The Holiest Month of My Life

Hassan II Mosque, Casablanca, Morocco – March 25, 2023

Faith is an essential part of living a meaningful life, for without a belief in something beyond or behind what we can touch and see, we slip into nihilism and apathy. According to that idea, I seek out religious experiences—not to become religious but to learn from religion and better understand my personal faith.

I’m agnostic, and this has been the holiest month of my life.

By claiming to be agnostic, I mean that I don’t believe in either the existence or the non-existence of God. I believe that we do not and can never know such a thing. Rather than hold to any beliefs with dogmatic certainty, I focus on uncertainty. I lean into the questions of ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics and search for the boundaries and blindspots of my worldview.

I’ve treated the past month like an introductory course in theology. The course began with a field trip to Morocco, which doubled as syllabus week. It outlined the concepts and primed the questions that I would explore. Then, back in my stateside classroom, I attended three Roman Catholic services during Holy Week and learned about the Passion of Christ. I’ve since been working through my final exams, writing about what I’ve learned.

What you’ll find here is the story of my month, told through questions, ideas, and revelations that I hope will help anyone who is skeptical yet open to faith.

Dawn of the Crescent

This month began on another continent and in the midst of a foreign culture. On March 22, I was standing in a bowl between sand dunes in the Western Sahara. In the day, the dunes were still, orange waves, and at night the waves lost all texture and became opaque curtains against a celestial stage. Craning my neck to observe the stars above, I was reminded of the world’s natural mystery. I was reminded of how much I don’t know and how grateful I am for the pleasure of consciousness.

Beneath a billion stars, I thanked whatever forces brought me to being.

Absent from the firmament was the moon. It wouldn’t rise for another few hours. I climbed to the rim of the bowl, then descended again into camp. As I slept, the crescent moon dawned, marking the start of Ramadan.

The influence of Islam is much more apparent in Morocco than Christianity’s influence is in the U.S. In Morocco, you see traditional and conservative clothing. You see streams of men exiting prayer rooms in the middle of the morning. And you hear prayer calls five times per day.

During Ramadan, attendance peaked. I saw massive gatherings through the mosques’ big, open doors, but I couldn’t step inside. That space is for the believers, His followers. I’m not one of them and am not allowed among them. Yet, the days’ prayer calls gave me pause.

They ring from loud speakers atop mosques, the tallest buildings in every city. They call the people, no matter their beliefs, to pause and be grateful. Whether or not you kneel down and pray, the prayer calls interrupt the ephemeral thoughts of your day. You put down your fork or phone, relax your jaw, and breathe. Through static and cracks, foreign words ring out in a familiar rhythm. The noise is enough to convey meaning:

There is something beyond us that we don’t understand.

There is something that existed before us that will succeed us.

Even in the natural world and in our daily experience, there is something worthy of faith.

Morocco reminded me of the importance of prayer—or, in my case, meditation. It’s grounding and elevating. It’s humbling and transcendental. When you pause to reflect on the gift of existence, you become more aware of what matters. Somehow, no matter how grand and mysterious the world is, we easily forget. We forget so easily that we need to remind ourselves five times per day. We need to remind ourselves of what matters so that we can stop concerning ourselves with what doesn’t.

Palm Sunday

Back in New Jersey, bereft of the billion stars, I attend the first event in a Theology 101 lecture series, courtesy of the Roman Catholic Church. Palm Sunday Mass reminds patrons of Christ’s Passion—of Peter’s three denials, Judas’s betrayal, Jesus’s cross-bearing, and His faith and forgiveness in the face of death.

“Passion” comes from the Latin word pati, which means “to suffer.” Caught up in the sweeping platitudes of secular society, we’ve forgotten the suffering that attends passion. Passion is not ecstasy, euphoria, or bliss. Passion is meaningful pain; it is an agony worth enduring. If you are passionate about something, you are willing to withstand what’s required to accomplish your end.

Think of any athlete or artist. How many missteps, bombs, false starts, and rejections did they experience before reaching their goals? Think of any relationship you’ve had. How many challenging conversations, tinges of jealousy, and bouts of inadequacy did you overcome so that you could grow closer to your partner? Any passion—whether artistic, romantic, or religious—is a mix of suffering and pleasure—but not simple pleasures. Passion points to higher pleasures, ones that are rooted in your values and give meaning to existence.

The Passion of Christ is an account of His suffering, and it is the account of His accomplishment. It is at once tragic and climactic, somber and triumphant.

Palm Sunday marks the start of the Catholic Holy Week, during which believers walk with Christ toward His death, anticipating His resurrection on Easter Sunday. At this Roman Catholic service, we stand, listen, and read along to the story, which begins at the Last Supper and ends with Jesus’s death. I catch details I hadn’t remembered, like how Judas identifies Jesus by kissing Him (and now I understand the idiom “the kiss of death”).

I am engrossed in the powerful story and inspired by Jesus’s resolve and commitment to His mission. But one thing distracts me from the story and taints its insights. In this reading of Matthew 26:14–27:66, there are four speaking parts: the narrator, Jesus, the apostles, and we are cast as the voice of the Jews and Romans condemning Christ to death—the crowd.

