Without my vocation as a writer, my craft, I'm not sure how I would ever have appropriated my Christian faith. And that's a difficult thing to say for someone with my background.

I come from a family of believers. My parents were evangelical Christians. My father a Baptist preacher. My grandfather a Baptist preacher. And my paternal grandmother was the last of the really hard-shell Baptists—an armadillo Baptist. She was a laywoman whose convictions made the two preachers look like infidels.

These people knew things, and they wanted you to know them. They wanted you to believe them, to accept them categorically: one, two, three. They had what I might call the gift of belief. They thought of themselves as the principal exemplars of what they confessed. They were not only evangelical Christians, but at given moments they represented themselves as the vicars of evangelical Christianity. That word, vicars, would be foreign to them, but their faith, their belief, was so personal that they placed themselves, their persons, in its stead: they were belief.

I seem to have been born immune to belief. At least belief on the order that the rest of my family seemed to be capable of. This made things exceedingly awkward. Actually, it made Christianity frightening. The believers I knew seemed so sure of having a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ." That phrase is nearly sacred to my subculture. But what does it mean?

People spoke of 'feeling really close to the Lord,' of being 'high on Jesus.' All of this mystified me.

When I was young I tried to answer this question by projecting myself into the mental and emotional lives of the believers I knew. I found this difficult. I knew nothing of what being a Christian seemed to be for other people in their more extravagant representations. People spoke of "feeling really close to the Lord," of being "high on Jesus," and most especially, of the Lord "telling them things." All of this mystified me. I did not even feel properly elated when I went soul-winning, which I was reasonably good at. During my adolescence, rather early on as a matter of fact, I decided that either the people around me were lying about how they felt or I was damned.

My agnosticism continued on into my early college years. In fact, I remember that my most persistent thought in college was: I don't know. I was concentrating then on some of the great questions. Like: does existence precede essence or essence existence? And to that question I could only answer: I don't know. Another question: is evolution true or simply another paradigm that science will inevitably discard? I don't know. Is there a way within literary criticism to talk about values or must texts submit to extra-literary considerations? I don't know.

The problem is that the kind of questions I was examining in college really do matter. They matter intensely. Whether existence precedes essence or vice versa eventually determines such things as whether we start decanting future generations out of glass containers.

Perhaps I was most disturbed because my own ambivalence denied the deepest impulse of my evangelical subculture. The fundamental project of that subculture was to get what we might call propositional leverage on historical moments. Chiefly two historical moments: the sixteenth century, with its Reformation, and the turn of the twentieth century, at the time of the advent of theological liberalism. The cultural messiah that every evangelical household hoped would get born into it was a little boy who would grow up to be the philosopher that finally, once and for all, came up with the ironclad arguments that would positively force the liberals to renounce their positions in sackcloth and ashes and return to orthodoxy. When I was a child I always saw looming ahead of me years of theological and philosophical and biblical education by which I would surmount the intellectual peaks and become the champion of my family and our culture.

What a project! What a project especially for someone like me—a born unbeliever. Someone who couldn't find a way to begin scaling that Mount Everest of content.

So what was such a poor sad son of an evangelical to do?

I wanted to find a truth that allowed for the greatest expression of my humanity.

I did what was most reasonable. I did what I have finally concluded was most spiritual as well: I did what I liked. I didn't seem to have it in me to climb that mountain of content. I liked to play with the equipment of philosophy and theology but finally I had to admit I just couldn't get serious about it. I found, however, that I was pretty good at a whole different kind of process. I was good at understanding how stories worked and telling my own. I think what I have always longed for within my spiritual life has been felt belief. Not a mere assent to propositions, but the kind of truth Kierkegaard demanded: a truth for me. And I am not easily moved in this way, or at least I am highly distrustful of religious forums like worship services as a place to find this truth. Lately I have had the thought that what most secular people despise about the kind of religion they see on television is its manifestly dishonest emotional pattern. There is an exaggeration about it, a stylization, that's not too far removed from professional wrestling. It's an emotional tableau that's only real by virtue of being witnessed. And the assent of the faithful to its reality appears to the outsider as a collective delusion.

I do not mean to dishonor my lineage, but I have to say that the triumphalism of my evangelical subculture had about it this same emotional dishonesty. For me it has been a choice between believing this or believing myself damned. I could not project myself into the religious lives of my vicars of belief because there was not enough honest humanity there to identify with.

