pain, infinitely felt—forever.” Plunging into that idea—down, down, down—was the nightmare that, when I woke just before hitting bottom, made me know why they called the sin of Adam the “Fall.” My first luminous sensation of transcendence, that is, was the horror of eternal damnation. Obsessed with hellfire, I once held my hand over a candle to test the pain. I managed not to cry out, but the blister became infected.
In fact, I was a good boy, rarely punished by my parents. But I dreaded punishment all the more for that—which, no doubt, helped me to be good. The most dramatically locating experience of my childhood was initiation into the Sacrament of Penance: Confession. At age seven or so, I grasped that the confessional booth was the judgment seat of God, which was why the priest, God’s representative, was seated, while we the penitents would kneel. First Confession was prerequisite to First Communion, scheduled for the next day. Ahead of the momentous rite of passage, I was instructed in the rubrics of self-scrutiny, which presented me with what I understand now as my first conscious moral dilemma. I was assured by the nuns that I was guilty of sins and that, in the darkened booth of the confessional, I was to explicitly admit them—not so much to the priest but to God, who was in there, listening. Of course, God already knew what my sins were.
My dilemma was immediate, and simple. I could not think of any “sins” I had committed. The examples offered in the preparation sessions—anger, lying, stealing, taking God’s name in vain, failing to say prayers—defined actions and attitudes to which I had no known connection. Not that I assumed innocence. I was convinced that I had committed sins, but without knowing what my sins were, which was surely another lapse. So, on my knees in the darkened booth, staring at the profile of the priest, whose aroma reminded me of my grandfather, I confessed to neglecting my prayers, although, to my knowledge, I had not. I said I had disobeyed my parents, which I would never have done. I admitted having had bad thoughts, with no clue as to what such thoughts could be. In the recitation of my scrupulously memorized Act of Contrition, I solemnly declared to God that I was sorry for my sins less because I “dreaded the fires of hell” than because they offended Him, who “art” all good—and that was not true, either.13 Avoiding the fires of hell was absolutely the point of what I was doing. No sooner, having carefully made the sign of the cross in sync with the priest’s words of absolution, did I push out through the velvet curtain into the shadowy church than it hit me that, in my first Confession itself, I had lied. Now I had a sin—a mortal one. And God knew it! More than that, it was God to whom I had been untruthful! As I knelt at the Communion rail to say my Hail Mary, I stifled sobs, which the nuns took as a signal of my piety—a further deception. My emotion was moral panic, pure and simple, a draft of the poison of scrupulous self-loathing that can ambush me to this day.
I know now that this was not the intended faith of the Bible, yet it came to me with biblical potency. Oddly, perhaps, religion gave me my first taste of despair—for, despite my youth and, yes, innocence, despair was the distilled essence of all these feelings. I acknowledge that I am describing here the initiation of a susceptible and vulnerable child into fear and guilt—yet this is a system of inculcation many Christians would recognize, the mechanism of what’s called “atonement.” As a system of inculcation, it strikes me now as ingenious. In the melodrama of my own recruitment into the Catholicism of my parents and grandparents was recapitulated the central dynamic of the faith—not as it began, perhaps, but as it unfolded across the centuries: Jesus as the answer to an impossible question.
I retraced the well-trod route: Religion made me aware of God, but God was forbidding and judging. God presided over hell, which was far more vivid to me than heaven, where, in any case, the sovereign was not God but God’s Blessed Mother, Regina Coeli. God’s omniscience boiled down to His capacity to see through to the core of my unworthiness. So why shouldn’t I have viscerally grasped the urgent need of some intermediary, someone to take my side against God and keep me safe? Not safe from Lucifer, mind you, nor from my own concupiscence, which was surely the first four-syllable word I learned, but from the Creator of the universe Himself. For such salvation to take, it had to be offered by one who could counter an enemy God’s threat with equally stout protection, a balancing of the scale, which required nothing less than a friend God. And wasn’t that precisely the offer coming, wondrously, from Jesus Christ, the Son of God? Jesus alone could get God the Father to change His mind about me, from damnation to redemption. So, of course, I accepted at once. I took to Jesus as one drowning takes to air.14
In the beginning, Jesus was a boy with whom to identify. A favored picture book showed him by Saint Joseph’s side in the tidy carpentry shop attached to the modest house in Nazareth. Jesus, looking to be ten or eleven, used his foster father’s carving tools to fashion a little bird. He was a boy like me, until . . . until . . . he breathed on the model he had made, and it came instantly to life. The bird’s wings fluttered, and all at once it lifted off Jesus’ hand and flew away. The boy who seemed like me was God the Creator.15
That Jesus grew up and accomplished the purpose of his life by suffering, as my brother, Joe, was suffering, sealed Jesus’ significance. Joe is central here because, of course, his condition was the content of my guilt. I was at the mercy of dread that my sin, whatever it was, had caused his polio. The punishment due to me had been cruelly deflected onto him. My healthy legs were the precondition of the scarred blight of Joe’s.
The starting point of the reflection we pursue here was Elie Wiesel’s question in the face of wretched suffering, “Where is God?” Without meaning in any way to equate my bunk bed with Wiesel’s, I am accounting for the answer that was given to me. When, as an altar boy, I knelt before the crucifix at St. Mary’s Church, it was the battered legs of Jesus that transfixed me. God had legs like Joe’s. That the monsignor refused to let Joe become an altar boy because he had the limping gait that went with such legs was my first lesson in the difference between the all-loving Lord and the Church authorities whose kindness is self-servingly selective. Somehow it had become crystal clear to me that Jesus, as God, could readily have avoided the tortured fate of crucifixion, but he’d freely taken it on—here was the nugget of my first belief—for the sake of my brother, Joe. I loved my brother, and so did Jesus. When I looked down from the top bunk, I saw one for whom God’s love was absolute—absolute to the point of the cross. That love established my first sense of the moral order of the cosmos, just as the stars in the sky bespoke its physical order, and as the sure presence of a guardian angel beside me did the spiritual order. The moral order is love. Love embraced Joe. And me. Where is God? God is here, in the bunk bed with us, as love.
But love is tied to suffering. In the liturgical cycle that was the main calendar of our parish, Good Friday defined the year, just as that holy day’s crucifix-centered suffering defined the depth of the Jesus God’s love for us. As an altar boy, I was regularly present for the solemn veneration of the cross, the stripping of the altar, the dousing of the sanctuary lamp, the clothing of every surface with black. The Gospel account of the Lord’s Passion and Death was the first true dramatic narrative that I made my own—as an Athenian boy, perhaps, would have internalized the journey of Ulysses.
As the entire dynamic of a faith that transforms God from enemy to friend had implicitly rooted me in the so-called penal atonement, so the fate of the loving Son as an appeasement of the judging Father brought me, also implicitly, into a world of contempt for Jews. To indict Jews as the instrument of Christ’s suffering does not go far enough. Jews made that suffering necessary in the first place. Following the sure logic of the salvation Jesus offered, I viscerally grasped why those who put him on the cross—notwithstanding that it was a Roman execution device—had to be the Jews. The matter was simplicity itself, since the enemy God from whom Jesus had come to save us was the Jewish God, also known as the God of the Old Testament.
As the merciful, loving God of the New Testament—the “Abba” of Jesus—began to vanquish the damning, vengeful, lawgiver God of Moses, the Jews were naturally determined to defend their brutal deity.
