When I was fifteen years old, an angel of God came to me at night, pinned me to my bed, and demanded that I put my trust in the Lord. This was no dream. I was awake, and a terrifying presence was communicating to me. I tried to escape, but my body wouldn’t move. Through great effort, I finally yelled out, and my scream chased the presence away. My heart pounded as I caught my breath. Coming back to myself, I heard my twin brother, Jim, snoring peacefully in the bunk above.

By morning, the sense of horror had passed, but I was still sure that something significant had happened. I never mentioned it—not even to Jim, whom I told everything—and I thought less and less about it over time, until it seemed possible that I’d imagined the whole thing. Then it happened again.

The visitations continued for years, varying in power and vividness, though each was terrifying and unmistakably real. Still I told no one. I’m not sure why. One obvious explanation is that I knew it sounded crazy, but I don’t think that was it. I’d heard such experiences reported before, rarely but without embarrassment, and accepted as perfectly reasonable.

To say I was raised in a Catholic home would begin to describe my childhood, but it would get closer to say I was raised in a Catholic world. People are sometimes surprised to hear this from a product of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a well-known W.A.S.P. stronghold. But New York has an enormous Catholic population—a third of the city’s residents, more Romans than Rome—and it’s not confined to outer-borough immigrant enclaves. My own family had been New Yorkers going back several generations and Catholics going back as far as anyone could count.

Granted, my childhood in the Eighties and Nineties did not revolve around the Church in quite the way of my parents’ in the Fifties and Sixties or my grandparents’ in the Twenties and Thirties. But it wasn’t so far off. We went to Mass every Sunday and on all other days of obligation; we said grace before meals and prayers before bed. On long car rides, we passed the time with the Rosary, my mother reading out the Mysteries—Joyful, Sorrowful, or Glorious, depending on the day. When people we knew were troubled or sick, we prayed for them, trusting that these prayers were more than kind gestures.

I don’t mean to suggest that we lived a cloistered existence. My siblings and I watched the same bad after-school T.V. as all our friends. My parents were devoted fiction readers, and the latest works by Updike and Roth made their way onto our shelves each year. The whole family shared a love of lowbrow gross-out comedy, particularly spoof movies like Airplane! and Spaceballs. We didn’t treat any of these habits as being in tension with religious devotion. Whoever had recorded our grainy V.H.S. tape of Caddyshack had carefully excised a few moments of nudity, but this was a rare concession to propriety.

I had enough friends whose families weren’t religious (or who’d already rejected their family’s faith) to know that disbelief was an option, but I felt little reason to consider it for myself. Catholicism provided the furniture of my world, and I was comfortable in it. Jim and I served as altar boys even after an adolescent growth spurt left us towering over the priest. As teenagers, we regularly attended weekday-morning services at our school’s chapel. Afterward we’d sneak out for a smoke before first bell with the Jesuit who’d just given us Communion.

I thought occasionally about one day joining the Jesuits myself, but this was mostly adolescent romanticism, and some part of me knew all along that I wasn’t really called to it. Still, I had a strong sense—who doesn’t at that age?—that I was called to something. And who could have been calling, if not God? This seems to me the likeliest reason I kept my nocturnal visions a secret: They marked me off from others, not in a way that shamed me but in a way that flattered me. I wanted them for myself.

I was eighteen when my doubts began. That’s a common age to start questioning the values with which you were raised, but in my case the cause of these questions was more concrete. After high school, Jim and I went to Princeton, where our older sister, Alice, had just finished her freshman year. A month into our first semester, a speeding car hit Jim on a street near campus.

In those pre–cell phone days, I was lucky to be in my dorm room when a call came from a friend on the scene, and I got there in time to ride in the ambulance. Jim was in good spirits, despite a broken leg and some bruises. Things could have been much worse, he said. Then they did get worse. By the time we got to the hospital, he was disoriented. An emergency room doctor asked where he went to school, and he named the high school from which we’d graduated six months earlier. The doctor asked him to name the president. When Jim looked at me for help, my worried face made clear how much was riding on the answer. If only I would tell him, his eyes said, everything would be all right. So why did I refuse? The doctors hooked up a monitor, which showed his oxygen levels dropping rapidly. They wheeled him away to a ventilator.

