An Atheist Comes to Believe in God

This guy, for some reason, there was something appealing about him. He'd greet me: "How are you this fine day?" He would sit in the middle of the room and he would plunk the Bible down. I was teaching a course on really spiritual esoteric thought: René Guénon and P.D. Ouspensky. These are two heavy hitters in esoteric thought, and I thought, this guy is not going to swallow any of this. Well all right, as long as he takes notes and does the exam, it's fine.

But I liked him. He would always sit there with his Bible and he would criticize. It was strong, but it was not hateful; it was not violent. So I took the chance of trying to listen to him. I would make an effort to practice what I preach and listen to a person I totally disagree with about a subject I know a lot about.

So we started having a conversation, and one of the subjects had to do with interpretation of scripture. At one point we were back and forth and I realized: this man, I disagree with him a lot but he has a heart. This is not a maniac -- he has a heart, he's feeling something. And I started respecting his being, really, in a sense, without any sense of agreeing with his thoughts.

Anyway, he started saying things like: you can't have criticism, you can't have interpretations, you can't have commentaries -- what is right is what's in the Bible. It sounded like the old literalistic fundamentalist kind of thing. But it wasn't, because he was saying something really interesting: let the Bible interpret itself.

And it's true, if you could really receive the Bible, if you could really open to the words -- this leads into the whole big question about how you read scripture. In its deeper sense, scripture was never meant to be an academic study, where you take questions in your mind. In its deepest sense you can only understand real scripture when you need something, when you need truth of a certain kind and you need help. Then scripture speaks. Whether it's Christian, Jewish, or sacred books of the Gnostics, or whether it's Buddhist -- really scriptural texts.

Scripture is not just recording what Jesus said; scripture is men and women coming together, working inwardly to be true to something and together trying to produce something that has at least a bit of truth of the heart. Real scripture, though it might on the surface seem contradictory or violent, these things are often symbolic and can only be understood with the heart and the head together. Not just with the head.

So I started criticizing as a professor, but I didn't want to stay in my head like that with this man for some reason. I could give him all kinds of good jabs, ask him questions that would refute him, but as I went on playing my role as a professor I started coming down into my own heart. This guy started being less rigid. He was a heart coming up and relating to a head, and I was a head coming down and relating to a heart. A beautiful meeting.

This so-called fundamentalist was a human being. Someone might look like an unpleasant fanatic in certain conditions, you begin to speak to them, and -- well, you might be quite surprised.

The article was first published at Religion Dispatches, a Patheos Partner, and is reprinted with permission.

Lisa Webster, senior editor, is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California; her M.A. is in comparative literature from Columbia University. Her work, focusing on religious writing, brings a literary approach to religious studies. She has worked in web and magazine publishing, most recently as managing editor at Tricycle: the Buddhist Review.