Christianity: Narcotic or Cure?

My friend, my very old friend, wrote a while back to me after noticing some of the posts to my Face Book account asking "Have you lost your mind? I just can't believe in this overly simplified, pre-packaged narcotic for reality...while I remain basically spiritual in my outlook on life, I can't buy the myth of organized Christianity...to quote Jimmy Buffet 'the god's honest truth is it ain't that simple'..."

Perhaps I have lost my mind. But, if that is so, then the disease, to borrow a phrase from Edgar Allen Poe, has "sharpened my senses, not dulled them or destroyed them". Then again, perhaps the illness is not mine. I think that for the first time in years I now see more clearly. Perhaps, just perhaps, the medication is a cure and not a narcotic. Does the possibility exist that the medication, the "pre-packaged" therapy, which my friend so decries is a cure for my ills? Is it possible that the places where I have sought solace before, that the cures of the world, are what induces narcosis?

I think it not only likely, but highly probable. I've tried finding solace in the things of the world, and they availed me nought. My drinking didn't work, my sexual escapades got me nowhere. You know about that. Talk about pre-packaged. Whatever makes me feel better. Forget the common good. Forget the intrinsic dignity of every human being. There's no need to worry about others. Self-restraint, self-discipline, self-control count for nothing. There's your narcotic, my friend. Numbness.

Now I feel, and what I feel is something quite different from narcosis. It's not pre-packaged in the sense that you think, it's more a regimen, and as part of that regimen, I'm required to feel outside myself. My spirituality requires me to feel faith and hope and love. Faith in a God who has made and keeps His promises; hope for the world He has made and redeemed; love for Him and for those He has put into this world with me.

Most of those with whom I argue see Christianity as anything but simple, and I'm inclined to agree. Greater minds than mine have grappled with its truths and been left stuttering. St Thomas Aquinas, the capo Di tutti capo of Catholic thinkers, after a lifetime of thought and writing of Christianity admitted at the end that his writings were as but straw compared to the Truth. Take a read of Augustine, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, John Paul II and tell me then that you don't begin to see the marvelous and beautiful tapestry that is Christianity. If this is a drug, then I implore you to pump my veins full of it and more! Let me pop some Chesterton and snort some Faustina Kowlaska, pour me a long draft of CS Lewis and let me drink it to its dregs, then perhaps a blunt of Richard J Neuhaus spiked with JRR Tolkien for good measure. And still I'd not be sated.

Now I see, my friend. Dimly, though, as through a glass and darkly. I see that though I suffer, others suffer more. It is through that suffering I see that all this is real, for no man would wish suffering to be if he could will it not to be so. But I see a God who suffers with us to bring about the redemption of those whom He loves. In my suffering, in our suffering, we can unite ourselves to Him in pursuit of that goal. There is no deadening of the pain; in fact, it is felt more acutely. There is hope, though, and in the end "he who has hope lives differently."

Let me know what you think, my friend, and til next time, all the best. Joe