2 of 4

His writing has improved incredibly since those early days. I don't recall any signs from our first years working together that he would become an artist with words, a writer capable of enchanting us. He taught me a lesson: Never underestimate a determined person. Philip read voraciously, ultimately receiving an M.A. in literature at the University of Chicago. And he turned his laser focus to writing. I don't think anybody else gets any credit, including me, who has probably picked apart his prose as much as anybody over the years. He taught himself.

All Philip's best writing is marked by sharp observation and caution in jumping to conclusions. His general stance is, "I didn't understand this [prayer, pain, the seeming absence of God], it was a problem to me, so I decided to try to learn from it. And now as a fellow pilgrim, I am going to offer you what I learned, to see if it helps you too." Make no mistake: Philip remains a missionary at heart. He wants to change lives. Writing gave him a way to do it as an escaped fundamentalist, a man wary of authoritative pronouncements.

But Philip did have a prime mentor. I can clearly recall that in the mid-'70s he began talking about "Dr. Brand," as he always called him. I could not see what drew them together so strongly. Paul Brand was a world-famous hand surgeon, an expert on leprosy who had grown up and lived much of his life in India. He was a thoughtful Christian and a brilliant doctor; he had lived a fascinating life and had some ideas for a book. But the two men were decades apart in age, and worlds apart in experience and outlook.

I once asked Philip about their connection. He said that of all the many people he had written about, Brand was perhaps the only one who worried that what Philip wrote about him would make him look better than he really was.

Brand did not pursue Philip as a potential coauthor; quite the opposite. Philip was fascinated, far beyond the editorial possibilities most would have seen. I think there were two factors. One was Brand's fatherly status: Brand gave Philip a model of the kind of Christian he wanted to be—non-fundamentalist but thoroughly devout, humble, creative, and passionate about his work. He was the father Philip had missed.

The other factor was a shared subject: pain. Brand had participated in the discovery that most of leprosy's terrible toll on lives began with numbness to pain. The loss of pain was at the heart of his patients' problems. In this scientific fact, Philip saw a spiritual metaphor. And he somehow felt his way to the realization—I say felt because I doubt that it was a conscious process—that pain would be the subject of his life. Dr. Brand gave him a way to start writing about pain without being too direct or too obvious.

Philip used to say that he was an odd candidate to write about suffering, since he had never suffered. I disagree. True, he had never been starved or tortured, nor did he suffer from a terrible disease. But he was a little boy who grew up without a father, a boy sensitive to the deprivations of his childhood, and a man who, despite his rational exterior, experienced life very deeply. As long as I have known Philip, he has been drawn to suffering people—to their written accounts, to their experiences shared in letters and conversations. Somehow people recognize this sensitivity in him: he started receiving an extraordinary deluge of confessions, even before he was a well-known author. People seek him out to tell him about their pain.

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page

April 2008, Vol. 52, No. 4