On the surface, Diane Komp and Richard Selzer have much in common. Both have taught and practiced medicine at Yale, and both draw from their experiences as physicians to craft books that are widely read and critically acclaimed. Both also write openly about their religious faith–and there the similarities end.
Richard Selzer describes himself as an atheist, although he admits, “my atheism is far from devout” and is marked with a kind of incontinent nostalgia for faith. He reads authors like C. S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Henri Nouwen, and he even subscribes to “The Door.”
Somehow Selzer manages to get trapped in very compromising positions for an atheist. In his memoir, Down from Troy, he tells of impersonating a priest in order to grant last rites to a dying patient. More recently, he helped write a rock musical to be performed at an Assemblies of God church. Selzer had befriended a drug addict who became a born-again Christian. How could he refuse his transformed friend’s request to choose Scriptures and write introductions for the songs of celebration?
Selzer retired from medicine in 1986 in order to write. His “Mortal Lessons,” “Rituals of Surgery,” and “Confessions of a Knife” have become classics. He has written nine books, all of which are currently in print.
Diane Komp described herself as an atheist also, for 15 years. Raised in a traditional Christian home, she graduated from Houghton College, went on to medical school, and ultimately became one of the world’s foremost authorities on the disease histiocytosis. During that time, science edged out religion in her life. In a remarkable turnabout, she rediscovered her faith at the bedside of dying children, as she recounts in her first book, “A Window to Heaven.”
Komp began writing about her faith in “Theology Today,” and she has so far produced three books. (Zondervan/HarperCollins publishes the trilogy under a single cover with the title “Images of Grace.”) She ultimately resigned from her position as head of Pediatric Hematology at Yale and now devotes half of her time to writing.
In November of 1995, Selzer and Komp shared a platform in Colorado at a conference sponsored by Focus on the Family. Komp described the Christian conference as “the kind of place I once would have run 100 miles an hour to get away from.” Selzer confessed, “I feel as at home here as among the cannibals.” Neither ran, neither got eaten, and both used the opportunity to reflect on their lives as physicians, writers, and pilgrims.
Yancey: What the two of you have in common, of course, is that you were busy doctors who got infected with this peculiar bug called writing.
Selzer: My artistic mother wanted me to be a poet, and my physician father wanted me to be a doctor. Eventually, I managed to satisfy both. I finally left medicine after 35 years to devote myself to writing.
Komp: One reason we doctors have rich material to draw on is that when patients come to us, we strip them naked–literally–and ask them the most personal and probing questions. Their stories have to come out.
And, of course, our writing touches on life-and-death issues. I recently heard from my nephew, who was not raised as a Christian in any way. Yet he went to a Jesuit college, took a course on the soul, and ended up doing a paper on Auntie’s book. It meant a lot to me to be a part of his faith journey, which certainly did not come from the family DNA material.
Yancey: Faith is one thing not carried on DNA.
Selzer: Diane and I have come to such different places. I’m not a Christian. In fact, I’m a nonbeliever. My whole life has been a search for faith–an unsuccessful search. I have elected to make the best of that misfortune by deciding there is a place for an outsider. To be the goy among the Jews is not a bad place for a human being and a writer.
Yancey: Goy among the Jews? But you are Jewish. You’re using an analogy of an unbeliever among the believers?
Selzer: Exactly.
Yancey: What I find extraordinary, though, is that you keep going to the “Jews.” You submit to a “Door” interview, not once but twice. You hole up in a monastery in Venice. And now you appear at a conference sponsored by Focus on the Family.
Selzer: I am the one outsider that the Christians want. I need them, too, apparently.
Yancey: What do they want from you?
Selzer: Well, first of all, they want to convert me. I’m sure that won’t happen unless there’s a stroke of grace.
Yancey: You must get letters from readers saying they’re praying for your soul every day.
Selzer: Sure. And I like that. I keep looking, believe me. I read the Bible all the time. I’m really kind of a crypto-Catholic, as anybody who reads my work will recognize. I grew up in an Irish Catholic town, Troy, in upstate New York–98 percent Irish Catholic. This was during the Great Depression, and the whole town was stone-sucking poor. The only place of beauty was inside the Catholic church, with the Virgin Mary in her blue gown and the incense lingering in the air and the music. I was attracted to that place as a refuge.