Alice hadarrived at the hospital by then, and we waited together for our parents to get down from New York. In the meantime, an intensive care doctor explained to us that Jim was suffering acute respiratory failure. A bit of bone from his shattered leg had likely made its way into his bloodstream and from there to his lung. Almost as an afterthought, this man we’d never seen before added that our brother was unlikely to make it to morning. Then he continued on his rounds. The first thing we did, after he left us, was to pray.

As it happens, Jim did survive the night. He spent several more weeks in the hospital, sedated and intubated, during which time no one could tell when or whether he’d come through, or what condition he’d be in if he did. After regaining consciousness, he was slow and confused, which we were told might be a temporary effect of sedation or a sign of permanent damage. His impairment took the form of drunken dopiness: He told jokes that made no sense, and he didn’t understand why we responded with worry rather than amusement. This too passed, and it gradually became clear that the sudden drop in oxygen on the night of the accident had done no lasting harm. After a few more days he returned home, wheelchair bound, to begin a physical recovery that lasted more than a year.

I understood how lucky we were. Our prayers had been answered: Jim was all right. And I thanked God for that. Alice and I were lucky to have each other on campus, and Jim was lucky to have our parents in New York. We were lucky to live in a time and a part of the world with the care he’d needed, lucky to be able to afford that care. Lucky, really, in too many ways to count.

But the memory of that first night, when I didn’t think he’d survive, stayed with me. To appreciate myself as lucky meant appreciating how easily things could have gone otherwise, how many people lost their lives in capricious ways or had the ones they loved most taken from them, how many had no family to depend on. It would have been obscene to think that our devotion had spared us the full depths of suffering—not least because so many people far more devoted than we were did not get spared. Of course, I’d known that already, but the problem of suffering had always had an abstract quality for me. What struck me about the real thing was precisely the understanding that I’d been saved from the worst of it.

Putting it this way may make that understanding sound more high-minded (or less self-centered) than it was. I did understand that other people out there were suffering more than I, but I also understood that I had untapped potential for more suffering myself. I still had so much to lose, and I would eventually lose all of it. Everyone I loved would be taken from me, unless I was taken from them first.

The recognition of our finitude and mortality pushes some people toward belief, but it had the opposite effect on me. On campus that spring, I started skipping Mass. Most weeks the decision was made passively: I intended to go, but when the time came, I simply kept doing whatever I was doing. I would inevitably feel some guilt over this, and it was mainly in response to that guilt that I would tell myself I was actually acting on principle. The questions I’d been struggling with made the choice feel more significant. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t believe in God but that I didn’t believe that the God of all this suffering was worthy of my weekly devotion.

Eventually I gave up even the intention to attend church on my own, but I continued going with my family at home. I would still have described myself as Catholic if anyone had asked. Plenty of people I knew described themselves as such, even participated more or less fully in the faith (especially when family was involved), while admitting when pressed that they didn’t really buy into all of it. I thought of myself as belonging to this ambivalent camp.

I might have remained there—as many do all their lives—had it not been for a chance encounter with a book. We spent summers at a house on Long Island that had belonged to my maternal grandmother before her death. Signs of faith filled that home: a ceramic holy water fount by the door; a crucified Jesus looking down from the wall. But for me its most notable feature was its books: biographies of saints; layperson’s guides to theology; the complete works of John Henry Newman; novels by the likes of Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, and Evelyn Waugh, in hardcover copies dating from their original mid-century publication.

Having already decided that I wanted to write novels myself, I passed many days pulling titles down and reading them. On one of these summer days, I decided on a book called Why I Am Not a Christian. I’d noticed the somewhat scandalous title many times before, but the reason I reached for it now wasn’t my growing sense of apostasy. What had struck me for the first time was the name of its author—Bertrand Russell, whom I’d read in an introductory philosophy course that year. Why I Am Not a Christian is a hodgepodge, collecting fifty years’ worth of talks and occasional writings of varying length and quality, some with only a tenuous connection to religious belief. Nonetheless, the sum total changed my life. It was one of those books that wind up in the hands of just the right reader at just the right moment, so that it seems to be speaking directly to some secret need.