So in my searching out a truth for me I was looking not only for a view that was coherent-the beliefs of a paranoid are coherent—but I wanted to find a truth that allowed for the greatest expression of my humanity. I know that instantly this raises all kinds of objections about emotions as unreliable guides to behavior. But I would like to say a word, in a Romantic fashion, for the emotions. Our feelings give us important information about who we are, difficult to interpret as they may be. As long as our blood courses through our veins the change of our pulse and blood pressure will be vital signs, on a number of accounts, including our belief structures.

In my quest to find a truth for me I needed to find a means of knowledge that would be emotionally, as well as intellectually, satisfying. In my first years of college I was a philosophy major. My evangelical subculture was still governing the trajectory of my education. As I went forward in my studies I found that my favorite philosophers were also novelists. Existentialism exerted a considerable influence on me because I had been mesmerized by the novels of Sartre and Camus and Malraux. I found in these authors what I did not find in analytic philosophy: thinkers who were trying to read the text of the world and decipher its meaning. Even though these secular existentialists came to the conclusion that man invents his meanings—that the universe, in itself, is silent—their method of inquiry, the novel, impressed me as the best way to think about the great questions. In these novels I found a union of reason and emotion; not only did they teach me what existentialists thought, they also rendered what it felt like to look at the world from this point of view. I remember quite clearly comparing how the existentialists thought and felt to my own deepest responses to life. I was attracted to the brave stance of the existentialists, to their rebellion, to what seemed the maturity of looking the world's absurdity in the face and defying that absurdity through sheer exertion of will. One would certainly have to be a man to do that! And at that time I wanted above all to grow up, to prove my own courage.

And yet I could not deny that the world seemed to mean and mean intensely. I could not deny my most basic wish: that the same author who created my heart, with its one desire to give and receive love, had also created the universe as a sign of his love for me and the medium of our union one with another. I wanted God to be there. I found it impossible to give up on what my heart told me: that its very wish could only be there because of his presence. I realized that the existentialists knew this about themselves as well-they had, among their other gifts, a terrible honesty. And I knew that in response to this call of their hearts they had never heard a divine reply.

I could not deny my most basic wish: I wanted God to be there.

And yet, in the midst of the collective delusions of my subculture, its emotional and intellectual dishonesty, I had experienced, I thought, something of God's presence. I'm tempted here to speak in the same ghostly fashion as the subculture, to imply that I saw miracles, heard voices, witnessed changed lives. But it wasn't that. Maybe I had had these kinds of experiences; whether I had or not didn't seem all that important.

What did keep me hooked into the faith, in some way, was that a faithful reading of my experience made a kind of sense that a despairing reading did not. I was plagued by the notion that given faith and despair as interpretive guides to the great text of the world, faith might be able to account for much more. I wasn't entirely sure, but all those Bible stories I had learned as a child seemed to provide significant paradigms that were more true to the diversity of experience than The Stranger.

So what I found in the existentialists helped me to re-discover an important part of my Christian tradition that I might have wandered even further away from through a systematic approach to theology and an affected secular sophistication. The existentialists brought me back to stories as my way of thinking.

I'm not sure many people think of stories as a means of thinking. We think of stories as entertainment, and we think of them as expressing ideas and values. That is not what the person who will write takes them to be. The fictional process (says John Gardner in The Art of Fiction) is the writer's way of thinking, a special case of the symbolic process by means of which we do all our thinking. Though it's only an analogy, and in some ways misleading, we might say that the elements of fiction are to a writer what numbers are to a mathematician, the main difference being that we handle fictional elements more intuitively than even the subtlest mathematicians handle numbers.

To put storytelling and science on a par may still shock some of you. Yes but, I can hear you say, we have sent men to the moon with the technology developed out of science. We have created the atom bomb! Think how powerful science is.

The story of the supremacy of the German race put six million Jews to death in gas chambers. Think how powerful stories are.

As a man thinks, so is he, the Scriptures say. The Holocaust illustrates the connection between thinking and acting. The stories we tell ourselves in all seriousness—our beliefs—become vitally important. And while philosophy rarely makes up its mind as to questions like, Does existence precede essence, in practice we do make the decision, every day, as to what story we are going to live out.

In talking about the fictional process, John Gardner, once again, draws a startling analogy on how fiction has meaning, how it operates in our life, and how religion, most especially Christianity, has meaning for the believer:

In orthodox Christianity the believer is told that all formal codes, even the shifting codes of situational ethics, are supplanted by "the person of Christ." "I am the Way," Christ says, meaning, by one standard interpretation, that if the believer will give up his heart and soul to Christ, letting Christ's personality "enter in" like a daemonic [motivating] force, he can then act rightly in every situation, because in fact he is no longer the agent; Christ is—a divinity who can do not wrong. The believer's actions flow not from any theory of right and wrong but from what an objective observer—a sympathetic non-believer, say—would call an ingested metaphor: the life and personality of Christ. Long and devout study of Christ's life and works has given the believer a model of behavior too subtle and complex for verbal expression but nevertheless trustworthy.

