An agnostic encounters God.

• Author: Martin, Jerry L.
• Position: Religion

THE FIRST TIME GOD spoke to me I did not believe He existed. Rev. Billy Graham once mentioned, "I know God exists--I talked to him this morning." Theatrical posturing, I thought. Graham may have been talking to God, but was God talking back? I remembered psychologist Thomas Szasz's comment: "If somebody talks to God, that's praying. If God talks to them, that's schizophrenia."

I had been raised in a Christian home, but those beliefs did not survive Philosophy 101, where arguments for the existence of God were shot down like skeets. Since that time, I had been what one of my professors, Philip Wheelwright, called himself: a "pious agnostic"--respectful of belief in a higher reality but, when it came right down to it, staying eye-level with the natural world, the world of experience as I then knew it.

It is said you do not have to believe in God in order to pray. That is what happened to me. I had been divorced for many years. I always thought I would be happier married but, as the decades rolled on without Miss Right showing up, I began to think she never would. Then one day, the phone rang; it was Abigail Rosenthal. She was a professor at Brooklyn College, a school with an outstanding liberal arts curriculum, which campus administrators were proposing to trash. Rosenthal and a colleague in the history department were fighting the change. They had succeeded in rallying most of the faculty, but the administration was driving a steamroller. She called the higher education organization I ran in Washington, D.C. Could we help? "Yes, that is what we do," I said.

Our only hope was to take the issue to the public, and we did. The battle raged in the press through the spring and into the summer. Rosenthal and I talked almost daily, strategizing and getting the story out. None of the talk was personal, and we never met, yet I found myself thinking, "This is a very remarkable woman." Finally, our side won and, meanwhile, she had won my heart. In fact, I fell in love with her on the phone.

The pace of our phone calls quickened and grew more personal but, other than hanging on her every word, I was not fessing up to my feelings, and she, of course, was playing her cards close--as much as her impetuosity permitted. Thinking to maintain her feminine elusiveness, she nevertheless warned, in a stream of modals, "If there may be or might or possibly could be something personal, at some point perhaps, between us, we should make sure it does not interfere with...