I’ve seen the humble side of religion, too. I was drafted as a doctor in the Korean War, where I served under a rather authoritarian general. He overheard me picking out a few tunes on a piano in a bar one night, and next thing I knew he summoned me to his office. “We’ve got a church here, Selzer, and it needs an organist. You’re the man.” I protested that I had never played an organ, that my skills on the piano were minimal, that I was a Jew and didn’t go to church. Since he was the general, none of these protests mattered.
I spent all week practicing three hymns that looked easy to learn: “Fairest Lord Jesus,” “How Firm a Foundation,” and “Blest Be the Tie That Binds.” The church met in a Quonset hut. Soldiers took all the chairs, but Koreans were allowed to stand at the back. Some of the Koreans who came had walked all night, starting at midnight, 20 miles to be there. I played the organ several Sundays, always the same three hymns.
Komp: As I listen to you, I realize that those kinds of experiences are what I had at my patients’ bedsides. That was where I found faith–in listening to the children. I was raised in a Christian home, but I threw that out the window, and would have resisted any message of faith from an adult. To me, the holy ground came at the bedside of my children patients. Children keep you humble. They know, but they don’t rub it in, that it’s a privilege for me, an outsider, to be present.
Selzer: They’re wise, because we are their servants. We are there to wait on them, to take care of them. We should kneel at their feet.
Komp: I remember one patient, a 13-year-old boy, whose parents had never talked to him about death. He had been sick for about a year, and they spent all their energy chasing cures. Finally, the truth sank in that he was dying. They didn’t call for the priest; they asked for me. It was the most humbling experience in the world.
The boy’s lungs had filled with fluid and he could hardly speak without coughing. His breath was very precious, and he measured each word. He said to me, “I hear you’re a writer. What do you write about?” I said, “Well, a long time ago I figured out that I didn’t have all the answers to life’s really important questions. When I talked to kids like you I got better answers than I was getting elsewhere. So I listen to kids, and I write their stories. I’m just a secretary.”
He smiled. And then we talked about some of the conflicts between what he learned in science class and religion class at his parochial school. Throughout this conversation, his mother stood there with her mouth open. This is my kid talking?
He mentioned the story of David and Goliath, and how hard it was for him to believe a story about a giant more than eight feet tall. “You know, it’s not the details that matter,” he said at last. “It’s the moral of the story.” I had to think about the moral of that story: a little kid who prevailed against something unbelievably big.
He wasn’t finished with me yet. “Do you pray?” he said. I told him yes. I asked if he prayed, and he said yes, so I asked him to tell me how he prayed.
He said, “I start out like this: Now I lay me down to sleep.'” Suddenly he slowed down, as if he was watching his own words on a ticker tape. “I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If . . . I . . . should . . . die . . . before . . . I . . . wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
All this time his mother is standing there, mouth agape. This is my kid? The next day, the boy died.
Selzer: Very moving. Suffer the little children. . . . Diane, I’m in awe of you and your work. I don’t know what sustains you in it. It’s remarkable to me how your faith sustains you and your love for your patients.
Komp: It’s from the children that I get my faith.
Selzer: I must say, I envy it. Meanwhile, here I am at Focus on the Family, yet I cannot believe. I feel myself to be an imposter in a number of ways. I’m not a believer, I’m even pro-choice. I gave Dr. Dobson all the reasons why he should not invite me. I would desecrate the premises. It is to his everlasting credit that he invited me anyway.
Yancey: Why did he invite you?
Selzer: I’ve never met the man or heard his radio program, but he read a piece I wrote for “Esquire” some 25 years ago. I realized I had never seen an abortion, so I asked a friend if I could attend one. I watched as the doctor inserted a needle through the woman’s abdomen into her uterus. I saw the needle jerking–it was the fetus struggling to escape it. I looked around me and counted six people in the room, and then thought, No, we are seven people here.
“Esquire” ran the piece, and for a time I became the darling of the pro-life movement and the villain of the liberal Eastern establishment. I always turned down requests to reprint the article, but when Dr. Dobson asked if he could, I told him all right, as long as he identified me for who I was: pro-choice, unbelieving. I didn’t think he’d ever agree, but he did. He printed it in his newsletter, and my mailman got a hernia from all the angry letters from the pro-choice side. Then Dr. Dobson invited me to address a conference of physicians which his organization sponsors, and here I am, the goy among the Jews again. It’s a chance to be with people from another persuasion. No one is beyond redemption, I suppose.
(continued in Part 2)
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review
Volume 2, No. 2, Page 10
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