But my religiosity, such as it is, ends there. Questions about goodness and justice, suffering and evil, the origins and ends of the universe, the nature of the self, how to treat one another, how best to live our brief lives while we have them: all these are of passionate interest to me, but I have never found satisfaction or solace in any faith-based answers to them. By constitution, education, or both, I am profoundly skeptical of religious authority, and although I am deeply interested in the many fathomless mysteries of the universe, I do not believe that an omnipotent creator numbers among them.
C. does. From her earliest childhood, she has felt that, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God”; to her, holiness has always been manifest in everything. She grew up in the Lutheran church, studied theology after college, and, for a time, contemplated joining the clergy. Eventually she turned to writing instead, but not before working for a while as a hospital chaplain and in parish ministry. When we met, she was still occasionally preaching on Sunday mornings, if the local pastor was ill or out of town, and presiding, upon request, at weddings and funerals.
This was not the kind of difference between us that could go unremarked, even in our earliest days. My own religious background and irreligious convictions were hardly subtle, and the first time we spent a Saturday night together, C. got up the next morning and went to church. My initial and in some ways most enduring reaction to this—not to her faith but to my falling for someone so devout—was to regard it as a grand cosmic joke. I once had a thoroughly brilliant editor confess to me, after I had waxed enthusiastic about the International Space Station, that he wasn’t particularly interested in anything above the level of the stratosphere. Before C., I had been in relationships with people who, figuratively speaking, felt that same way: fascinated by all kinds of worldly matters but largely indifferent to many of the cosmological and existential questions that I care about most. Such adventures in dating were generally doomed on those grounds alone, but not in my wildest imagination did I expect to remedy the problem by falling in love with someone whose first and most abiding relationship in life is with Jesus.
Still, comic or not, I wasn’t na?ve enough to imagine that this double difference—the gap not only between her Christianity and my Judaism but between her faith and my atheism—wouldn’t matter. There were practical issues, for one thing. I wasn’t sure that I could have a Christmas tree in my home, and I wanted our hypothetical future children to feel at least partly Jewish, and to be better educated about what that meant than I had been. (Our kids, apparently, would go to Saturday and Sunday school.) And there were potential emotional issues as well. I am still sometimes aware of a kind of happiness I can’t bring to C., the kind she might find with someone who went to church with her every Sunday, bowed their head in prayer with her, and stood together with her under the shelter of a shared faith.
But C. assures me that she herself neither imagines this kind of happiness nor mourns its absence, and it is true that I have never sensed in her any longing for me to be other than who I am. Nor do I have any desire to draw her convictions closer to my own; I find them moving, illuminating, and inseparable from who she is, and I would not change them if I could. Still, they remain foreign to me, and sometimes it shows. Unlike C., who has always taken my Judaism and atheism seriously and finds both of them morally compelling, I cannot claim to be consistently charitable about Christianity. Once, when she told me that in her childhood church she had served as both a crucifer (carrying the cross into and out of the sanctuary) and an acolyte (lighting the candles at the altar), I responded with the smart-aleck observation that the latter figure should really be called a lucifer.
She laughed then, just as she has laughed every time I have teased or blasphemed or expressed bemusement about her faith. To the best of my memory, our different cosmologies have never caused either of us any real friction or fear—partly because they are each too robust to require the other’s obeisance or participation but chiefly because, as different as they are, they are not actually all that incompatible. The difficult lesson I learned in my previous relationships was that there is a limit to how close you can get to people who do not care about the same questions you do, not through any failure on their part but simply because their minds orient along different meridians than yours. Conversely, the wonderful lesson I learned from falling in love with C. is that if you do care about the same questions, it doesn’t necessarily matter if you arrive at the same answers. C. and I did not, but our minds turn naturally toward the same things—to the problem of origins and endings and the enigma of how to live meaningfully in between. She points them out in all their endless daily variations to me, like hawks in a tree or herons in the reeds, and I can’t imagine ever needing more than that: to be at her side in the vast fields of mystery.
* * *
—
None of us knew it, of course, but my father had eighteen months left to live when I fell in love with C. I wish he had been with us for five or ten or twenty more years, but I am grateful every day that he lived long enough for the two of them to meet. I told him and my mother about her sometime during that marathon second date, and not long after that, while planning a quick weekend trip home to Ohio to see them, I realized that I very much wanted her to come with me. It was early in a relationship to propose such a thing, and shockingly early in the context of my own past behavior; but I knew that my father was in poor health, and I knew, already, how serious I was about C. I asked my parents what they thought about meeting her and they were enthusiastic, and I asked C. what she thought and she said she would be honored, and that is how, one week later, the two of us found ourselves on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a tow truck.
The middle of nowhere was, in this case, central Pennsylvania. We had left the Hudson Valley on a Friday afternoon, talked until two hundred miles of highway had unfurled behind us and darkness filled the car, then found a nearby place to spend the night. The next morning, we got up, got breakfast, and, twenty minutes down the road, got a flat tire. I had neither a spare nor any form of roadside assistance (in point of fact, I didn’t even have a car; for complicated reasons, I was driving my parents’ own car back to them), but C. had a Triple-A membership, so she called and requested a tow. Then she fetched our iced coffees from the front seat, led me to a shady patch of dandelion-strewn grass, and sat me down beside her to wait.
Meanwhile, three hundred miles to the west, there was a photo frame hanging in my parents’ upstairs hallway. Procured by my mother sometime in the distant past, it was the kind designed to hold one school picture for every year from kindergarten through twelfth grade—designed, that is, to humiliate those of us who endured a ten-year awkward phase. I had never had the heart to ask my mom to take it down, but, although it couldn’t have occupied more than a square foot on the wall, when C. and I got in the car that morning to resume our drive, it was occupying something like thirty percent of my brain. Even in elementary school, when children as a rule are still adorable, I was an aesthetic calamity, and it only got worse from there. In addition to baby fat, braces, and curly hair that I had no idea how to handle, I had absolutely no fashion sense and no desire to acquire one. Instead, I delegated the matter to my well-intentioned but old-fashioned mother, with the result that I showed up at school every day for years looking like a miniature middle-aged woman.