One dawn in 2020, locked down in a high-rise apartment, I was sicker than I had ever been in my life when a Doctor walked through the dead-bolted door and into my living room.
He did this not tangibly but in my imagination. I have had an active one since I was a child. Characters from other realms would often come visit if I had paper and pencil, and I would bundle nightly under the covers with a book and flashlight to make my own trips to fictional worlds. I did this not to escape our world but to search for explanations of what I had witnessed in it.
I was five years old when my family immigrated from Russia to the United States, fleeing life-threatening antisemitism. From the safety of our new home, I pondered a question: Why, beneath the skin-flaying sorrow of the human story, could I sense in every capillary of my being the throbbing pulse of heartbreaking joy?
This was the question that kept me up reading, and the first fictional world where I began to glimpse answers was Narnia. Here was a story that persuasively imagined the necessity of friendship and courage in the face of hatred and terror––a story in which the heartbeat of joy beat louder. It emanated from Aslan the lion, who followed me home out of the wardrobe. He started accompanying me to kindergarten and playing tag with my friends at recess. He let me fall asleep nuzzling his mane, and the tenderness of his presence felt like déjà vu, like something I could almost recognize or a good dream I could almost remember.
One might argue I was simply recognizing C. S. Lewis’s allusions to the gospel story. But that was impossible. My family had inherited the Soviet Union’s atheism. When I met Aslan, I had never heard of “Jesus of Nazareth,” never opened a Bible, never knowingly encountered Christianity.
Aslan stayed with me for the next two years until the premiere of the Fellowship of the Ring movie. My family went to see it, and the heartbeat of joy that had reverberated in Lewis’s Narnia now surged from the depths of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
It crescendoed with nearly unbearable resonance into a longing that pulled me toward Gandalf the wizard. When I watched him die, I was so upset that I begged my mom to read me the next book in the series, The Two Towers. There, Gandalf came back from the dead, transfigured with white light, and took Aslan’s place as my imaginary companion. He remained with me for the next ten years—until they turned dark, then dangerous, and I told him to go away.
I did so because, as a teenager, I encountered more and more evil, not only outside myself but also inside. I did not need to read children’s stories anymore to know that adults could shape-shift into monsters, that we were capable of any horror. Louder than that heartbeat of joy, I began to hear a hissing in my thoughts that demanded to know why I should be kind to my enemies when I could be cruel; why I should seek good when I could seek power, pleasure.
I had no answers, only the emotions Narnia and Middle-earth had inspired. So I stopped using my imagination to indulge in “childish” stories and started digging for answers in the nonfictional abysses of 20th-century Europe. I stopped talking to Gandalf and matriculated at Dartmouth College. My first professor was a Christian.
His lectures on 20th-century Europe dissected me. I imagined myself a citizen of the Third Reich and understood I could not stop its gears from grinding up blood and marrow. I could perhaps shelter my Jewish neighbors, but that would not halt the cattle trains headed to Auschwitz. If anything, I would be arrested and gassed myself, so all my logic ordered me to opt for self-preservation.
But I could still hear that joy from my childhood, pounding like the heartbeat of a dying bird. That joy demanded a courage I could not comprehend, a selflessness I could not imagine. It demanded all of me, in fact, but with the passionate gentleness of a beloved. And I could not surrender, because between me and that joy stood the monster of death, and I was afraid, and I still had no answers.
Around this time, my professor returned my exam with a scribbled note: “If you’d like to chat more about these topics, come and see me.”
I did come and see him, and I learned that he was also a pastor whose faith had provided an intellectual framework for his trials. For the first time in my life, I opened a Bible and started reading. But if its contents had spoken to my new friend, they did not make any sense to me. I could neither imagine any of the biblical stories, nor feel emotion about them, nor grasp their logical implications. But I liked discussing them with my professor, so I kept reading until I graduated from Dartmouth and enrolled at Harvard for a PhD specializing in cosmology.
Right away, I met certain students who had also witnessed childhood suffering that had left them with lifelong questions. Like me, they had turned to science in pursuit of a rational story that made sense of their chaotic universe. These classmates were brilliant and often kind, but they had not, in their own words, forgiven the world for its cruelties. Why should we be fair to our enemies when they have been brutal? Why bother with goodness when greatness is better?
I wondered these things myself, especially after my encounter with 20th-century Europe. And I could almost sustain this mindset, so long as I believed I was better than my neighbors. In the early days of my PhD, my friend, the pastor-professor, forwarded me a Christian article about Narnia, Middle-earth, and Jesus. I felt a hissing anger frothing inside when I read that email. I typed a reply—to my best friend of the past two years—and told him, like Gandalf, to never contact me again.
I did not know it then, but neither my professor nor Gandalf truly left me; they merely withdrew to a gentlemanly distance. I would learn later that my professor prayed for me daily for the next four years.
In the meantime, I drank up Harvard’s culture to the point of intoxication. I worked on influential projects, climbed the social hierarchy, ate at expensive restaurants, and wore fine clothing. It made me happy—on the surface. But I felt a corrosive despair rising within, leaving me empty, lonely, and joyless, though I could not understand why.
