Heaven knows

One night in early 1989, when I was a 20-year-old New York University senior and a reluctant agnostic, the phone rang in my tiny dorm room.

It was Gary Selman, a forklift salesman who had a modicum of fame as one of local radio's "Two Nice Jewish Boys." The co-host of his show was Jonathan Cahn, pastor of the Messianic Jewish church Beth Israel; together, as Jewish converts to Christianity, they spread the Gospel with a hefty dose of self-conscious Noo Yawk attitude. (Cahn was then well on his way to becoming a self-styled modern-day Elijah. Today, his online bio proclaims, "Descended of the line of Aaron, he has been asked to sound the Jubilee trumpet and minister among the nations.")

I was expecting Selman's call. My mother was a member of his church and she had begged me to let Selman try to convert me. She assured me that he wouldn't put undue pressure on me; he just wanted to reason with me, she said. (And if you believe that, I've got a forklift to sell you.)

I resisted at first, but my mother kept up the begging. Eventually, she wore me down; I promised her I would take the call.

Once he got me on the line, Selman started out using humor. From there, he moved on to Gospel illustrations, and, finally, his trump card — salvation.

He informed me in no uncertain terms that all non-Christians were going to hell.

I didn't have much trouble believing I was going to hell. As a depressed and lonely college senior, I thought I was there already. In fact, I believed — although I probably didn't bother explaining this to Selman — that if there was a God, He intended me for hell. There was no other way, I thought, to explain the fact that He had resolutely refused to grant me faith after I had pleaded with him so many times, during countless nights when my depression stung me so hard that I wanted to kill myself.

Many times, I had tried to "get" faith at church with my mother, or on my own, through reading the Bible. At best, I could feel reasonably hopeful for a week. Then something would happen to remind me of how far I was from being the person I longed to be and living the kind of life I longed to live, and doubt would once again overtake me.

I was in no mood that night to endure Selman's proclaiming the doom of the unsaved. But getting him off the phone was another matter.

Racking my brain, I thought of one dead person I knew whom I had no doubt was in heaven, assuming there were such a place: my Grandma Jessie. She was, I believed, the purest soul I had ever met. I told Selman the idea that she could be eternally drowning in the lake of fire was unthinkable: "You can't tell me that my Grandma Jessie is in hell."

"Well," he said, "if she didn't accept Jesus, then she is."

That was it for me. I was ready to hang up. But before I could, Selman insisted I promise to ask God for something I wanted that I didn't believe was possible.

I told him I would, just to get him off the phone. Then I did ask God for what I wanted, and my prayer was granted the next day.

So I "believed" for a few days — until things stopped going my way and my faith, dependent as it was upon answered prayer, once again evaporated. It would be more than 10 years before I would receive faith that was based not upon fear of the afterlife or a desire for worldly favors, but simply upon the unmistakable light of truth.

Whatever good God may have brought out of Selman's failure to convert me — and who knows whether, had it worked, it would have stuck — his presumption of my grandmother's damnation effectively kept me a non-Christian for years to come.

As a Christian since 1999, and a Catholic since last year, I am required to stand by my religion's beliefs about the kind of faith that is necessary for salvation. At the same time, it is wrong for me to ever claim certainty about the state of another person's soul. Only God knows the hearts.

From time to time in my life, others have wrongly judged my soul. Sometimes it has been someone I loved, and it has hurt me deeply. With Holy Week upon us, if you are reading this and I have, at some point, tried to make myself the expert on your heart's purity, I would like to take this opportunity to say that I am truly sorry.
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