Does God Exist? Author Tackles Ultimate Enigma

Nothing concentrates the mind on God, to slightly mangle an old saying, more than the imminent prospect of one’s own death. That explains why Reynolds Price, among the most accomplished and honored novelists of his generation, was moved to think out loud about God during his decade of struggle with spinal cancer in the 1980s.

“I believe,” Price wrote in “Letter to a Man in the Fire,” his latest book, “that the means of my survival worked outward from a sense of God’s awareness of my ordeal and his willingness to watch and to brace me, generally in deep silence, in my own fierce hope to live.”

Price has written more than 30 books, and they can be approached as two separate and distinct bodies of work. One consists of his novels and stories, ranging from his career-making first novel, “A Long and Happy Life,” and perhaps his best-known work, “Kate Vaiden,” to the trilogy of novels titled “A Great Circle.” The other body of work includes his elegant and innovative contemplation of the Gospels, “A Palpable God” and “Three Gospels,” and a couple of memoirs that attempt to draw spiritual meaning out of his own physical illness, “Clear Pictures” and “A Whole New Life.”

“Letter to a Man in the Fire” falls into the second category. At 108 pages, this little book presents itself as an extended essay or, perhaps even more aptly, a religious tract. For Price, the existence of God and his experiences as a cancer survivor are inextricably related, and he is willing to allow that one was the cause of the other: “What I claim to be,” he writes, “is a watchful human in his seventh decade who harbored a . . . killing invader deep in his body a few years ago and who thinks he was saved by a caring, though enigmatic, God.”

The musings that Price offers here began as a response to a letter from Jim Fox, a reader of Price’s cancer memoir “A Whole New Life.” Fox was suffering from the cancer that would ultimately kill him, and he posed the two hard questions that appear as a subtitle to the book: “Does God Exist and Does He Care?” Price was inspired and provoked into answering those questions, first in a letter to Fox, which he turned into a public lecture at the Auburn Theological Seminary, and now in a book.

Price’s theology is informed not only by a close reading of the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, but also by an intimate familiarity with the insights of other thinkers and writers who have struggled with the same tough questions, ranging from Dante to Dostoevsky, John Milton to J. Robert Oppenheimer. Indeed, the book is richly decorated with the elegant wisecracks of a well-read man. When considering the weighty religious beliefs of T. S. Eliot, for example, he pauses to observe that Eliot, “that most affluent and meticulously dressed of all the half-blind trekkers through the wastes of God’s desertion,” always struck him as looking like “a starved heron miles short of an oasis.”

So what are Price’s answers to the questions in the subtitle? Yes, God exists and God cares: “What I assert with no serious doubt is that our one universe anyhow was created and is maintained by a single divine intelligence who still exists and continues to oversee his primeval handiwork.” But, aside from the poignant moments when he had a vision of Jesus washing his wounds and heard a voice he identified as God’s, Price refuses to pin himself down on the details: “I’m more than aware that such an assertion of belief . . . may be of no more value than a paranoid’s conviction that the CIA has planted a listening device in his molars.”

His readers will not be surprised, I suspect, to find that Price’s theological speculation ends with a whimper rather than a bang, a “stumbling guess” rather than a ringing confession of faith. “I wish there was more honest solace to bring to a fellow creature as tried as you are,” Price writes to the reader for whom he first set these words down on paper. “Beyond a doubt, the Creator is far more mysterious than we can suspect or than human organs will ever prove capable of comprehending.” To his credit, Price is too intellectually honest, and too respectful of the mystery that goes by the name of God, to say more.

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Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is the author of, most recently, “Moses: A Life” (Ballantine).