THE BEST CHRISTMAS PRESENT

Part I in the series, An Atheist’s Encounters with God

When I saw this question recently on a Facebook post, I knew I couldn’t wait until Christmas to respond. My best Christmas present was unique. Actually, more than unique. You see, it came from God when I was six years old. I remember that Christmas morning very well. After all, it’s not every day you get a present from Heaven. I never did get another one. At least not a toy. I did however, have some extraordinary experiences at crossroads in my life; they could easily be written off as coincidences, which is what I always do, but it was the timing. The timing. It’s the timing that gives a non-believer like me pause.

Maybe I should start back at that Christmas, soon after my Grandpa died, and I wanted to send him a letter…

Christmas in my Jewish home was cultural, not religious. In the early years on Creston Avenue in the Bronx, my parents brought the presents out on Christmas Eve. The brightly wrapped presents fit perfectly in front of a piece of furniture that looked like a fireplace, complete with a mantle and a “fire” that burned red when plugged in.

We had to wait until Christmas morning to open our presents, but when I was six, something special happened. Abraham Linetski, my maternal grandfather, who anglicized his name to Frank Linet, had recently died from injuries sustained after falling from a scaffold. He had been a house and sign painter. He painted huge billboard advertisements from small sketches. In his spare time, he’d pull out an easel to paint in oils. My other grandfather had died tragically during a routine surgery many years before.

I don’t recall being overly sad at Grandpa Frank’s death, but I felt a powerful need to communicate with both of them. I understood I would never see them again. They were gone forever. But in Heaven God could find them, especially since grandpa had just arrived. But how does one connect with God? We did not pray at home, nor did we go to synagogue. But I knew that God had all sorts of super powers; He could do anything.

I wrote a letter asking God to deliver it. But how can a little kid mail letter to Heaven? Should I put it in the mailbox? Dad said that wouldn’t work. Instead, he suggested we leave it on the mantle. After all, it was Christmas Eve; maybe Santa could deliver it. But Santa was busy delivering millions of presents; he probably didn’t have time. But none of that mattered; my desire to contact my grandfathers was stronger than my doubts.

The next day, on Christmas morning, the first place I looked was the mantle. Something was up there. I wanted to run right over, but houses, villages, bridges, stations and chugging locomotives spread over the entire living room blocked my way. The entire scene was sprinkled with ivory soap flakes, making for a white Christmas. I edged around the periphery of the living room to the mantel. The letter was gone, replaced with an unwrapped present, a little plaid briefcase.

“Did God take the letter?” I asked.

My parents said they didn’t know.

“What happened to it?

Both parents shrugged. “We don’t know, it was gone when we woke up.”

“Did God leave the present?”

They shrugged again and said it could be God, but they couldn’t know for sure.

I wrote the letter because I genuinely believed God would get it. But when it actually happened, I began to have doubts. It was so fantastic that I didn’t know what to think. My parents wouldn’t lie so it must be true. And if it is true, I reasoned, then I just might be on to something. The next day, I wrote another letter to God. Here’s the original copy. (Yes, I found it decades later.)

SUBSTACK SIDEBAR

It’s interesting to note that less than two years after the advent of our first television, watching too much TV was an issue. Also worth noting, is that at the age of six I was already supposed to study.

I carefully placed the letter on the mantle; the next day the letter was gone, but, alas, there was no present, thereby closing my direct conduit to a loving and generous God, who might have run out of sports games. Or maybe He was on to me.

Over the next year, and even beyond, I questioned my parents about it, but they always shrugged and insisted they had no idea what had happened.

I’ve been wrestling with God ever since, something Jews are encouraged to do. The word Israel actually means to wrestle with God. To question. To struggle. To argue, or as Eli Wiesel said about God and the Holocaust, “We do not demand answers, God. But if this is the last page of the human chronicles, assure us that we had the right to ask.”

AFTERWORD

Well – that was a “cute” anecdote. Not so cute were incidences that could easily be written off as co - incidences, were it not for the fact that they came at two of life’s most important crossroads, work and love. If I had not experienced these incidents myself, I would not have believed they happened. On the other hand, in spite of what happened, I remain even more skeptical and agnostic today than at age six.

“The Best Christmas Present” started me on this series of essays titled, An Atheist’s Encounters with God. This subject involving God, death, Heaven, atheism, salvation, meaning, theology, Jesus, the Old and New Testaments, human suffering, war, miracles, and humanity’s place in the universe. Besides being a multifaced, gargantuan task, it’s not typical of columns I’ve written on Substack. I’ve read multiple books by Christian apologist and scholars like C.S. Lewis, Ravi Zacharias, Karen Armstrong, Paul Kreeft, Lee Strobel, Dinesh D’Souza and others. On the other side of the bookshelf are the attacks on Christianity by atheists Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Bertrand Russell. I wrote an entire book defending Christianity (the reality not the theology). I attended a weekend atheist convention (boy, did I get an earful), and married a devout Catholic with a master’s degree in theology, even though God “told” us not to do it.

These posts will appear sporadically over the next few months.