When Dorothea von Ertmann, a friend and student of Beethoven’s, lost her only young child, Beethoven learned of her inconsolable grief. Instead of offering words of consolation, he sat at the piano and played for her, improvising for an hour before he squeezed her hand and left. It was Beethoven’s highest offering: using his greatest gift to express ideas and emotions of comfort and solace.
Dr. Jason Hill performs a similar service for readers in his moving new book, Letters To God From A Former Atheist. Hill, a philosophy professor at DePaul University, reasoned that if he were to find his way back to God, it also would come through his most developed faculty and his greatest gift, that of writing.
Hill shares this powerful journey of faith through his real-life story written as invocations to God: an autobiography told through the fearless and humble language of unfiltered and impassioned prayers.
“I seek to find You in these letters,” he prays.
These consecrated letters are filled with pathos, intimacy, joy, and a depth that is difficult to attain through other literary forms, helping to account for their unparalleled sublimity.
Hill is so bracingly honest that his book can be unnerving at times. Imagine sneaking into a man’s prayer closet and eavesdropping on his most personal and vulnerable thoughts and feelings, such as this prayer: “I’m tired of living a morally fragmented life, carving up my humanity, my heart, into tiny pieces of hors d’oeuvres and feeding them to uninvited guests.”
Hill’s supplications possess an uncanny gift of verbal expression that spares no details. Peering upon his soul stripped bare, I felt like a spiritual voyeur. I was embarrassed for him. But the spectacle was so powerful and personal, I could not look away. His trust in the reader is second only to his trust in God.
Consistent with sin’s nature, atheism initially proved “empowering and intoxicating” to Hill. The reemergence of faith was a gradual process as disbelief slowly dissipated, being replaced with “religious sensibilities” initially from an untraceable source. The atheistic “surges of exhilaration” had given way to a nihilistic “sinking void, emptiness and hollowness.”
Hill admittedly was a man who “projected bravado and supreme confidence … but whose soul had been shattered.” He takes you on a journey via his “epistolary outpourings” through physical and mental illnesses, a near-death experience, sexual molestation, attempted suicide, and parental abandonment by his father. All the while he kept up appearances, accumulating the accolades of professional success, as the rift between outward achievement and inner despair widened into a canyon. I felt Hill’s heart-dropping agony when suicide seemed like the “reasonable and merciful option,” and I basked in those moments of ineffable and transcendent joys like the “incandescent eyes of my grandmother guiding me back towards God.”
Prayer became therapeutic, healing, and revelatory of God’s grace. It saved his life, and the book resuscitated my own flagging prayer life. How refreshing it would be to live openly, honestly, and prayerfully before God as Hill exemplifies. He breaks down barriers to prayer and opens up avenues for self-reflection and of transformative connections with God.
With a penetrating gaze reaching deep inside his own soul, Hill touches a universal nerve of all humanity: a desperate need for God. “My Father, sometimes need is belief, isn’t it?” he says.
For Hill, this need “was fast becoming belief.” His need became indistinguishable from faith as all true need corresponds to a legitimate and satiating reality.
Dorothea von Ertmann later recalled that Beethoven’s impromptu recital “said everything to me” and “finally gave me consolation.” I am confident this book will give similar consolation to its readers as only unvarnished prayer can.
Hill prayed to become the person he most wanted to be with a heart for humanity and a hunger for God’s presence in life’s every aspect. To his delight, he was not disappointed, and neither will the reader be.
Kendall Conger, MD is a practicing ER physician and author of “Give Me A Sign: A Study Through John’s Gospel.”
Jesus Christ is King
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