Letter #1: Where to Begin?

What I Mean When I Talk about God

Spence!

All right, how do we start this?

We’ve been having these conversations on walks and in restaurants, in person and online, over field and fountain, moor and mountain, not to mention whiskey and cigars for such a long time now, that I’m afraid our readers may feel they’ve wandered into the middle of a discussion in an invented gibberish. Our ideas are so inter-tangled at this point, we ourselves can no longer tell where any of them originated, and both of us have developed the habit of waving each other off mid-sentence once we’ve guessed the sentence’s end. With “time’s wing-ed chariot hurrying near,” I have exactly zero inclination to try to rehearse the progress of our thought up to this moment, but at the same time, I’m too ancient and cussed to pretend to be open-minded about conclusions we’ve already reached.

So let me start by describing, in the simplest, most general way, what I personally am talking about when I talk about God.

Like the Wise Men of old, only better looking, I came to my faith from afar. A secular Jew — a popular artist in a faithless age — I was 49 before I was baptized a Christian. I took this dramatic step because I was satisfied that God’s incarnation in the person of Jesus, Jesus’s words, his miracles, his death, and resurrection were matters of history. I would not believe in them if I thought that wasn’t so.

This history has practical consequences for me. Again at the simplest level, it means material life exists in active relationship with spiritual truths. It means the human heart and mind can accurately discern some portion of those truths. And it means I carry the image of God within me and can learn to grow toward that image using Christ as a living guide. I have centered myself on that enterprise because Jesus promised that, if I did, his joy would be in me and my joy would become complete. I have more than enough reason to believe that promise to be true.

Here is what my faith is not. It is not a license to carp at others about their beliefs and peccadillos. I am myself increasingly immersed in tradition and the orthodoxies, but I also know that Christ can come to whom he will in whatever guise he will. I have heard the God of love speak in a thousand voices. I am a Christian because I think it’s better to worship what you know, but I also recognize that many call Jesus “Lord, Lord,” without doing what he has told them to do. In short, while I’m delighted to share what has given me such joy, I believe when Jesus said, “Judge not,” he meant exactly that.

So there’s my credo to get the old credo ball rolling. It’s in your court.

A few nights ago, I was standing at the bar at Shapiro’s 40^th birthday party. Our mutual friend, the Beloved Erica, wafted by and ordered a “Jerusalem and Athens.” Wine and whiskey man that I am, I had never heard of this cocktail. But as a rapidly antiquating Jew writing to a snarky young Classics scholar, I expect we’ll be mixing a lot of them.

Cheers.

Your ever-loving Father.