At the writing desk, Casey read her Bible chapter for the day, and afterward, she jotted down her verse. She’d begun this practice during her freshman year after an office-hour visit with the esteemed religious studies professor Willyum Butler—an atheist who converted to Catholicism in his late thirties. Butler was a West Indian from St. Lucia who had been educated at Cambridge. He reviewed her mediocre paper on Kant and Huxley, and sensing the student’s awe and fear of the subject matter, he asked her plainly, “Casey, what do you really think of what they are saying?” Casey swallowed and confessed an attraction to agnosticism. God’s existence, Casey said in a stammer, couldn’t be proved or disproved. It was easier to reconcile her life with Huxley than Presbyterian orthodoxy—the passionate belief of her joyless parents.
Willyum nodded encouragingly. “So you are a determined fence sitter.”
“Yes, I mean. . . Am I?” she answered.
Willyum laughed, and then Casey did, too.
Willyum liked his student’s earnest face and admired her willingness to talk about her faith. Her seriousness reminded him of his early beginnings at university. He felt compelled to give her something—to tell her a bit about his struggle. But he didn’t want her to think that he was proselytizing, because he didn’t believe in that, and it would have been wrong to do so in his capacity, he thought. He loathed thumpers as much as he disliked ex-smokers. But he also believed that if there was a cure for cancer, how could he withhold such a thing? “I think. . . if a mind can. . . a mind must wrestle before declaring victory. Really wrestle. Do you understand?” Willyum did not release his frown.
Casey nodded, not knowing what to say.
“It’s your soul you’re fighting for.”
She wanted to know what he thought of the soul—obviously, he believed that it existed. But she didn’t feel entitled to ask any more questions. There were other students waiting outside the closed door. At times like that, Casey felt like a bumpkin, and his kindness and humility affected her deeply. In longhand, he drafted a short reading list for her. That afternoon, she would go to the bookstore and buy Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Chesterton, Lewis, de Beauvoir, and Daly—blowing most of a paycheck from her weekend job at Sabine’s. As she gathered her things to leave, she couldn’t help herself from asking: “Do you still struggle? I mean. . . wrestle?”
“Every day, I read a chapter of the Bible.”
She nodded—her father and mother did this, too.
“And every day, I find a verse I cannot stomach, make peace with, or comprehend. I write it down on my calendar.” Willyum opened his leather-bound diary and showed her his scratchy writing. That day he was reading Ecclesiastes. “I pray for clarity,” he said, but did not mention being on his knees, hands folded, head bowed.
Casey rose from her chair and shook his hand good-bye, but in her mind, she was busy tucking away his proffered scrap of personal history like a jewel.
Then, in the second semester of her junior year, Professor Butler was killed in a car accident with his fourteen-year-old son, and Casey went to a memorial service attended by hundreds of mourners. Seated in a back pew with no one she knew, Casey could not stop weeping. Prizewinning poets flew in from all over the world to read in his honor. The university president and the janitor who cleaned Butler’s office eulogized him. Casey regretted not having told him that each morning since their talk, she read a Bible chapter for ten minutes and took an additional minute to scribble down her verse of the day. It wasn’t wrestling exactly, but more like approaching the mat. After he died, she began going to church each Sunday, though she told no one. She still didn’t feel comfortable around people who identified themselves as Christians. But she discovered an unexpected dividend—her anxiety diminished for a while, and for that, she felt grateful.
In her block print, Casey wrote out her day’s verse from the book of Joshua: “When I saw in the plunder a beautiful robe from Babylonia, two hundred shekels of silver and a wedge of gold weighing fifty shekels, I coveted them and took them.” What was a shekel worth today? she wondered. She closed her Bible and notebook and stored them away in her messenger bag. She checked her face. There was little she could do except pull down the brim of her beach hat and wear her sunglasses. Lipstick seemed beside the point, but she applied some anyway. It was June in the Upper East Side of Manhattan—she kidded herself—perhaps the hotel staff might attribute her appearance to rhinoplasty. She decided to go shopping.