“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” Psalm 139:14 NIV
“When we dead awaken” - Henrik Ibsen
One morning in 1938 in his small apartment on St. Paul Street in Baltimore, Whittaker was casually feeding his young daughter, Ellen, breakfast. He contemplatively absorbed this everyday and seemingly ordinary experience as it appeared to stand in direct contrast to everything about him. Just the fact that Whittaker and his wife, Esther, had a daughter was an unforeseen and unplanned blessing. Even sex itself “was held to be merely functional and of little importance except that it might help or harm the party” (p. 214). Active Communists generally saw children as a burden, which only slowed their participation in the party, even more so for an underground agent in the Soviet Military Intelligence.
Regardless of his own desires, no matter how suppressed they might have been, the thirty-seven-year-old Russian spy had many reasons not to have children. From nearly all viewpoints Whittaker had not lived a desirable life. From his clinically insane grandmother, absent and drunk father, to his emotionally dependent mother and suicidal brother, Whittaker came to the conclusion that having his own children would be to repeat his misery, a crime against life (p. 184). He had no selfish right to perpetuate such hardship. Besides, he questioned, what right had any man and woman to bring children into the 20th century world only to suffer its inevitable revolutions or die in its inevitable wars (p. 325)?
The answer in his mind was, “none.” That’s why abortion was commonplace for Communists. There were communist doctors who rendered that service for a small fee. Communists who were more choosy knew liberal doctors who would render the same service for a larger fee. Abortion, which now filled Whittaker with physical horror, was once regarded by him, like all Communists, as a mere physical manipulation (p.325). But even though Whittaker’s mind was resentfully determined to remain childless, his soul was not. When he heard Esther’s words for the first time two years before that she had conceived, he was first filled with a shock of wild joy and fatherly pride. By this time his father, Jay, had died and his brother, Richard, had long ago taken his own life. If Whittaker was to remain without a child, the bloodline would stop with him. This only increased his inward desire to have children. Yet because it was assumed that he and his wife would dutifully adhere to the party rule (even though unspoken), it was a passing joy, only to be succeeded by a momentary sadness.
But the paternal instincts were too strong to deny in both Whittaker and Esther. They both simply wanted to have the child, and nothing would stop them: not reason, the agony of his own upbringing, the Communist Party and its theories, nor wars and revolutions of their current time. All these stout walls of materialism and communist ideology crumbled with the gentle touch of a child (p. 325).
And so two years later, Whittaker found himself caught between two opposing worlds. He was a spy for the Russian Communist Party working to overthrow capitalism and the Christian worldview through espionage activities among high-ranking United States government officeholders while also being a man who really only wanted to live on a farm and work the land, be a husband to a wife he loved, and a father mundanely feeding his beautiful daughter on unremarkable mornings.
Despite the danger and adventure in the former, the latter brought Whittaker more peace and joy. He felt like an average man and a normal father as he watched his daughter drop porridge on the floor and rub it on her face as she tried to find her mouth. So bad was her aim that bits of breakfast were even found on her ear. And it was then that her father’s eyes stopped. He gazed at her ear — more specifically, on the small convolutions of her ear — those intricate, perfect ears. Those ears were not made by chance or by atoms naturally coming together (the communistic view). They could have only been created by immense design. All Whittaker could think was God. He tried for a second to crowd the unwanted thought out of his mind for if he had completed it, he would have to admit that “design presupposes God.” And for a Communist where the denial of God and exaltation of man is the aim, such thoughts were secular anathema. While he might not have known it at the time, “the finger of God was first laid upon his forehead” (p. 16).
In this surreal moment, certain thoughts from Whittaker’s childhood arose in his mind. Anything he knew of God or religion wasn’t a result of Christian upbringing or of education. “He knew it as a result of something he had heard by chance, or something that happened to him, and that touched something that was already in him” (p. 116). There were a few moments in his childhood that he believed declared the invisible attributes of God. Even as a child, he knew there was something divine in these rare experiences. One such experience occurred early in his childhood. Whittaker had wandered off into the roaming fields from where he lived as a boy. After some time, he found himself facing a nearly impenetrable four-foot-tall wall of thistles in full bloom. Wanting to keep moving, he pushed his way through with his back on the ground, wriggling like a worm between the thick stems. After some time of pushing, he stood up in the midst of the field. It was painted purple as far as his eye could see from the endless flowering thistles. “Clinging to the flowers, hovering over them, or twittering and dipping in flight, were dozens of goldfinches — little golden yellow birds with black, contrasting wings and caps” (p.117). They didn’t pay the slightest attention to the young boy. It was as if they had never seen one before. The sight was so unexpected and the beauty so absolute that young Whittaker thought he could not stand without grabbing a stem for support. Out loud, he said: “God.” It was a simple statement, not an exclamation. And at that moment, which he remembered through all the years of his life as one of its highest moments, he was closer than he would be again in nearly 40 years to the intuition that alone could give meaning to his life, the intuition that God and beauty are one (p.117).
The dropping of his daughter’s utensil on the ground awoke Whittaker from his reverie. He squinted his eyes to break the vacant look still fixed on little Ellen’s ear. The sunlight had begun to fall softly upon the table at which they sat as Esther came in to relieve her husband. Whittaker stood up and began to get ready for another day’s work in the Fourth Section of the Russian Intelligence apparatus. Yet as he shaved and got dressed, he couldn’t shake the notion that it was God whispering in his ear as he stared in awe at his daughter’s.
He collected his documents and placed them on top of the revolver that he kept inside his briefcase. As he gathered everything he needed for the day, he kissed his wife and daughter goodbye and closed the door behind him. He walked into the rising sun but away from the world he held dear. Whittaker knew that what had transpired while gazing at his daughter’s ear was something to behold. He wanted to leave the party but knew there would be serious repercussions if he did. As one colleague told him, if one ever decided to break from the underground, he would either be terminated “by them or by us.” This wasn’t surprising to Whittaker. He had assumed this from the beginning of his service to the party. And yet, as he walked down the sidewalk, he felt like Lazarus, that he had begun the impossible return from the underground where he had been buried deep for six years, back into the world of freeman (p. 25). As Whittaker would later observe, "A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites — God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism” (p. 16). God was drawing Whittaker’s Soul towards Himself, towards Beauty, and towards Freedom. As these thoughts became more alive and began to take root within his soul, he reached the prearranged park bench. Starting to feel more alive than ever, Whittaker sat down and waited for the drop-off. Under his breath, he continued to repeat four words taken from an Ibsen play: “When we dead awaken, When we dead awaken, When we dead awaken” (p. 25).
Micah Coate, President and Host of Salvation and Stuff
To enjoy this in a Podcast go here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/salvation-and-stuff/id1492371560?i=1000482400652
Works Cited: 1. Chambers, Whittaker, Witness, Regnery Publishing, INC. Washington, D.C. 1980. Photograph, https://www.webmd.com/baby/ss/slideshow-fetal-development
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