Article March 15, 2010 Issue

TO SEE AND KNOW GOD

BY BASIL HOFFMAN

I WAS AN ATHEIST and had been from about the time I got out of college. I had no religious life. I was convinced that there was no God. More than 30 years with no connection to God, or so I thought.

Then something happened that changed my life forever.

For some years I'd been suffering from a tremor in my right hand. When I first started to experience this condition, while I was still in my 20s, I connected it to the fact that I was lifting weights. For some period of time after I lifted weights, I couldn't hold things firmly in my right hand. Over the years, the weak grip and some little shaking in my hand began to develop into a real tremor, which became progressively worse. Other members of my family, my mother, two of her sisters, and her father, my grandfather, had suffered from similar symptoms, including severe tremors.