Test Everything, Hold What Is Good

Sy Garte was raised inside a conclusion. Three generations of atheism and communism had shaped his family, and the verdict came to him settled: God was not simply unnecessary but impossible. He had no reason to interrogate it. Then the science he loved began to work on him. As a biochemistry student he studied the processes by which cells translate DNA and RNA into proteins — the reading, the copying, the assembling, the proofreading. The intricacy itself was not what troubled him. What troubled him was that materialism seemed to have no account of it that satisfied him. He also encountered ideas in quantum physics that challenged his assumptions about determinism, and the ground he had stood on without thinking began to feel like something he had chosen rather than something the evidence demanded. He did not become a believer. He became an agnostic — the furniture moved out, the room not yet refurnished. In that unsettled season he had a vivid dream about letting go. It stayed with him, unexplained. He could not file it away with the rest of his dreams. He was forty-six when he walked into a Catholic church with a Christian friend. He came, most likely, as an observer; he had spent his life examining claims, and this was one more. What he found there surprised him — a welcome he had not anticipated, and a sermon about love. The arguments that had carried him for decades suddenly seemed less final than the room he was standing in. Over time — not in a flash, but over time — he came to read his own history differently. The stubborn questions, the dream, the friend, the door, the sermon on love: he came to understand all of it as the Holy Spirit drawing him to Christ. He was baptized. He became active in the church. The man raised to think God impossible now worships him.