Andrew Klavan

But it’s not only such scenes that inspire my faith. Terrifying storms and catastrophes can have a beauty to them too. Sere wilderness and lowering mountains that overawe the mind can remind us of that God whom to fear is the beginning of wisdom.

But this is true if, and only if, we are watching these sublimities from afar. When the lightning strikes us, when the wilderness swallows us, when the catastrophe falls on us or on those we love — then the revelation tends to vanish, the inspiration fades, and sometimes our faith dwindles away as well. Pain and suffering and ultimately death can strip us of our sense of creation’s beauty and benevolence and make us run to our wall calendars for some comforting verse, false and dishonest though it might be when taken out of context.

And why not? The existential facts of life are weighted, after all, toward bleakness. We hope for heaven, but we are absolutely certain of death. And no matter how many of our prayers in life are answered, our joys are fleeting, while death, for all we know for sure, goes on and on and on.

Oddly, this reflection, typical of my sunny disposition, solved an old riddle for me. Why did Jesus heal people? Why did he bring the dead back to life? What was the point of it? The healed would just grow sick again. The resurrected would someday die. What was the purpose of giving the blind man his sight and the lame man his legs if they would lose them finally forever in the grave?

It must be, I realized, that Jesus saw the world far differently than we do. He saw that the things we experience as most real — suffering and death — are actually illusions, and the things that we fear are illusory — our souls and our eternal life — are in fact the most real. If what he saw is true, if it’s our pain that passes and our joy that lasts, if it’s our life that is endless and our death that dies, then all the world is beauty, and it’s not sentimental in the least to see it as it truly is. If, through healings and resurrections, Jesus could teach us to see what he saw, his joy would be in us and our joy would be complete.