"God talked to me today"

Here's what I knew: before the doctors got involved, when his father and I had faith in him, Andrew had not been sick. He'd been simply autistic -- in mostly charming ways -- and had happened, every once in a while, to hear the voice of God.

But after two years of psychiatric treatment, he was deeply afflicted with more than just autism and a case of teenage depression. Muddled, moody, dopey, he was now prone to hearing a variety of voices: the girl he'd hated in second grade, an old lady who had scolded him in a restaurant when he was 12, and the Eagles' Don Henley. He was mean and unhappy, and God had grown faint.

It seemed clear to me that the first situation was better than the second. So I set about to try to recover it.

I took Andrew home and tried fiercely to believe. If God were actually paying attention, I raged, my wise son would simply awaken and pop out of the stammering Goliath who'd replaced him. A "Red Riding Hood" kind of ending. But it wasn't that way at all; his progress was, in fact, excruciatingly slow.

Medications like the ones my son was given alter one's ability to synthesize dopamine, which is, among other things, the pleasure-seeking hormone. The reason patients in the early stages of Parkinson's have a tendency to abuse substances, gamble, have risky sex, and shop compulsively is that their dopamine production is impaired. Simply put, they've lost the brain function necessary to get a thrill.

So Andrew came back from his medical odyssey a junkie, compelled to eat, drink, play, and spend. What's more, he'd lost two entire years and -- due mostly to the untreated catatonia -- about ten years of functioning. So he was, essentially, an adolescent locked in a 290-pound body and technically old enough to arrest.

Rather than returning to his sweet, smart childhood self, as I'd hoped, Andrew was driven, compulsive, unstoppable. Nothing I said made any difference. And yet...

There was, after all the other voices had disappeared, still God.

"I heard him in my head," Andrew told me after he was picked up for shoplifting. "Before I stole the candy bars, God said, 'Andrew, don't do this.'"

"But you didn't listen?" I asked, even though the answer -- given that the two of us were standing in the store where he'd been caught and retained and I was now writing out a check -- was obvious.

Andrew ducked his head in shame and whispered, "Sadly, I did not."

Finally, in January, I capitulated and placed my son in a locked treatment home, a bleak place full of fractional people whom society could not accommodate in any other way. Like the asylums in "Dracula" or old Bette Davis films.

For days after, I felt as if I were swimming through a nightmare. My sense of time was off: Everything seemed to be happening a couple seconds faster in the real world than it was in mine. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't write. I couldn't read, which was the closest thing to total breakdown I could imagine.

I went to a therapist and described my mental state. Perhaps, I said, I was the one who needed antipsychotic drugs. "Oh, no, what you're experiencing is normal," she told me. "This is grief. What you need to do is work through this and accept that your son will never be OK."

One morning, desperate for a different answer, I called Dr. Mark Dever, pastor of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and (according to my Google search) a leading expert on listening to God. I reached him in his office and he listened for full minutes while I described in too much detail the situation.

"I don't know that you need to differentiate between conscience and hearing the word of God." Dever said. "I believe it's a kindness to us that we have this sense that gives us time to correct ourselves. Your son is only trying to live in accordance with the scriptures."

I was not soothed. But then, as if by some miracle, Andrew began to get better.

The structure and well-trained staff at the group home surely deserve most of the credit. I would arrive to take Andrew out for coffee and he would be neatly groomed, polite, full of thoughts. February brought a few warm days and we walked to Minnehaha Falls. My son stood tall -- not swaying -- staring into the upside-down spires of the frozen falls, and told me he had begun to write poetry about the way blackness sometimes "crowded" him. He had made friends with the other residents and taught one of them to play chess. After a month, I arranged his transfer to a more cheerful residence where he could enter a day program and maybe even get a part-time job.

That night I fell asleep but awoke a couple of hours later, staring into the night. This is not unusual for me: I often startle around 2 a.m., panicked about inconsequential things. The need to make a dentist appointment, or whether we're out of butter.

But on this night, I felt something else. Not a presence, exactly, but an amorphous sense of rightness. It was broad and familiar, a little bit brooding.

A stock enlightenment experience, I know. It could have been a dream, I suppose, or the clawing of my frantic mind, creating out of need something similar to the bright white light people see as they begin to die. And it is true that the following day I would go right back to constant worry, living in a sinister place.

But for a few moments, I lay in bliss. Uncertain of where I ended and God began.

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