Veritas

In the summer of 1979, I left Harvard for the priesthood. I was twenty-four years old, newly married, and had been a first-year graduate student working towards a Ph.D. in American History. I was a restless student, less interested in history than I had thought I'd be. Something else was pulling me. I had been raised in church. My father was a bishop. Now I wondered if God was calling me to ministry. Not knowing quite how to sort that out, it occurred to me to sit down and read the New Testament, which I had never done before in one sitting. Of the gospels, it was the Gospel according to St. John that struck me. Scene after scene, it invited belief that in Jesus Christ the world was face to face with God. I wanted to believe that. My heart said yes. But now my head was bothered by a question. These things the Bible said concerning Jesus--were they true? If so, why weren't we discussing them at Harvard? In history seminar, Christ was seldom mentioned. A little anxious, I began to poke around the Cambridge book stores, sampling scholarly perspectives on the history of the gospels. The results were mixed. Randomly, I opened a book by Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels, which fueled my doubts. A Harvard friend recommended Hans Kung's On Being Christian, which I found reassuring. Then I revisited C.S. Lewis, who so confidently reinforces St. John's message. Lewis readers are re-invited to believe that in Christ the Lord above had visited our world.