The lasting impact of Russell’s book on me came from his insistence that we must respond to fear not by dogmatically accepting the creeds handed down to us by tradition and authority but by looking the world “frankly in the face” with a “fearless outlook and a free intelligence.” Russell’s words suggested less a particular set of beliefs than an approach to knowledge about the world. He very rarely uses the word atheist, preferring such terms as freethinker, skeptic, and rationalist. By the time I’d finished reading Why I Am Not a Christian, these were the terms I hoped to apply to myself.

The next Sunday, I stayed in the pew while the rest of my family went up for Communion. That doesn’t sound like much, but the act felt monumental to me. Up until the last moment, I wasn’t sure I would go through with it. My mother cried in the parking lot after Mass. (She thought I’d forgone the Eucharist because I’d committed a mortal sin.) I was sorry to cause her pain, but I felt it couldn’t be helped. I had faced up to the question of whether I would live my life on the basis of reason or faith, and I’d thrown in my lot with reason.

Later that summer, I was helping my mother make lunch, listening to N.P.R. on the kitchen radio, when a segment came on about sleep paralysis, a condition that leaves people awake but unable to move. The experience is often accompanied by a feeling of terror, the host explained, as well as hallucinations. Sufferers report strongly sensing a presence in the room with them, and researchers have connected the condition to historical accounts of nighttime demons—incubi and succubi—as well as modern reports of alien abductions. The segment featured interviews with chronic cases, who make up around five percent of the population.

“That happens to me,” I said.

“You’ve never mentioned it,” my mother responded doubtfully.

I shrugged this off. Explaining that silence meant explaining my private interpretation of these events, which for obvious reasons I wasn’t eager to do. That interpretation seemed now to exemplify everything that was wrong with my old beliefs: I had experienced a reasonably common physiological affliction and, rather than trying to find a rational cause for it, I had retreated into superstition. I’d actually convinced myself that God was sending me a message. It seemed highly significant that the most striking feature of the experience was precisely fear. All at once my last remaining justification for belief became a powerful argument against it.

My parents and I worked out an uneasy compromise by which I continued to attend Mass when I was home but never took Communion. Every Sunday, my father put a hand on my shoulder as he passed me coming in or out of the pew, as though acknowledging my choice while also expressing appreciation that I was there. Toward the end of the summer, I went to see a priest at our local parish to speak with him about my doubts. Perhaps part of me was still ready to be talked out of them. Instead, the priest—another Jesuit—told me that he had also stopped going to Mass at my age. We all have to work these questions out for ourselves, he said. It was a relief to have made this break, to feel that I was now living honestly, rather than displaying the outward form of a truth I could not accept, but this relief went only so far. Giving up God did not mean giving up my anxiety about death and suffering.

I suffered from depression throughout the rest of my college years. I drank too much and took more than my share of recreational drugs. I still had frequent bouts of sleep paralysis, made worse by these habits and by the irregular hours of college life, but I no longer experienced them as spiritual visitations. Some part of me now knew their real cause even as they were happening. Strangely enough, this half-knowledge did not lessen the frightful feeling. It simply stripped my terror of content—I was not afraid of anything, but I was still afraid.

Sometimes I missed my faith and even envied those who could believe, but the fact that disbelief could be difficult ultimately seemed like a point in its favor. I hadn’t entirely given up the feeling that I was called to something great, even as I had given up the context within which this calling was explicable. The feeling now was absorbed entirely into my sense of literary vocation. I wrote very little during this time but thought constantly about becoming a great writer. Anxiety and depression had fueled many great writers, and I hoped it might do the same for me. Perhaps, I sometimes thought, my calling was not just a secular one but even an anti­religious one. Perhaps I would make lasting art from the discomfort of living in a godless universe. In these moments, there seemed to be something dignified in the fear that I felt, and I was almost glad to have it. At other times, it overpowered me. I spent long days in bed, unable to drag myself to class. I felt tired and slow, and I suffered a growing number of minor physical ailments that I was too indifferent to address. My appetite disappeared entirely. When forced to eat, I quickly threw up my meal. My family eventually intervened, worried that I had an eating disorder. I insisted that I didn’t care about my weight. (I didn’t add: any more than I do about anything else.)

