Suffering's Revelatory Power

Andrew Sullivan, fast becoming America's most influential writer on faith and religion, ruminates on Christianity, atheism, and suffering:

Christianity's radical claim is that it is in suffering alone that we approach the truth about our ultimate condition, just as Jesus' intense suffering on the Cross makes sense only as an act of God's solidarity with us in this mortal, existential panic. The position you take on this cannot be reduced to an argument. It is much deeper than that.

I revere reason and respect atheism. (And I think the writer who most taught me about the need for mutual respect between atheists and believers was an atheist, Albert Camus.) Watching my friend die in this remarkable fashion is as persuasive an argument for atheism as I can imagine. Hitch is dying as he lives - with integrity and passion. But for me, it is the fear too that informs us, the dread and the pain and the loneliness of dying and suffering. The moments I have felt closest to God have been when I have been stripped of every security, the moments when I have felt no love, known no safe home, witnessed unspeakable cruelty - and was rescued by nothing but his ineffable, boundless and yet intimate Love.

This is not an argument, I know. It can easily be dismissed as wish-fulfillment. I beg of you only to respect that this is not how I experienced these moments. They were real. In suffering, I have felt and known God reach into my life and grab me by the scruff of my neck and shake me with the brusque affection of a father's compassion. "Andrew, Andrew ... you fret and are anxious about so many things. But only one thing is necessary."