johnbyronkuhner.com

As you grow older you learn that a key dimension of all religious narrative is that these are stories which you will, by virtue of being human, almost certainly reenact in your own life. Andrew Sullivan, who has been leading one of the most impressively public Christian lives, describes in few and eloquent words his own confrontation with the cross the day he learned he had HIV.

In one day I was told, ‘You’re going to die, you can’t stay in America, and you probably have to quit your job.’ … And the sense, the knowledge that God can strip you of everything – and what do you have left? … It’s a very useful moment in one’s life – to realize, ‘What do I have if all of this is taken away? What’s left? What am I really living for?’

He quotes a friend who said about his own suffering, “I’m almost grateful,” which beautifully describes the phenomenon. You know that words like “grateful,” which people use to describe how they feel when friends give them concert tickets or their colleagues proofread their work, cannot possibly be used for something so strange and mysterious as this, this personal death and resurrection which is very nearly as horrible as it is good.

The theoretical value of real Christianity is that it teaches this way of descent: the courage to let God (or the Universe) change you, the humility to face the fact that your own desires are not commands the world will bother to obey, the wisdom to realize that you will suffer and die no matter how much you may want to live and prosper. I attended a lecture in my high school, a place where young men often learn to consider worldly success the highest value, and the speaker, Michael Holleran, said, “How did we miss the point? How did we get coopted by the world, so that the most important thing became making money and never doing anything embarrassing in your whole life? Just look at the cross! Living a long, successful, wealthy life is not what we’re supposed to worship.” And he looked around the room for a cross to point to, but, it being a Jesuit school, of course there wasn’t one.

Sullivan is a Catholic, but there’s no obvious reason why you need Christianity to realize these things about the universe. But Christianity has the potential to give you language and images to understand these things as they happen to you, and perhaps prevent you from going down the path of denial, the great refusal to accept the horror and darkness of your own life, which can only lead to greater and greater neurosis as you attempt to put a Geryon-face on the fraud of your own supposed immortality and perfection.