One day I woke with my ankles so swollen that I couldn’t walk on them, and I agreed to go to the campus infirmary. The doctor prescribed an X-ray of my chest. This seemed a strange response to a problem with my feet, but he speculated that I might have tuberculosis. In retrospect, I imagine he had other concerns in mind. Rather than talking me through the results, he sent me to the local hospital, where I came to be diagnosed with stage three lymphatic cancer. My body, the oncologist later told me, was “caked with tumors.” It was the winter of my senior year, and I was faced with the very real possibility that I would not live to graduation, yet I felt an odd sense of relief. I had known that I could not go on as I’d been going, and now the real problem had been named.

Who knows what this experience would have done to my faith if I’d still had it. Perhaps I would have found solace in belief. Instead my skepticism hardened into something more severe. I saw my illness as a test of my newfound commitment to looking life frankly in the face. (Who might be doing the testing I did not ask myself.)

After several weeks of uncertainty, a biopsy revealed my lymphoma to be the more treatable Hodgkin’s variety. I began a six-month course of chemotherapy, and the cancer responded quickly. As with Jim’s accident, a catastrophic threat had been followed by what could be seen under the circumstances only as a run of luck. But this time, I hadn’t prayed for that outcome, and I didn’t thank God when it arrived. Quite the opposite: Having faced mortality without recourse to faith, I thought, I would never be going back. I went from being merely a disbeliever to being a committed, almost evangelical atheist, the kind who takes every conversational opportunity to sound off on the subject, who revels in offending believers with the cold facts of life. Just as Catholicism had been something more than a family tradition, something central to my identity, so atheism represented not just a rejection of that tradition but the embrace of a new me.

In many ways my postcollegiate years—the early years of the twenty-first century—were an ideal time to be a budding unbeliever. It was the heyday of the New Atheists, a collection of popular writers whose aggressive attacks on religion made forthright disbelief suddenly fashionable. Particularly fashionable, it seemed, among young men with college degrees. Many books have already been written about the movement, and I won’t go into great detail about it here. But suffice to say, at the time it was profoundly influential.

It was only in my mid-thirties when the doubts returned. After nearly twenty years of searching unsuccessfully for a livable atheist worldview, I began to suspect that atheism itself might be part of the problem. This might seem like another natural stopping place. First I rejected traditional belief, then I rejected the more strident forms of unbelief, and finally I arrived at a moderate compromise position. The common name for this position is agnosticism. Depending on how you understand that term, it describes either a very old or a fairly recent response to the problem of belief. If you take agnosticism to be simply the view that human beings can never really answer the question of God’s existence, then it is likely as old as belief itself. That position has historically been called skepticism. To this day, I consider myself a skeptic, and in this sense I can claim to have accepted agnosticism.

Agnosticism could also be defined as the view that we need not hold any opinion on God at all. We can easily go about our lives without even a provisional answer to the question, and so we ought to set it aside entirely. On the individual, practical level, even this position is very old. It is roughly the view that asks, “What does all this business have to do with me?” To many people, spiritual matters just don’t feel urgent. Without a social structure that forces them to hold some view on religious questions, they are simply not moved to ask them.

But for me, at least, these questions—How am I to live? What do I owe to other people (or even to myself)? What is the meaning of life?—felt real enough, and they continued to call out for answers. A life in which one has learned by way of therapeutic philosophy to stop asking these questions seemed little better than a life in which one has silenced the questions by way of drugs or alcohol or shopping or endless social media scrolling. I didn’t want such a life. So the journey went on.

That journey is now nearly three decades old. It has led me to an outright rejection of atheism. And it eventually led me back to the Catholic Church, albeit in a very different relationship from the one I had as an adolescent altar boy. This development did not end my journey any more than my earlier departure from the Church had. I have come to believe that the journey will never end while I am still alive, that continuing on the journey is in some sense the work I am on this earth to do.

But what then about that angel? Was it a miracle, or a perfectly explicable physical event? My rather frustrating answer is that I think it was both. I know what “caused” these visitations, from a strictly material standpoint, but I also know what they in turn caused—a lifelong journey that I am still on. And I know that one must consider their final cause as much as their efficient cause when trying to grasp their meaning. I also know that their physical cause cannot explain the mental form they took, because physical causes can’t explain mental realities. And if we take the word miracle to describe an event that can’t be reconciled to the natural physical order, then every thought is a miracle, and every thought put into action is a miracle indeed.

This essay is adapted from Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer (Penguin Press, 2025).