Price was a critically esteemed novelist and longtime Duke University professor, but more interestingly to me he wrote several books in his later decades of life sharing his religious experiences and beliefs. He had an individualist approach to a form of liberal Christianity deeply informed by a handful of mystical experiences with the divine which he was not embarrassed to write about, perhaps something of a surprise given his social and academic position.

In this slim but extremely rich volume Price is writing to his godson in hopes of providing him with something useful to consult as part of his own future spiritual life. This may seem odd given that he writes here that he is possessed of the suspicion that written arguments are useless in transmitting faith; that faith must be personally experienced, with a generally popularly unacknowledged necessity of God actively bringing a person closer to Him, which He does not always seem to do (though figures such as Aquinas, Calvin, Kierkegaard, and Barth are said to discuss this).

Nevertheless, Price shares his own experiences and beliefs that evolved from them. He writes of being six or seven years old when

In brief, in a single full moment, I was allowed to see how intricately the vast contraption of nature all round me - and nature included me, my parents a few yards away in the house, all the animal life in the dense surroundings, and every other creature alive on Earth - was bound into a single vast ongoing wheel by one immense power that had willed us into being and intended our futures, wherever they might lead through the pattern, the enormous intricately woven pattern somehow bound at the rim and cohering for as long as the Creator willed it... At my age then, of course, I couldn't have conceived a thing of such perfect complexity on my own; nor could I have described the gift I'd received in any such words. But memory tells me that the description is honest.

And here I think of a curious French book by the 20th Century French journalist and intellectual Andre Frossard called Dieu existe, je L'ai rencontré. Frossard, an incurious atheist, writes about being a young adult and walking into a chapel one day looking for a friend and suddenly, in an instant, being given an astonishing vision of God and of an ordered universe with purpose. One minute, atheist, the next, stunned convert. Price here recounts something quite similar. I'm fascinated by these stories, and immensely curious about them.

Price goes on to talk about his journey in a personal sort of faith as he grew up, eschewing a church community, feeling more comfort in an empty church or alone in nature. He counsels against an "unadmirable appetite for display [that] was part of formal worship", not connecting it with Matthew 6:5-6 (do not pray in public like the hypocrites to be seen, but in private... if I may paraphrase) but a clear echo. He admits that finding a church home is not necessarily bad and may provide good, but clearly be wary of being led astray by an organized group of people claiming to speak in God's name. His suspicion of churches likely grows out of seeing the white Southern churches in operation during Jim Crow days, but is still an interesting perspective. He does not however attempt to wrestle with how one can be a "Christian in isolation" in what is really a strongly communitarian faith.

He counsels his godson to stick to and grow in the faith tradition he was given. He writes that there was nothing in his visions communicating that Christianity is the only or approved way to approach the Creator, and other faith traditions are of equal value and worth, but that it is best to approach the divine through the stories and traditions of one's birth.

He discusses the relationship of his beliefs to his career. Mostly he tried to keep them separate, both because of his idiosyncratic approach to his faith and because he didn't want to scare off those for whom talk of Jesus, God, Christianity is off-putting. But that the moral values of his faith, especially the compassion demonstrated by Jesus, has been the bedrock of his career.

Famously recounted in more depth elsewhere, Price was diagnosed with spinal cancer at 51. A surgery was unsuccessful, and was followed by radiation treatments that largely defeated the cancer but left him paralyzed from the waist down and in constant pain the rest of his life. Between the surgery and radiation he had another astonishing vision.

It's enough to say here that I was half-upright in my bed; then suddenly without apparent transport - and I was certainly not dreaming - I was lying on the stony shore of a huge lake. I knew at once that I was by the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinnereth, as it's called in modern Israel) and in a moment, a man whom I knew to be Jesus had silently beckoned me into the water with him.

In another moment - still silent - he was washing the foot-long wound from the failed surgery that had gouged for hours deep into my spinal cord; that wound was also the proposed site of my weeks of radiation. At last Jesus spoke, only a four-word sentence - "Your sins are forgiven." But nearly overwhelmed as I'd been by a month of surgery and the discouraging aftermath, I pushed onward for the answer I most wanted - "Am I also healed?" As if I'd forced it from him, he said only "That too."... The experience ended there as inexplicably as it came. It had been nonetheless a long moment as vivid as any other in my life - and as undeniable in its force.

My conviction, more than twenty years after that second vision, is that the experience was in some crucial sense real. In a human action that apparently lasted no longer than two minutes, I was essentially healed. By healed I mean that I was repaired in the sense that a man I had every reason to trust had guaranteed me a long stretch of ongoing vigorous existence. The fact that my legs were subsequently paralyzed by twenty-five X-ray treatments... was a mere complexity in the ongoing narrative which God intended me to make of my life.

Fascinating stuff.

To his godson, he cannot promise any such experiences. And he doubts the ability of written accounts to transmit faith either. Nevertheless he hopes his godson will be a curious seeker, and to that end recommends a good amount of reading, including of course the ancient Hebrew and Christian texts, as well as Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi, and exploration among the great religious painters and composers of later ages (Gorecki, Pärt, etc.). And to begin trying to talk to God, out loud (though not around others, you might be dragged off). Listen for answers. And if they come, examine them with great care. ( )