Why I am a Christian (or, at least, part of a story in motion)

Stare long enough from the third floor of an apartment into the cool, bruise-colored absence of a late August night, and you will lose your senses. Your sense of time slips into the barrage of passing headlights shining liked focused, hyperactive fireflies as they glide irregularly down the highway. The soft murmur of humanity oozes from the cracks of your isolation and dances at the corner of your mind until you lose your sense of place. Your sense of loneliness, slides into the haze of your own heartbeat—a pulse that wraps around you like a velvet blanket of slow-burning fire. In that moment, every common sense skepticism melts away, and you are left with nothing but your own life and the color of the world around you—a color settling like silt at the base of your spine, tingling in an echo chamber of thought somehow lost in the bustle of everyday life.

It is always hard to seize this moment without it fading from the effort, evaporating as rationality awakens to find its predecessor bathing in the moonlight—and crushes this delicate creature in territorial fright; but it is in these moments, rare as they are, that I sometimes feel the clarity of thoughts I shy from in waking hours. It is in these moments of contemplative pre-thought, that I, occasionally, see my life more clearly than at any other time.

By all accounts, this—my world, my life, my reason, my will—this condition I call existence should be nothing more than nothing: a blank space occupied by night in the absence of night. My very wakefulness defies some whisper of skepticism that always hovers in the back of my mind begging (softly, like yours) one simple question: “Why?” Every breath irks and startles me. Every breeze crawls from my eyes to my toes with the stealth and purpose of a stalking panther, and the lights fade to non-light in a kind of relativism that defies the moral kind—a relativism that, faced with the decidedly objective truth of my existence, continues to ask the one unanswerable question I will face in my life. Why?

For many, the explanation is simple. Somewhere along the line, this tiny ball (as near as I can tell, an eternal pin-prick containing all of space an time) was ignited by an inexplicable explosion of celestial energy (yet another eternal element) catalyzed by an enigmatic principle of physics—a natural mechanism that preceded nature and time. From this explosion, life arose. Beauty arose. Nature (finally awakened and fulfilled) arose. Love arose. Six billion years somewhere down the line, I arose.

This always seemed a fairy tale to my mind. To think that the flower of this universe blossomed from the period at the beginning of history was an absurdity that left me unfulfilled from as early as I could remember. Sure, the scientists could prove evolution, but they couldn’t explain nature any better than the Inuits with their stories of animal gods and celestial fights. Creation, even to the secularists, was an ex nihilo phenomenon. Somewhere along the line, something outside the system had to exist. Even more fanciful than the eternality of matter and energy, was the super-eternality of the thing that could move these two material principles to life.

So, I was left with a choice: Choose one of two pre-eternal (and, thus, post-eternal principles).

The first is nameless and faceless—a mathematical abstraction that somehow became the prime mover when it collided with the pin-prick of existence and set fire to creation. Far from warm and fuzzy, this explanation seems acceptable because it is natural—meaning nameless and utterly lacking personality, a non-willful entity that refuses to pass judgment on the matrix it could not not create. This first entity is objectively subjective, but it doesn’t do much to explain life. By definition it seems super-natural (or at least outside the bounds of what we refer to as nature), but by definition it eliminates the possibility of anything supernatural. It begs the question of its own existence, and, far from simplistic, seems an impossibility wrapped in the absurdity of an exception to the nature it gave life.

The second option was different. It watched me as I glazed over, wrapped up in my own frightened contemplation. It stared back at me when I looked for an answer at the beginning of time (or, I suppose, the time outside of time). It recoiled when I called it “it” and asked, softly at first, that I call “it” by name. The second option was the same as the first—an eternal principle that collided with matter and energy to produce a marvel of engineering: creation ex nihilo—something from a nothing that, itself, should never have been. However, the second option had a personality and a purpose. The second option allowed for inconsistency, because it laughed at what I knew of “nature” like a parent laughs at their child’s fascinating with a lopsided sandcastle. The second option seemed more believable because it was, by definition, super-natural; it wasn’t just outside of nature, it was above it, regulating the post-nothing existence that would be the history of my kind.

Look into any woman’s (or man’s) eyes, and the second option is not just more believable; it is more fulfilling and comforting. Fall in love with another human being—living and breathing when they shouldn’t be—and the second option allows for the knot in your stomach that defies the logical slight-of-hand employed by the materialist who would look past their own eternal principle rather than face its inconsistencies. Wrap your arms around a newborn child, the impossible birth of a conquering soul into the nothingness of material life, and you will pray that the second option is right. If for no other reason, you will choose the second option to justify the way you would live and die for nothing more than another’s life.

That is why I am a Christian. Take all of the other options—cold, hard, materialist, and utterly afraid of their own dogmatic foundations—into account, and nothing else seems quite right. Nothing explains the shape of our bodies and souls or the warmth when those entities unite. Nothing explains our longing where no longing should be for a home buried somewhere in the sky. Nothing else portends to explain that itch we have at the base of our hearts, the constant nagging of displacement in a world in which our existence should seem right.

Stare into the sky tonight. When you finally start looking and start to see, explain to me the absence in a more coherent and hopeful way. Tell me something inside you doesn’t start to wonder why. Tell me some other explanation, any explanation, could be right.

Comments

[Sara]

Thank you.

[M]

This is yet another example of your way with words that reinforces my high regard for you. There's a lot of word power in you, John... always use your power for good and not for evil. ;)

[BRan]

That was beautiful.