The Great Good Thing Read Free Page A

nations of the earth.
    And I knew there was one person who would believe exactly that, one person who would think me a coward and a traitor to my kind, without question, without a doubt: my father. We were not friends, my father and I, and there were many times through the years when we had been at daggers drawn. We lived on opposite coasts. We didn’t see each other much. We rarely spoke and, when we did, I never told him more than the most superficial news about my life. But he was old now, and I was middle-aged. We were both good men, or tried to be. We were both men of integrity, or tried to be. He had been a kind and generous grandfather to my children, and there had been peace and even amicability between us for at least a decade. My baptism would end that peace, I was certain. My father had once told me he would disown me if I ever converted. I knew he would never forgive me. I hated the thought of bringing trouble to my house.
    For five months, winter into spring, I drove the hills of Santa Barbara and prayed. I questioned my sincerity and my intentions. I analyzed the philosophical steps that had led me to the brink of conversion, holding them to the light one after another like a jeweler with a set of gems, turning each one this way and that to study its facets and pronounce upon its qualities. I reviewed the experiences that had gone into my decision. I tried to tell myself the story of my life as a novelist would tell it, highlighting the formative moments, exposing the ways in which personal history shaped my ideas and possibly distorted my view of the world. And because I am a novelist, and because books I’ve read and books I’ve written have molded my mind as much as the events I’ve lived through and the people I’ve met, I revisited and reconsidered the stories and poems and works of philosophy that had meant the most to me, the authors who had served as my invisible mentors through a life in which living mentors had been in short supply.
    This memoir is, to some extent, that long meditation remembered. I don’t mean it to be an autobiography or a psychological confession or anything like that. It records my memory of things, even when it might be faulty, because my memory guided me at the time. It’s definitely not intended as an exposé of my own sins or anyone else’s; I hope to leave out as many of both as possible! I’ve also tried to tiptoe quietly around the private lives of anyone who did not directly affect my ultimate decision, especially the lives of my brothers, three men I love and admire, who have the right to remember our shared family history in their own ways. Nor am I trying to preach or argue with or prove anything to anyone. I’m not a theologian or a philosopher. I’m just a barefoot teller of tales, as I frequently explain to my long-suffering wife. Anyway, God is not susceptible to proofs and disproofs. If you believe, the evidence is all around you. If you don’t believe, no evidence can be enough.
    All the same, I feel the need to explain myself to myself, to set my reasons down on the page where I can look them over. Other men are born into their faith and never leave it. I was planted elsewhere and had to find my way. And when my five-month pilgrimage through the Santa Barbara hills was done, I came home rejoicing. I was convinced and fully convinced: my mind was God’s, my soul was Christ’s, my faith was true. How had that happened and why? Given the spiritual distance I’d traveled, given the depths of my doubts, given the darkness of my most uncertain places, and given, most of all, the elation and wonder I felt at the journey’s end, it seems to me a story worth telling.

CHAPTER 1
G REAT N ECK J EW
    T he town I grew up in is named Great Neck. It is situated on a peninsula on the north shore of Long Island, about twenty-five miles east of Manhattan. It was, in my boyhood, as it is today, a wealthy town, a well-tailored suburban refuge from the swarming