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Someone Moving in a Far Room

Though my mother raised me as an atheist, she taught me a good-hearted morality. But by the time I reached my teens, I was often inconsiderate of others. After reading Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger, I began to wonder where morality came from, since I did not believe in God. I went from book to book, asked people questions, and gradually became more and more convinced that morality was simply a creation of society, something forced on humans for the sake of utility.

When I went away to college at Columbia University in New York City, I discovered a philosopher who said, in so many words, “You are correct. There is no basis for morality. A strong man must overcome it.” He was Friedrich Nietzsche, and though his impressive prose style disguised an empty and nonsensical worldview, I could not see this at the time.

My disbelief in morality allowed me to indulge in drugs, and slowly I became a thieving heroin addict who sold whatever drugs I could get my hands on in order to keep up my habit. I often stayed up all night, went to bed at 9:00 a.m. and awoke again at 7:00 p.m. I went for months without showering. My drug abuse got so bad I had to leave school, and I went to stay with my brother in Boston where I couldn’t get heroin. Many nights I wished I could put a bullet in my brain.

I began to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings, where I found kind-hearted people who spoke of a higher power. They had a glow around them, like a loving family, so that I went home with a feeling of new possibility: Maybe I could be a good person.

When I got back into Columbia, I became sincerely interested in spiritual experiences. But I tended to distort them from the very way I approached them, like a man who, as he leans down to pick something up, has to move his hanging scarf aside. From the time I was a kid, I used to feel a chill in my spine from certain passages in literature, and so I became more attuned to that feeling, which got especially strong when I encountered real love or truth.

I began to listen to a Fundamentalist preacher on the radio each night, and, as he spoke those arcane Old Testament names and explained strange mysteries whereby a husband and wife become like Christ and the Church, I got that spiritual feeling deep inside. I did not believe in Christ at all, but, as an experiment, I asked Christ if he was the Son of God and if he might show himself to me somehow. Something felt different from that point. I still didn’t believe, but I think the slow transformation started then—I felt a flutter of awareness, as if I saw someone moving in a far room. Shortly after I spoke those words, however, things really started going wrong.

Jesus said that if a man becomes good and then becomes bad again he is worse off than before, because the evil spirit who inhabited him wanders from the man’s soul and, when he comes back to find the soul swept and clean, invites seven more evil spirits to inhabit it. I believe something like this happened to me when I stopped listening to the preacher and looking for the spiritual feeling. I no longer stole or did heroin, but I felt terribly alienated from everything good, and only my studies at school kept me going. I read constantly, driving myself so hard that I got dark circles under my eyes.

After I graduated, the job I got as a copy editor for the American Society of Civil Engineers lasted less than a year because my health had gotten so poor. It was at that job, though, that my life began to take a turn for the better, because the Pope literally appeared across the street.

It happened this way. I became infatuated with a young woman working in the same office, and I pursued her relentlessly. But I had become so cold and barren that she could see this easily, and she avoided me. After a while, I wrote her abusive e-mails every day, until finally she told me never to make another advance toward her again.

I sulked away and wandered around New York City in the rain, thinking of what a shambles my life had been for so long, not just in how I had treated her but how I treated everyone I knew. My whole life disgusted me.

As I crossed through Times Square, I began to think about that spiritual feeling I used to listen to, and, though I did not want to trust it or go back to it, I thought that anything was better than the life I now led. So, standing in Times Square, I stopped and said to the feeling, “I give in. I will do things your way from now on. I may not like your way, but it’s the only shot I have left.”

The next morning, I arrived at the office, which lay directly across the street from the United Nations Headquarters, and I heard a lady nearby say excitedly, “The Pope is coming!” I had finally given in and decided to follow the spiritual feeling no matter what, and here was the Pope passing by under my window. I didn’t try to get a look at the Holy Father because my spiritual feeling seemed to me beyond such things as popes. But all this did strike me as a great coincidence even at the time. Throughout the day, I listened to the spiritual feeling, which got stronger when I acted patient or kind or tried to put away my pride. I felt it strongest when I apologized to the woman I had harassed for so long, and she forgave me.

