Back in November I was contacted by a writer and professor in New Jersey
named Danusha V. Goska, a former leftist who had begun posting powerful and
personal articles about her political transformation. I interviewed her here, and subsequently she became a contributor to FrontPage Mag. She also happens to be the
author of the novel Save
Send Delete, which I
recently read.
As powerful and as personal as her articles, Save Send Delete chronicles the intellectual love affair-by-email
of Mira – a poor, Catholic professor – and Rand, an atheist author and
celebrity. The tale is simultaneously a philosophical debate, an exploration of
faith, and a passionate romance.
In my interview with Dr. Goska, she had explained that her novel was
essentially her own true story, albeit with the names changed to protect the
identity of the man who was once the object of her affection:
Several years back I was wrestling with the
big, hard questions: Is there a God? Why is there suffering? I saw an atheist
on TV and I sent him an email. To my great surprise, he wrote back. We
corresponded for a year, debating the existence of God, and we fell in love.
Her novel grew out of that tempestuous intellectual affair between a
confirmed atheist and a questing believer. But that intellectual bout is not as
black-and-white as that might seem. “Save
Send Delete isn’t a left-wing book or a right-wing book,” Dr. Goska told me.
“It’s about confronting God and love and trying to dig down as deeply as
possible for worthy, livable truth.”
The book opens with Mira emailing an outraged rant to Lord Randolph
Court-Wright, a prominent philosopher, after she sees him interviewed by Bill
Moyers on TV. She bluntly challenges his intellectual arrogance, calling him
“as dogmatic in your atheism as a Monty Python parody of a pope.” To her shock
and mortification, the celebrated philosopher responds graciously; Mira even
suspects that it must be the work of a grad student reading Rand’s emails. And
thus begins their conversation.
Mira is Christian because “Catholicism assured me that I had a place as
good as any rich kid’s in the kingdom of Heaven… Inside a Catholic Church, I
never doubted my worth. There was no reason.” Burdened at one point in her life
with physical challenges, her faith gave Mira meaning to her suffering. “I
approached every feature of my suffering: loneliness, pain, paralysis, despair,
terror, rage, waste, poverty, as an obstacle on a course I was running for my
own spiritual growth in the eyes of God – and nobody else. That choice was what
made all the difference.”
Other than the Judeo-Christian tradition, Mira tells Rand, she knows of
“no other narrative tradition where common, often peasant, women from two, and
three, and four thousand years back, take on individual life and importance
that outlasts the renown of kings.” On the other hand, she writes,
I don’t believe in a God who, the moment you cast
your lot in with him, or read that bestseller about the power of positive
thoughts, makes you happy, pretty, and rich. I do believe that there is a
supernatural entity who can make you feel 100% better instantaneously, and his
name is Satan.”
As for Buddhism, Mira tells Rand that, “like Merton, I’m grateful to
embrace Buddhism’s gifts, like meditation, that don’t contradict my own
beliefs.” But ultimately, “we humans are hot-blooded creatures, and Buddhism is
as cold as empty space, and it demands that we be, as well, and we cannot.”
On the subject of Islam, Mira tells Rand that she didn’t learn about
jihad from a book; she received a blunt education about it from a childhood
Muslim friend named Narin, who told Mira calmly as they walked home from school
together one sunny day “that when the time for jihad came, she’d kill me if I
did not submit”:
The unchanging command that Muslim men must
commit jihad and establish universal dominance is unique to Islam. No other
world faith mandates the nonnegotiable, continuous and all-pervasive
denigration of women and girls that has proven central to Islam… Islam allows
no criticism, and, therefore, no growth, no change.
One of the reasons she revels in her correspondence with Rand is that,
thanks to the “mind-crippling toxin” of politically correct education, she gets
no intellectual stimulation from her functionally illiterate students or even
from other professors: “It’s your feeeelings that matter most,” she says,
scorning their vapid mindset. “There Are No Wrong Answers. Let’s all sit in a
circle and make a communal collage expressing our anger at our enemy – rich,
white, heterosexual, Christian, American men.”
In the process of their back-and-forth, Mira quickly finds herself
becoming seduced; she confides to a friend that “it’s as if he knows what words
I most crave to hear and is speaking them, one after another, in some order
designed to move me to the maximum.” But the growing intimacy is not of a simple
sexual nature: “He and I are not tearing off our clothing to reveal our
nakedness, but, rather, we are revealing something far more intimate – our
souls.” In doing so, she finds they are not so much opposites attracting as
complementary halves:
He’s a glacier. I’m a blowtorch. His
hyperrationality and stunted emotional life provide scaffolding. For once in my
life I can lean back. There is finally a methodical, cold and rational yang out
there equal and opposite to my arithmetically retarded, ever-exploring yin.
Mira’s world view is a reflection of Dr. Goska’s own, of course; they
both categorically reject the deadly relativism of what Goska calls “capital A”
Atheists who dismiss all religion as evil. Such relativism “has long been the
thinking of mass murderers from the French Terror to the Khmer Rouge,” she stated
in the interview.
Save Send Delete presents a compelling
challenge to that absolutist mentality. It is a passionate, intellectually
wide-ranging novel that wrestles with “the big, hard questions” and makes the
case, as Dr. Goska put it, “not only for faith, but for civilization.”
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 2/19/15)