Around this time, I got an email offering a relationship with a faculty career mentor. Although I replied, I did not get the mentor I had requested. Instead, I was assigned to a professor Karin Öberg. I did not like her. She was one of those devout Christian types.
I decided that I could put up with this when I realized that she also knew about the joyful heartbeat. In fact, she seemed to attach a great deal of importance to it. Each time I explored a potential career path, I would report back, saying, “Well, that was all right. I suppose I could do that for a living.” But she would shake her blond head and tell me, “No. You’re not glowing with joy. Cross that job off the list and move on.”
Karin and I met in person until the pandemic descended, but when Harvard closed, I locked down with a friend in his high-rise apartment. One July dawn, during a time of peaceful protests and violent riots, I watched with my coffee from the safety of our 26th-story windows as the National Guard deployed amid shattered glass and clouds of pepper spray. I knew my schedule for that day: I would put on my fine clothes, work on my influential project, and lord over my colleagues. And the despair inside me swelled into a vertigo of nausea, an utter vacuum of meaning.
I had everything I wanted. This was the life I had chosen. Nobody had forced it upon me, but now I was trapped in it. And it felt like a foretaste of hell. It sickened me.
I lay down on the couch and tried, for the first time in years, to access my imagination. I could not do it. The wardrobe to Narnia was just a wardrobe. The passage to Middle-earth seemed forever closed. If I had woken up blind, I do not think I would have felt as much terror. I became desperate and tried to imagine something simpler: the corridor just outside our dead-bolted apartment. But I saw nothing, not even blackness or the texture of my eyelids, but an abyss, the negation of being. And as I began to topple into it, I felt someone sit down on the couch and catch my hand.
I opened my eyes and saw a graying, bespectacled Doctor with an old-fashioned medical bag and a heartbreaking gentleness that seemed somehow familiar. I knew he was imaginary; in fact, part of me wanted to congratulate myself for forcing my rusty imagination into first gear. But the rest of me sensed the Doctor at my bedside was different from the characters I had invented.
I do not remember what he and I talked about, only that he visited daily that summer until my imagination returned. I got well enough to ask whether I should stay with my friend in our high-rise apartment.
I will always remember the Doctor’s answer: “By saying yes to him, you’re saying no to someone else.”
I left the high-rise and returned to Harvard. I called my history professor, who said he forgave me because he had been forgiven. I wrote a short story about my Doctor, which posed but did not answer my nagging questions, and then I put it away, eager to dive back into my Harvard life.
But the Doctor kept following me around, gently whispering, “Finish my story.” I probably would have ignored him had it not been for Karin. When I told her about the Doctor, she gave me a strange look, as though she had recognized him. She said, “Keep writing. This is it. Finally, you are glowing.”
I pulled the draft back out and, with the Doctor’s help, began turning it into a novel. I submitted an early version to a Harvard writing course, and it was accepted. The instructor encouraged me to apply to national workshops, and this, too, went well.
My Doctor, meanwhile, shepherded me back to New Hampshire on what I thought was just a vacation. I stayed with my Dartmouth friends, three of whom happened to be retired doctors, who contributed their expertise to the growing manuscript. It dawned on me there was no reason to return to Boston, so I texted a New Hampshire friend to ask if he knew of any rentals where I could focus on my PhD and on writing. He texted back, “Do you need indoor plumbing?” Because if not, he and his wife had a cabin in the woods where I could finish the novel.
Many months later, over half a year since leaving the high-rise apartment, after two full revisions of the novel, I woke up on March 28, 2021. Being an atheist, I had no idea it was Palm Sunday. I did my work for the day. I drove into town to buy a burrito. I returned to the cabin and, on a whim, decided to read the Gospel of John. I had a copy of every major religious text because owning them made me feel smarter.
I read to just before Jesus’ arrest in the garden, then closed my eyes. I imagined myself facing torture and death, as I had imagined in 20th-century Europe. But this time, I did not flee the terror. Instead, I let it suffuse me. Then I imagined my Doctor in the garden, and after I had soaked up this pain, I imagined him waiting for the impending death of his Son. For that was the story of the novel I had just finished: a father losing his only child.
I imagined his agony. I could feel skin-flaying sorrow. And I understood the logical implications of Jesus’ claims. If the gospel were true, then Lewis and Tolkien had been right: The universe was a romance and our life an adventure. If the gospel were true, then the monsters were powerless: Every life was infinitely valuable, death had been defeated, and though we fell, we would rise. If the gospel were true, then Jesus of Nazareth was the heartbreaking joy I had been searching for all my life: my Aslan, my Gandalf, my Doctor, Beloved, and Savior.
I stood in the cabin, holding on to the gospel, and all the stories I had ever read fell away to bare an author. For the first time in my life, I was willing to know the answer.
“Is it true?” I asked.
And God answered:
“Yes.”
Nina Maksimova, PhD, lives in Scotland, where she is preparing the Doctor’s novel for publication while studying the intersection of cosmology, literature, and religion at the University of St Andrews.