The next day, as I walked toward the U.N. Building where the Pope had been, I listened to a taped performance of Hamlet on my personal stereo. I got to a part of the play that triggered one of the most intense spiritual experiences of my life: The evil king, Claudius, has killed his brother, and as he tries to repent he says (to paraphrase), “O, my trapped soul that, struggling to be free, becomes even more trapped. Help me angels! Bow stubborn knees!” At that exact moment, as I walked down 46th Street, the Spirit shot down into my body and electrified every nerve, opening my mind up to a vast, holy reality.

Eventually I got so sick I had to cut back to working part-time, and I spent most of my days learning about this spiritual feeling and trying to follow it where it led me. The more I got to know it, the more it told me to let go of anger, resentment, and dishonesty. When I started studying the Bible, it seemed that whoever Jesus was, even if he was not the Son of God (I thought), he understood this spiritual experience so much better than I did.

Though I still did not believe in Christ, I listened often to Evangelical preachers on the radio whose storytelling power opened up new possibilities of kindness. I felt that, even though these Christians were mistaken in believing that Jesus was God, they had two thousand years of spiritual experience and insight to offer.

I wanted to find a community of people who felt the same way about spirituality I did. And so I went to all sorts of churches around New York—from Buddhists to people who claimed to speak with the dead to Swedenborgians and their highly intellectual sermons to Unitarian Universalists with their belief that all religions could be combined into one. But the feeling always told me I had not found the right place.

One afternoon, I decided to walk over to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and see what it was like, even though I thought of Catholicism as a false and rigid religion. When I walked into the church, I received the Spirit so strongly that I felt the community I had sought had been right here all along. I began to walk straight up the aisle toward where Mass was being celebrated, but a kindly security guard saw me and, thinking I was a tourist, informed me that this part of the church was only for those who had come for Mass. Without thinking, I said that I was indeed there for the Mass, because it seemed to me the most natural thing in the world to say.

As I slowly became able to think rationally again, I asked the feeling if I were supposed to become Catholic, and how that might be possible, given that Catholics believed so many absurd things that no one could possibly take seriously. The feeling seemed to say to me silently, “Just give it some time, Chris. We will get there.”

Soon I was too sick to work even part-time, and I went back home to Florida to stay with my mother. I now read the Bible constantly, took notes on it, and began to think that, whoever Jesus was, he knew the feeling I felt so well—a feeling I felt more and more comfortable calling “God.” One day I remember thinking about how Jesus said that whenever anything good is done to another person, that act was done to Jesus himself, and I wondered how a man could say such a thing.

That night I had a dream: I looked at myself in a mirror, but my face seemed distorted. Then, for the first time in my life, the spiritual feeling entered my dream and with such force that I was frightened my mind would get washed away. When I woke up the next morning, I asked the feeling if Christ was the Son of God, and it said yes. I felt resurrected, and I walked outside where the whole world seemed transformed. I went out to lunch with my mother, and she said, “You’re glowing!”

The same day I began to talk to Christ about the Catholic faith, and I thought of that feeling I had in the cathedral. I went to a Catholic bookstore and picked up books of apologetics. They made such clear sense. We could not even know the canon of the Bible without the Catholic Church. And then there were the arguments for a sacred Tradition that sat alongside Scripture like a mother explaining to her children what the photos in the album meant. There was the apostolic succession, where we traced ourselves back through the patriarchs who braved the pagan onslaught. I talked to Jesus about all this, and then, very simply and without fanfare, opened myself up to the possibility that Mary might have some special place in my spiritual life. Instantly I felt the most serene holiness flood my soul, like a jeweled ship that had sailed in from far places.

I began to go to Mass, where I would just sit in the back and watch, since I had never been baptized. I had no idea about kneeling or holy water or anything else, though all these things surrounded me like half-open doors into gradations of spiritual light. Soon I joined the program for those preparing to enter the Church, and after more than a year, I went to the cathedral in the diocese of Orlando for a special bishop’s Mass, where at the end of the ceremony, the soon-to-be-baptized like me were to write our names in the Book of Life.

The whole time, I saw Mary standing beside me, so much like a portal into the land of everything good that I could not stop weeping. After I signed my name in the Book of Life, I looked up, and I saw a balcony of heaven rising diagonally into a great light that was the fulfillment of my every longing.

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