have been the first mover in this, as in everything. He helped me to believe by leading me freely to choose what I rationally saw as best — best for myself, and best for all His creatures — while rationally inferring that what was best was also true. Having chosen, I sought the help of the Catholic Church to make me firm in what I had chosen, not like double-minded men and women who flap around wildly in whirlwinds of hot air, such as I had been for far too long.
My first try at seeking the help of the Catholic Church was not entirely successful. I talked with a priest who recommended the Dutch Catechism, which I later learned was infamous for its failings. It seemed to me to contain few, if any, concise, solid statements of what one must believe and do to be a Catholic.
I briefly backed off, but soon tried again with a different priest, who recommended Father John Hardon’s Catholic Catechism (this was in the days before the present Catechism of the Catholic Church existed). Though not superbly concise, Father Hardon’s book succeeded for me where the Dutch Catechism had failed — it outlined what one must believe and do to be a Catholic. After learning and accepting these things, I received the Sacraments of Initiation at the Easter Vigil in 1980. I then began the long, slow, ongoing process of transformation from a goofy, mediocre, fairly unwise new Catholic into someone more nearly worthy of the glorious liberty of the children of God.
Whatever Became of That Horrible, Selfish Brat?
I needed help, and plenty of it. I was blessed to be accepted into Thomas Aquinas College. There I managed to acquire a modicum of learning from great minds of the past who wrote great books (St. Thomas Aquinas above all), and found a great wife while doing so.
Having a wife who agreed with me (and the Church) that children must be welcomed as gifts from God, I needed a good way to make a living. Having little or no skill with anything but words, I considered becoming either a lawyer or a professional philosopher. A couple of years in graduate school cured me of any interest I may have had in the life of a professional philosopher. Why? I could hardly put it better than Pope Leo XIII did in Aeterni Patris (section 24): “Systems of philosophy multiplied beyond measure, and conclusions differing and clashing one with another arose about those matters even which are the most important in human knowledge… a multiform system of this kind, which depends on the authority and choice of any professor, has a foundation open to change, and consequently gives us a philosophy not firm, and stable, and robust like that of old, but tottering and feeble.”
I thought it would be most unwise to risk putting myself and my growing family in the arbitrary power of any set of professors with clashing conclusions, shifting foundations, and feeble philosophies. My moderate interest in the possibility of teaching at a genuinely Catholic college was far outweighed by my horror at the thought of teaching anywhere else. Besides, I was not even good at understanding the immeasurably multiplied systems of modern philosophy; for example, I am sure I would still fail to comprehend Kant’s ethics even if I forced myself to study it until my eyes popped out!
In the end I had to conclude that I would do better to become a garbage collector than a professional philosopher. This I proceeded to do, under the patronage of St. Thomas More. (As a lawyer, I collect a very special kind of garbage, consisting entirely of paper and electronic documents with legal language in them; I process it and try to render it harmless, often by writing and speaking persuasively about why it is rubbish and should be rejected.)
When I graduated from Thomas Aquinas College in 1985, the commencement speaker, Dr. Ralph McInerny, shared a quote from the famous author Herman Melville: “Be true to the dreams of your youth.” I’ve always remembered it, and I find that, to a remarkable extent, I have been true to the dreams of my youth, with a great deal of help from my Creator. Even my unrealistic dreams of Western heroism have found their fulfillment. I still wouldn’t be able to win physical fights against bad guys, but I’ve won many verbal fights, defeating bad guys (and their attorneys) seeking to evade the demands of justice. And, in lieu of actresses impersonating beautiful, admiring girls, I have someone far better: my wife.
What’s more, unlike when I was a boy, I now know why the Bible should be believed. I no longer find the suffering and death of Jesus loathsome and incomprehensible; and I have some realistic hope of attaining limitless life, through the saving power of God. But what about turning the other cheek, which I used to think signified a willingness to let evil triumph in this world? I learned the right perspective on this once-appalling teaching from St. Thomas Aquinas. Here’s an illustration of how you can only get a true understanding of what the Bible means by listening to the wisdom of the Catholic Church, as manifested by the great Doctors of the Church — not just by reading the Bible and trying to figure out what it means on your own.
Turning the other cheek is an example of not resisting evil. Sometimes, not resisting evil is the right thing to do, or even the only thing that can well be done, under the circumstances. (There are, of course, other times when we need to resist evil, to punish evildoers for the protection of other people and the common good, so far as possible.) So when Jesus says things like “I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil” (Matthew 5:39), it may sound like He’s giving a commandment that must be obeyed always and everywhere, like “You shall not commit adultery,” but He isn’t. He’s actually giving us an affirmative command to exercise the virtue of meekness, by which we govern our feelings of anger — and His affirmative commands have to be obeyed in the right way, at the right time, for the right purpose, and not otherwise.
So, led by my Creator, I’ve been true to the dreams of my youth, which I used to imagine were totally inconsistent with being a Christian. They weren’t. Actually, my life for some time now has been not entirely different from that of a Benedictine monk, except that I’m married and a lawyer. True, those are big differences — but like the monks, I pray and work. I’ve even come a fair distance toward fulfilling St. Paul’s admonition to pray without ceasing — especially to pray for the conversion of sinners.