In the same way, fiction provides, at its best, trustworthy but inexpressible [in critical terms] models. We ingest metaphors of good, wordlessly learning to behave more like Levin than Anna (in Anna Karenina), more like the transformed Emma (in Jane Austen's novel) than like the Emma we first meet in the book. This subtle, for the most part wordless, knowledge is the "truth" great fiction seeks out.

What I found in the existentialists helped me to re-discover an important part of my Christian tradition.

I think in the act of this composition I have been able to clarify in a new way what "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ" means. I am sure we would not want to limit the sense of the life of God in our lives to this literary perspective—for, at least in my adopted Catholic tradition, God comes to us not only as sign, metaphor, in the Eucharist, but as the signified as well, himself. But a very good way of starting to think of what this means comes through the literary analogy. In Gardner's sense I have a personal relationship with Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.

I understand how Bloom looks at the world from the inside out. If Joyce were alive to write another book in which Bloom figured, I feel as if I might almost be able to predict how Bloom would act—in the same way as I might be willing to predict how an intimate friend would act in a hypothetical situation. The communion we have in friendship breaks down the ego barriers in this way. Perhaps I have engaged in this highfalutin investigation only to come up with my mother's persistent advice: do what Jesus would do. But there is a problem here. Most of Catholic moral theology, as I understand it, is based on our friendship with Christ. Are we being Christ's friend? Are we doing what his friend would do? In order to be his friend we might think first of doing what he would do; thinking what he would think.

I am not sure, however, if we are able to empathize with Christ in the way we can with a merely mortal friend or even a fictional character. Chesterton, I think, said that all heresy begins in psychology, meaning that when we try to see the world from Christ's perspective we are far too inclined to see it through our own, and then validate our own perspective by virtue of this inadequate process. Saint Paul, on the other hand, can teach us much. He recommends that we identify with him as he identifies with Christ. That has always seemed to be part of the saint's own often noted egotism. And yet in this context we can see that Saint Paul was talking about the communion of the saints as a key to the Christian life—the way in which the friends of Christ fill out our imaginations of what it must be like to be Christ's friend.

I found my first vicar of belief when I found the whiskey priest in Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory. As I have said, the intellectual and emotional profile of those around me as I grew up, at least in their representations of what it was like to be a Christian, struck me as alien, impenetrable. When I came to Greene's whiskey priest I breathed a sigh of relief and found, at last, a saint with whom I can identify: a man who has violated his calling in hedonistic pursuits and whose main sense of the Christian life centers in his comical inadequacy.

Here is the whiskey priest confronting at the last his leprosy, his disease, his humanity, his death:

When he woke up it was dawn. He woke with a huge feeling of hope which suddenly and completely left him at the first sight of the prison yard. It was the morning of his death. He crouched on the floor with the empty brandy flask in his hand trying to remember an act of contrition. "O God, I am sorry and beg pardon for all my sins...crucified...worthy of Thy dreadful punishments." He was confused, his mind was on other things: it was notthe good death for which one always prayed. He caught sight of his own shadow on the cell wall: it had a look of surprise and grotesque unimportance. What a fool he had been to think that he was strong enough to stay when others fled. What an impossible fellow I am, he thought, and how useless. I have done nothing for anybody. I might just as well have never lived. His parents were dead—soon he wouldn't even be a memory-perhaps after all he wasn't really Hell-worthy. Tears poured down his face: he was not at the moment afraid of damnation—even the fear of pain was in the background.He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him at that moment that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint.

An unbelieving teacher of mine once said: 'I am not a Christian — I hate Christianity, but when I read Flannery O’Connor, for the time that I am reading her, I believe.'

The whiskey priest's foolishness—his faithfulness to his mission despite the shambles of his life—was the foolishness I tried to create once again in my novel The Holy Fool. I had found in Graham Greene and the tradition of the Catholic novel of which he was a part a means of thinking along the lines that I wanted to be thinking—and believing. To do this I could not simply imitate The Power and the Glory or the other authors—Flannery O'Connor, Evelyn Waugh, François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, among them—who influenced me. I had to engage in the same process of thinking that they had engaged in: the fictional process. Because I believe in fiction as a method of thinking, I write about what I don't know but would like to. My novel, The Holy Fool, began when I was twelve years old. At that age a friend of my father's walked into our house and broke down emotionally. Like my father he was a pastor. He believed in a creed virtually identical to my father's. And yet the things that he believed had not indemnified him against being broken. I wondered why. For a long time. So I wrote The Holy Fool to find out.

