“No, Dr. Lasman, what I deserve is to be dead. What I deserve is to be burning in Hell right now for what I did to my wife and friends. And I certainly didn’t deserve to have her stick by me like she did for those two years, doing everything she could to pull me back from the abyss. But from where I had sunken to, neither she nor any other human being could help me.” Now it was his turn to let out a short, low laugh. “I’ve heard it said that justice is what we deserve, but mercy is what we want. Well, I ended up getting mercy instead of justice. And I pray to Jesus Christ every day for giving me that mercy, and I’ll say that prayer every day to the day I die and it still won’t be enough. I’m a very lucky man, Dr. Lasman, and I work hard never to forget that.”
“And how long have you been… recovered?”
“Since March 17, 2012.”
“That’s pretty specific.”
“It’s not something you forget.”
“Was that your first AA meeting?”
“No, not exactly. Something a lot more personal.” He looked down at the floor. “Dr. Lasman, when I quit drinking, one of the things I swore off was lying. Lying for any reason. I always do my utmost to tell the truth, no matter what the consequences. So I’m quite aware that what I’m about to say may cost me my chance at heading the Jerusalem Project. I stopped drinking because I had a religious experience. A vision, in fact.”
“Okay,” I said carefully. “If you don’t want to talk about it…
“No, I think it’s important for you to know.” He took a deep breath and stared off into the distance. “I had just come home. It was just after ten P.M. and I was even drunker than usual. My driver’s license had been taken away six months before, so I had staggered home on foot from a tiny hole-in-the-wall bar some ten blocks from my house. After a few minutes I managed to unlock the front door and stagger inside. I made it halfway up the stairway—the same stairway I had thrown my wife down—when I tripped and fell. I landed sprawled out flat on my back at the foot of the stairs.
“While I was lying there, I felt myself—my spirit—lifted up, and a moment later I was next to my unconscious body. I remember standing there, looking at myself—looking at my uncombed hair and the stains on my jacket, watching a thin trickle of blood seep out of the edge of my mouth. Then I heard someone call my name, and when I looked my house was gone.
“I was standing in the middle of a vast, dimly lit plain, the sky an odd shade of purple, no sun or stars visible. I heard the same voice call my name again, and I turned to see a man in a hooded robe standing by a riverside. I walked over to him and asked who he was and why I was there. And that’s when he pulled back the hood, and I saw it was Jesus Christ.”
I was silent, struggling to keep my face impassive as I watched Phil tell his story and stare off into the distance. Whether it was true or not, I could certainly tell that he believed it was true.
“He didn’t answer me at first, but merely pointed to the river. I looked down and saw that it was a river of blood. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of bodies in the river, all floating face down.
“ ‘This,’ He said, ‘is your future. This is the endpoint of the path you walk.’ I started to ask Him what He meant, but just then a great wind came sweeping down the plain, drowning out my words.
“ ‘Remember,’ He said, and then His body was suffused with a blinding white light.
“Just then I came to, stone cold sober, at the foot of the stairs. It was already morning outside.” He sighed and shifted in his seat. “Well, since then I haven’t had a single drink. I spent the next two weeks reading the Bible and apologizing to my wife, my co-workers, and everyone else I had wronged during my binges. Jesus Christ changed my life. It’s as simple as that.”
I sat there silent for a long moment, not knowing what to say. What could I say? Though I knew he thought he was telling the truth, I didn’t for a moment believe that he had received an actual vision from God Almighty. Alcoholics saw all sorts of things in the grip of delirium tremors. What was I supposed to tell him? The vision that had changed his life was merely a particularly vivid case of the DTs?
No. Instead what I said was: “That’s quite a story.”
“No story, just the truth, as hard as it may be to believe. Dr. Lasman, I’ve talked with some of your colleagues here and I know that you’re not a Christian. That doesn’t bother me. The state of one’s soul is a personal matter, and I wouldn’t presume to judge another man. ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged.’ But if swearing on the Bible isn’t enough, I give you my solemn word as a scientist that I haven’t had a single drink since that day.”
“I believe you,” I said truthfully. “Of course, the university will want documented proof of your recovery.”
Phil nodded. “I have random drug test records for that entire period, at least once a month, showing that I’ve been clean and sober the entire time.”
“I’d like to get a copy of that. Not that I don’t believe you, but the Federal Drug Rehabilitation Act requires us to keep the paperwork on file.”
After that we discussed various casual, unimportant things: politics, the weather, football. I bid him goodbye and promised to get in touch as soon as we made a hiring decision. When he left my head was still spinning from what he had said, though not for the reasons you might expect.
Next to his confession, I suddenly felt inadequate. During my early years as a scientist, I thought I had been searching for Truth—and when I thought about it, it was always with a capital letter. Truth was the first thing that had led me to physics—and, not coincidentally, atheism.
When I set my sights on physics, religion was one of the first things I gave up. After all, how could I look for Truth when a fundamental part of my worldview was based on a he? How could I dare to pull back its veil of mysteries when I cloaked my own fears in such threadbare robes? No, I had to strip off the comforting lies of God and the afterlife, of Christ and the soul. Only when I was naked of such deceptions could I approach Truth on equal terms.
But after my meeting with Phil, I was shocked to find my commitment so hollow. Where once I had held Truth above all else, my own life was now a tapestry of shabby lies. Each disillusionment, each compromise, each falsehood I had to commit in order to climb the administrative ladder, was a thread in that tapestry.
In short, Phil had shamed me. Here was a devout Christian, a fervent believer in the most threadbare and shabby mass of lies known to man, and yet he still found the courage to relate his wrenching personal tragedy with the absolute truth I had lost.
It was that, along with his scientific ability, that finally made me hire him.
Until he succeeded, I never had cause to regret it.
As Phil continued to capture Christ’s wave event, I was going through a very different kind of intellectual crisis. During that time I had not yet abandoned my atheism, merely retreated with it to higher, more intellectually defensible ground. Obviously, Jesus of Nazareth had lived, and preached, much as was described in the Bible. But just because he had lived did not mean he was divine.
For those few weeks it seemed entirely possible that Jesus thought he was God, or the son of God, or whichever grade of hair-splitting distinction Christian theologians use to categorize divinity. True, almost all the recorded miracles (the loaves and fishes, the raising of Lazarus, etc.) occurred before Phil’s entry point into the wave event. But after the crucifixion, I thought our messiah would turn out to be just another corpse.
I quickly found out how wrong I was.