Dinner with a Perfect Stranger

by David Gregory

  “Who says that? I’ve never heard those things, except the military part.”

  “Revered Muslim writings. The Sirat Rasul Allah. The Hadith collections of Bukhari, Muslim, and Abu Dawud. The History of al-Tabari, among others.”

  I didn’t have any basis on which to argue the point with him, so I returned to his original statement. “But you could say the same about Christianity, that it revolves around whether God spoke to some guy.”

  “No, the Bible has over forty authors spanning fifteen hundred years, all with a consistent message. That argues for, not against, a divine origin.”

  “Still, who’s to say that God didn’t speak to Muhammad?”

  “If God did, he got some things wrong.”

  “Like what?”

  “Muhammad wrote that I was never crucified, that God’s angels rescued me and took me straight to heaven.”

  “You mean Jesus.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  I decided not to rehash that debate. “So maybe Muhammad was right.”

  That elicited a slight smile. “No, he wasn’t.”

  “Oh, of course. I forgot. You were there.”

  “But you don’t have to ask me,” he continued, ignoring my comment. “My crucifixion is historically documented, not only by early Christians, but also by non-Christian historians of the time. Throw it out, and you have to throw out everything you know about ancient history.”

  I couldn’t disagree, actually. You could debate about the resurrection, but Jesus’s crucifixion was a certainty. I was about to ask another question when he resumed.

  “Islam teaches other things that aren’t true.”

  “Such as?”

  “That the Bible has been altered over time so that what you have now is a highly corrupted version that can’t be trusted.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s false. Any scholar in the field will tell you that. The Dead Sea Scrolls, among other things, prove the reliability of the Hebrew Bible. And you have over five thousand early manuscripts that validate the New Testament. You have what the authors wrote. It’s up to you what to do with it, but you have what they wrote.”

  He moved his wineglass toward the top of his place setting. “But that’s not the biggest problem with Islam.”

  “Which is…”

  He looked around the room for a second, scanning for I’m not sure what. His eyes returned to me. “What is your deepest desire?”

  Where did that question come from? “I’m not sure I want to get into that.”

  “Then let’s talk in generalities. What do people in their hearts most deeply long for?”

  “A raise?” I kidded. All right, half kidded. He didn’t respond.

  I thought for a minute, glancing around the room myself. The ravioli guy and his girl were still making cow eyes at each other across their cleared table. “I suppose people’s greatest desire is to be loved.” I looked back at my host.

  He leaned forward, and his voice softened. “I don’t mean to be too personal, Nick. But in your experience, has another person ever fulfilled your need for love?”

  He is getting too personal, whether he wants to or not. Besides, I thought we were talking about Islam. I resisted the urge to look away again, though I did shift back in my chair. I thought of my dad, of Mattie, of Elizabeth, my girlfriend at NIU. “No, not really.”

  “That’s because another person can never satisfy it. Only God can. He designed people that way. But Muslims never have that hope. You can’t have a personal relationship with Allah. He is someone to worship and serve from afar, even in paradise. It doesn’t meet the deepest need of humanity’s heart. Why would God create humanity with this deep need, then never meet it?”

  I kept my eyes on him for a moment, then picked up my wineglass and took a drink. “Maybe Muslims don’t have all the answers. But I don’t think anybody does.”

  “No, they don’t. They only think they do.”

  He spoke not sarcastically or arrogantly but with almost a hint of sadness. Uncomfortable with the subsequent silence, I glanced toward the river but saw in the window only the reflection of my face and the back of his head.

  “What if God doesn’t even exist?” I looked back toward him. “Maybe the material world is all there is.”

  “Then you have the problem of design.”

  “What, that there’s no way it could have happened by accident?” It was a common argument and, frankly, a good one.

  “You’re aware of Roger Penrose,” he said.

  “Yeah. Helped develop black hole theory.”

  “Do you know the odds he calculated of a cosmic accident producing this orderly universe rather than chaos?”

  I hadn’t read Penrose’s calculation, but I had seen similar comments by Hawking, Dyson, and others. I guessed: “One in a million?”

  “Try one in a hundred billion, to the one hundred twenty-third power.”

  “Not very good odds.”

  “And that’s just the macrouniverse. He omits the design complexity of biological life.”

  He had me there. The more I’d studied cosmology, the more apparent the design in the universe had become. I thought those who promoted the idea of random chance had more of a philosophical ax to grind than science on their side.

  I reached for a piece of bread, spread butter on it this time, and took a bite. “Okay, fine. I agree that there has to be some transcendent being, not just physical existence. And you’re great at poking holes in all these other religions. But it seems to me that all religions, including Christianity, are different paths to the same place. I mean, everyone is looking for God, and—”

  “Are you?”

  That interjection caught me by surprise. Am I looking for God? You wouldn’t think so, observing my life. I decided to ignore his question.

  “As I was saying, it seems like everyone is looking for God in their own way. That’s what I like about the church our friends Dave and Paula attend. They embrace everyone’s beliefs and try to help them on their path to God.”