Of course what I was really writing about—I can see clearly in hindsight—was the brokenness in my own life. Some of it I knew only then in the form of the fiction—for there are episodes in the novel that were prophetic of what was to come later. And the method I used there to heal that brokenness was essentially an interpretive method, a trying out of one and another biblical story to see whether such a brokenness could be taken up into the divine mercy.

I mean "could be" not chiefly in the sense of whether God was capable of such forgiveness, but whether God himself could be forgiven for the brokenness of the world, and whether the grounds of that forgiveness might be glimpsed in how such brokenness must be part of his glory. I was trying to understand the theological notion of the "happy fall." In my little way I was writing Paradise Lost, most especially in its prophetic dimensions as a divine comedy, which I suppose all writers who are Christians are writing at all times, everywhere. Here is my spokesman summarizing what he has learned through the course of the drama. It is his description of the Passion. He speaks aloud:

"As his death approached, Jesus must have thought about it more and more. He thought about it in the way you and I might anticipate open-heart surgery. We would know that the surgeon was going to cut us open with a knife from below the neck to our navel. We would know that our flesh would have to be pried apart so that the doctors would have room to operate. We would know that our ribcage would have to be cut down the center with a high-speed circular saw and broken open with a tool like a tire iron and that finally our heart would be placed on a table outside our bodies and repaired while our life was sustained by a machine. As these things occurred, we would be anesthetized, but unless we died on the table, we would return to our senses and know all too well what had been done. Jesus looked forward to his crucifixion in much the same way, except that he knew he would not be anesthetized; he knew that it would be necessary for him to refuse any relief that was offered.

"Why else do you think he prayed in Gethsemane, sweating drops of blood? From his first breath he had known the pain of this life, and he went to his crucifixion in the awful knowledge of what it would be like, in detail, to the blackness of the end.

"Still there was one surprise. It was the worst news that anybody had ever had.

"Scourged so that his back looked as if it had been slashed with razor blades. Crowned with a diadem of inch-long thorns so that his vision of the world in those last hours was tinted with blood. Spat upon, made to carry his cross until he dropped from exhaustion. Nailed to it through his hands and feet. Every muscle in his body starting to cramp. His lungs beginning to fail—he had to push up with his legs from the peg through his feet to inhale, every breath an agony that only delayed a more terrible pain. In this unimaginable state, Jesus Christ was stunned with a knowledge more horrible than any pain that the flesh is capable of. He cried out, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? And it was at that moment, when the Son was abandoned by the Father, when the Godhead received into itself the full measure of this world's condemnation, that Jesus Christ proclaimed the first credo of every Christian. For I say unto you, beloved, that until we have faith which calls upon God precisely when God is silent, we have not the faith of Jesus Christ. Through our Lord, the Godhead received the knowledge and judgment of hell and death, which is to die eternally aware of being abandoned by God. That was what Jesus Christ knew in that all-encompassing instant on the cross. It is no more than the fate of man and mankind, and no less.

"I took several deep breaths. I heard my next words, like the forerunners of an unseen yet advancing army, already out in the air.

"But be of good cheer! As the Apostle Paul writes in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians: 'If in this life only (that is to say, not in the life beyond the grave) we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that sleep.... For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.' "Because we have a certain hope in Jesus Christ, we must not betray him by our unwillingness to die with him in his uncertainty. And when we are uncertain, we must claim, in our own agonies and passions, that he is our God, my God. As the Apostle writes: 'For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known.'"

That final verse always strikes me; it summarizes so well, so tersely, what I have been laboring to say here: that our deepest desire is not merely to know, but understand, and in that understanding to realize the object of our quest: God's love.

An unbelieving teacher of mine once said: "I am not a Christian—I hate Christianity, but when I read Flannery O'Connor, for the time that I am reading her, I believe." I think what I have tried to do in my work is to dream up contemporary characters who are capable of belief, and through having a personal relationship with them, so to speak, believe myself. They are my vicars
of belief.

This is a writer's faith. It is this writer's faith. And as curious as it may be, it has hooks, I think, into that great process of the communion of the saints by which the faith is sustained.