What Happened in Assisi

Last time, I left you with an eighteen-year-old nerd who had just arrived in Italy. A boy who read encyclopedias from cover to cover, drew chicken coops without chickens, and had relegated God to the list of dogmas. I ended with a comparison that I didn’t even understand myself at the time: that this journey would turn out to be my Road to Damascus, just like for the Apostle Paul, who was thrown from his horse by a vision that turned his whole life upside down.

I didn't know I would experience that literally. There was no way I could have prepared for that.

There is a statue of St. Francis in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli that I will never forget.

Not because I was prepared for it. Not because I was looking for anything. I was, as you now know, an eighteen-year-old wearing a mask of self-confidence and possessing an analytical mind that wanted to dissect everything—including architecture. Assisi was a stop along the way, not a destination in itself.

Francis is depicted with his hands open, like a chalice catching something. As I stood there, two live lovebirds were perched in those hands. I have no idea how those birds stayed so calm with all those tourists and their noisy cameras. My analytical mind immediately started looking for an explanation. A trick? A ruse? Trained pigeons?

As I was studying that, something happened that I couldn't quite categorize.

Not a single vote. Something worse.

I didn't hear a thing. Let me be clear: there was no voice in the church. No one spoke to me. There was no light that came down, and no angel spreading its wings.

But I remember a voice—one I didn't hear, but felt.

That’s the strangest sentence I’ve ever written, and it took me years to work up the courage to write it. My mind told me there was nothing. My memory recorded something. And those two have been at odds ever since.

The best I can do is describe what was going through my mind. It was a feeling that something had been said. A sense of words. It felt like the moment right after something remarkable has happened and you think, “Wait, what was that?”—but without the actual event that preceded it. It was the echo without the impact.

What I remember “hearing”: David, what are you actually doing with your life? Don’t waste your chances. I need you.

I walked away. I almost tripped over my own feet.

The second time

I was walking in the wrong direction. In the confusion that followed, I allowed myself to think it was just my imagination. Just a strange moment, the kind you have every now and then. Maybe I was tired. Or perhaps the architecture had had an effect on me. There were surely scientific explanations for these kinds of experiences—and the nerd in me still preferred science to mystery.

I made a point of walking back past the statue, as if to prove a point. See? Nothing to worry about. A statue is a statue. A pigeon is a pigeon.

It happened again.

This time with one extra sentence: You have to make a choice.

I walked away from there without any further drama. Completely overwhelmed, in silence, while the rest of the group was wandering around somewhere else and no one had noticed that I’d just fallen off my pedestal—figuratively speaking, though it felt a bit literal, too.

What I thought about it that evening

That evening, I would have told you that I had heard a voice. An hour later, I would have said it was my imagination. An hour after that, I wasn't so sure anymore.

That pattern kept repeating itself, not just that evening but throughout the years that followed. I had one memory but two stories about that memory, and they constantly contradicted each other.

As the boy who, in the previous piece, still thought that every question had only one correct answer, I knew what to do in that situation: hypothesis, evidence, conclusion. But how do you prove something that took place in your own mind? How do you distinguish a real memory from a fabricated one?

I can't give you any irrefutable proof here. I never can. What I can give you, though, is what I've learned over the years about the difference between a fabrication and a real experience.

Fabrications fade. They become vague, they flake away, they adapt to the story you tell about them. Real memories have a tenacity you can’t rationalize away. They’re anchored in a detail—the position of his hands, the pigeons, the way I stumbled—and that detail doesn’t disappear, even if the story surrounding it has changed twenty times.

That's still the case, thirty years later.

What I think think about it

I joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s a long story with many twists and turns—the studies, the books, the conversations, the doubts, the decisions. I’ll tell that story later and in even greater detail in my book*Reasonably Faithful*, which will be released on September 15. In it, I explain how that one memory eventually grew into a conviction, and what steps led to that point.

But when people ask me when it actually started, I always say the same thing: in a church in Assisi, in front of a statue with doves, on a day when I wasn't even looking for it.

To this day, I’m not one hundred percent sure exactly what happened. I don’t want to claim that I am, either. What I do know is that it changed my life. Not that day—that day I was mostly confused and a little scared. But it set something in motion that couldn’t be stopped. The nerd who wanted nothing to do with God started asking questions after all. And asking questions—that was, in fact, the one thing he’d always been good at.