  “There’s one problem with that thinking,” he said.

  “What?”

  “There is no path to God.”

  That was the last thing I expected to hear.

  5

  TO MY RIGHT, the waiter lingered with our salads, for how long I don’t know. Our pause cued his approach. Maybe he avoided interrupting “serious” conversations. I guess this one qualified. I wasn’t quite sure how I got suckered into a God discussion, but it was more captivating than my college prof pontificating on comparative religion. Mr. Drone, we called him, for his preferred lecture style.

  The tortellini salad across the table jogged my memory. That was what Mattie had ordered that was so good. Oh, well. I pulled my selection closer and reached for a new fork.

  “Care for some tortellini?” my host asked, pointing to his own salad. Before I had a chance to respond, he reached over, grabbed my empty bread plate, scooped half of his portion onto it, and handed it to me.

  “That’s too much,” I said in polite protest.

  “This place serves enough food for two dinners. I have plenty.”

  He was right about the servings, and I wasn’t about to argue. I took the dish and pushed my own salad to the side. “Thank you.”

  I took a bite. “This is ungodly.”

  He tasted it as well but didn’t respond. I had a couple more bites before getting the conversation back on track.

  “What do you mean, there’s no path to God? Every religion claims to teach the way to God.”

  “Oh, there’s a way to God,” he said. “Just not a path.”

  He had lost me. From the look on my face, he probably knew it.

  “What I mean is this: a path is something you travel down by your own effort to reach a destination. But there’s no such path to God. There is nothing you can do to work your way to God. That path doesn’t exist. It—”

  “Wait a minute. That’s what all religio
n is about, trying to get to God. How can you say otherwise?”

  He took another couple of bites before responding. “Did you ever get into trouble as a kid?”

  “Are we changing the subject?”

  “We’ll get back to the other.”

  I wasn’t too sure I wanted to talk about me anymore, although in truth it was a favorite subject of mine. “I don’t think this place stays open late enough for all my troublemaking history.”

  He smiled. “That bad? Give me a highlight.”

  I reached over to sample my own salad. My mind raced from getting my first spanking to playing Halloween pranks to teasing my sister Ellen to aborting a plan to smoke bomb the high-school teachers’ lounge to…No point in bringing up the present. I backtracked.

  “When I was four, my mother made these Christmas decorations—miniature drummer-boy drums. I don’t know what she used them for. Anyway, she’d covered the sides with green and red crepe paper, plus somehow she had attached spearmint Life Savers on the sides.”

  He started smiling, probably knowing where this was heading.

  “So she had them in the utility room, on the washer and dryer. And I snuck in there and plucked a Life Saver off one of the drums. Then I crossed through the kitchen, where Mother was, to get out. But a few minutes later I went back in, saying, ‘I forgot something’ as I entered the utility room. When I tried it a third time, my ‘I forgot something again’ wasn’t too convincing.”

  I started chuckling to myself. “She opened the door, and there I was, stuffing my pockets with as many Life Savers as I could. That was the first spanking I remember. Actually, my dad did it when he got home. He always used to do it. He wasn’t too mad, really. But Mother was, so he had to.”

  I paused, lost momentarily in my childhood. “Once Dad got really mad, though.”

  “When…”

  “When I was about nine. My sister Chelle must’ve been five. We had stopped at a burger place for some ice cream, and Chelle wanted a big vanilla shake. Dad tried to talk her into a small one, but she insisted on a large. So we all got our orders, got back in the car, and drove off. Then Chelle started on her shake. But the thing was so thick that she couldn’t use a straw. So she took the plastic top off and tilted it toward her mouth. Except it was barely moving, and she kept tilting it up farther and farther, and the main blob still wasn’t moving. So finally I said, ‘Come on, Chelle!’ and reached over and gave the bottom of the cup a whap. When I did that, the whole thing came cascading onto her face. When she opened her eyes, all you could see were these two big, brown circles poking out through the white ice cream.”

  He started laughing with me. I continued. “She looked like a ghost. I burst out laughing, she burst out crying, and my dad burst out yelling—at me. He never used to do that, but this time he did. He slammed on the brakes, got out, wiped her off as best he could, then bent me over his knee and gave me my worst spanking ever. He was not happy.”

  I wiped my eyes with my napkin. I hadn’t thought about that in years or laughed so hard in a while, either. “I think that was the last vanilla shake I ever saw Chelle get. She always ordered chocolate after that.”

  We both took a drink of water, looked at each other, and chuckled a bit more as we returned to our salads. Finally he got us back to semiserious conversation. “So your dad always handled the spanking.”

  “Yeah. Mother just screamed at us. But Dad didn’t spank much. I probably didn’t get half a dozen spankings growing up.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.” I thought about that for a second. “I don’t know. That just wasn’t his way of handling things. Usually he made sure we understood why what we had done was wrong. Then he always made us apologize to the other person. Especially to Mother.”

