The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

by Andrew Klavan

Jesus’ resurrection is the final proof that no matter how often we kill the truth of who we’re meant to be, it never dies.

Stories are not just entertainment, not to me. A story records and transmits the experience of being human. It teaches us what it’s like to be who we are. Nothing but art can do this. There is no science that can capture the inner life. No words can describe it directly. We can only speak of it in metaphors.

For years, maybe most of my life, I had languished in that typical young intellectual’s delusion that gloom and despair are the romantic lot of the brilliant and the wise. But now I saw: it wasn’t so. Why should it be? What sort of wisdom has no joy in it? What good is wisdom without joy? By joy I don’t mean ceaseless happiness, of course. I don’t mean willed stupidity for the sake of a cheap smile. The world is sad and it is suffering. A tragic sense is essential to both realism and compassion. By joy I mean a vital love of life in both sorrow and gladness. Why not? The hungry can’t eat your tears. The poor can’t spend them. They’re no comfort to the afflicted and they don’t bring the wicked to justice. Everything useful that can be done in the world can be done in joy.