  I took another bite of tortellini. He had a sip of wine, then said, “It sounds as though your dad had a lot in common with God.”

  That one cut short my next bite en route to my mouth. “How so?”

  “They both focused on restoring relationships.”

  I wasn’t quite getting the connection. “Meaning…”

  “Your dad had you admit how you had hurt someone and apologize. He was interested in restoring relationships.”

  I guess that’s true. I’ve never thought about it that way.

  “God is like that,” he continued. “He’s not interested in people trying to perform well enough for him. They can’t. He created people to have a relationship with him, to enjoy his love. But humanity rejected God and severed that relationship. His program is putting it back together.”

  He paused, took a bite, then gestured with his fork toward me. “Let me ask you this. When Sara is seven and she does something wrong, how many dishes will she have to wash before she can sit in your lap and have you hug her again?”

  “None.”

  “How many A’s will she have to make in school?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Why?”

  “She won’t have to do anything. She’s my daughter.”

  “Exactly.”

  I looked down and sampled some more of my salad, letting that sink in. Finally my gaze returned to him. “You’re saying that we can’t do anything to earn God’s acceptance.”

  He smiled and reached for the wine bottle. “A little more?”

  “Sure.”

  He poured me half a glass. My mind was still racing from his last statement—or my summation. He proceeded.

  “Muslims who try to earn their way into paradise—how many daily prayers do they have to perform to be good enough?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do they. That’s the problem. They can never be sure if they’ve done enough—enough praying, fasting, giving to the poor, making pilgrimages. They can never know. Ask them, and they will admit that. Hindus can never know how many hundreds of lifetimes it may take to successfully work out their karma. Buddhists can never know how much effort it will take to reach nirvana.”

  “But Christianity is no different,” I responded. “No one can ever know if he has really been good enough to make it to heaven.”

  “Oh, people can know that for certain. The answer is, they haven’t been. No one is good enough to make it to heaven. No one can ever be good enough, no matter how hard they try.”

  “But what about all the people who think that going to church or giving money or being a good person will get them into heaven? Mrs. Willard, my Sunday school teacher, sure thought that would get people in.”

  “She was wrong. It won’t.”

  This was stretching my concept of Christianity. “So you’re saying that doing all the right things, like keeping the Ten Commandments, won’t get you into heaven?”

  “Correct.”

  “Then why do them?”

  “There’s great profit in obeying God. It just won’t get you into heaven.”

  For a moment I didn’t know what to say. How can this guy say something so different from what I heard in church growing up? Maybe he realized my predicament, because he resumed the conversation.

  “You’re a Star Trek fan.”

  I didn’t know where he got his information, and I had decided to stop asking. “I liked The Next Generation. I never got into the follow-ups much.”

  “There’s an episode where they talk about a rift, a tear, in the fabric of space-time. It’s a huge problem. The galaxy will be destroyed if they don’t repair it.”

  “Something tells me we’re not going to start talking about Star Trek.”

  “Maybe not,” he replied. “But it’s a great illustration. There is a moral fabric to the universe. Humanity’s rebellion against God is a massive rip in that fabric. It’s an overthrow of the entire way God designed the universe to operate. Every person’s sin tears this moral fabric.”

  It was hard to deny that humanity is pretty screwed up. The evening news proved that.

  “But who is to say that humanity isn’t evolving spirituall
y? Like Dave and Paula say, maybe we’re all moving toward a greater universal harmony.” I had to admit I wasn’t too convinced myself, but it was worth considering. Momentarily, at least.

  “Humanity’s separation from God is much more profound than people realize. Just look around. The selfishness, bitterness, hatred, prejudice, exploitation, abuse, wars—all these result from humanity’s rebellion against God. Do you think God designed people to operate this way?”

  “But some of those things are getting better,” I chimed in optimistically.

  “Really?” His eyebrows rose. “How many people were murdered by their own governments in the last century?”

  “Oh, I dunno,” I replied. “A hundred million or so.”

  “And how many killed in wars?”

  “Probably about the same.”

  “In what century have the most people been killed for their faith?”

  “Let me guess. The last one?”

  “Right. And in what century do you think there has been more ecological damage, exploitation of the world’s poor, rampant immorality—”

  “Okay, you’ve made your point,” I said, halting the litany of human ills.

  “There’s a rip in the fabric of the universe,” he repeated. “God stands on one side of the tear; you stand on the other. And there’s no way for you to repair it. There’s no way at all to the other side. Trying to be good enough is irrelevant. Humanity rejected God, separated itself from him, and can’t do anything to reestablish that relationship.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because only God is big enough to fix the tear.”

  I had a feeling he was going to say that.

  6

  THE PROBLEM WITH places like Milano’s is that by the time the main course arrives, you’re stuffed. Well, not completely stuffed, but at a point where you wouldn’t consider ordering veal fantarella with grilled vegetables. Of course, when the veal comes, and you take your first bite, room magically reappears in your belly.