I refuse to read the lines assigned to us, the people in the pews, for this casting reinforces my least favorite tenet of the Catholic faith: we are fallen, sinful creatures, unworthy of God’s grace by our good deeds alone. We must be saved by Christ and ask for the Father’s mercy if we are to be worthy of eternal life. The church crowd reads as the mob, condemning the Son of God, which suggests that we have a natural, unshakable kinship with these cruel people of another time and place. We are no different than them, which is why we take their part in the story. In unison, a packed house reads the bolded lines:

“He deserves to die.”

“Let him be crucified!”

“Let him be crucified!”

I was inspired by the story of Christ’s Passion but uncomfortable with my casting in its retelling. Yet, there is a way to reconcile this conflict. I should emulate Christ by understanding the suffering required to achieve worthy ends, the suffering that attends passion, but I should not act as if I deserve to suffer. I am not a fallen, sinful creature.

The suffering I experience in life is not a punishment. Suffering is amoral; it is simply part of life. It is part of striving toward something meaningful, toward something I value. Suffering is an inseparable part of passion.

Good Friday

The reading on Palm Sunday closed with Jesus’s last words: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And that stumped me. I asked myself, Did Jesus lose His faith at the moment of His death? Wouldn’t that invalidate His good work? Then, at the end of mass, the church advertised the rest of their Holy Week programming, and I added Friday’s to my calendar: Meditation on the Seven Last Words of Jesus Christ.

Christ’s seven last words are more like verses He said on the cross, from the various accounts of His crucifixion in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.^[1] Each is powerful and conveys its own lesson, but I’ll focus on the fourth of the seven words because it holds the mystery I attended this service to solve.

My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?

I enter the Good Friday meditation intending to answer one question: How could Christ have fulfilled His mission if He lost faith in the Father at the moment of His death?

Accompanying the seven words are commentary, hymns, prayers, and a slideshow of images depicting Jesus on the day of His crucifixion. Sitting in the pew with my notebook, I pay close attention to it all, eagerly awaiting the answer to my question—the big reveal of the meaning behind the fourth word: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

On the surface, those words are a faithless curse of agony and disdain. “How could you do this to me?” they say. “Save me from this suffering.” But in this Good Friday service, I learn that they are, counterintuitively, a deep profession of faith and an acceptance of the will of God.

With His final words, Jesus references Psalm 22, the Old Testament prophesy of the Messiah. These are the first lines:

My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Why are You so far from helping Me, And from the words of My groaning? O My God, I cry in the daytime, but You do not hear; And in the night season, and am not silent.^[2]

This is the common interpretation: Jesus chooses these as His last words so that He can speak directly to His followers. Everyone who worshiped with Him would have known Psalm 22 and would have understood the reference.^[3] And to those who renounced Jesus, these words were exactly what they would expect. The crowd mocks Him, like bullies saying, “Where’s your daddy now?”

This is why He quotes Psalm 22. Jesus points to His crucifixion as evidence that He is the Son of God. He assures His followers that He will fulfill His messianic mission, as it is prophesied:

For dogs have surrounded Me; The congregation of the wicked has enclosed Me. They pierced My hands and My feet; I can count all My bones. They look and stare at Me. They divide My garments among them, And for My clothing they cast lots. (Psalm 22)

Jesus accepts the reality of death and, despite His unimaginable agony, faces it without fear. These are the hopeful, faithful lines at the end of Psalm 22, which Jesus invokes with his last words:

[God] has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; Nor has He hidden His face from Him; But when He cried to Him, He heard.

There are two lessons I took from the meditation:

1. Fearlessness can only come from faith.
2. Death is a meaningful part of life.

To face death without fear, you must have faith that your life has been worthwhile, that it has been enough. Your faith doesn’t have to be in God, but without faith, it would be impossible to be fearless in the face of death. Jesus’s crucifixion also shows that death is not something to run from; it’s a reality to prepare for and accept. Death is inevitable, and it is part of what makes life meaningful.

Easter Sunday

The final event in my Theology 101 lecture series was held at the same church I’d attended on both Palm Sunday and Good Friday: the Saint Ann Roman Catholic Church in Hoboken, NJ. What was the subject of this event? Well, it was the same as all Easter Sundays since the dawn of AD-time: resurrection.

The Man, The Martyr, The God

Christ’s Passion is among the most ubiquitous and enduring narratives of all time, yet His story subverts the structure of the hero’s journey.

The Passion of Christ goes against nearly every aspect of Campbell’s monomyth, and that’s because Jesus was not a hero. On Earth, he was a man and a martyr; in Heaven, God. He was never a hero.

In the archetypal story, the hero is called to adventure and leaves his ordinary world. Then, he faces great adversity in the unknown world, ultimately enduring and overcoming a great ordeal, seizing his reward. Finally, he returns to the ordinary world with earned wisdom, a changed man.

Does that fit the story arc of Christ’s Passion, of His death and resurrection? Sure, Christ leaves His ordinary world and returns to it after a series of trials. That tracks. But Christ’s ordinary wold is the Kingdom of Heaven, not Pride Rock, Kansas, or the Shire. In His ordinary world, Jesus exists in perfect unity with the Father. He doesn’t endure trials like a hero, for the sake of self-improvement or self-discovery. He is not a man who goes on an adventure and comes home having gained great wisdom, like Bilbo returning to his hobbit hole. Jesus is God, who returns to Heaven after changing the world. (That is, according to the Christian faith.)

There’s a big difference between Jesus and our archetypal hero. Jesus is already perfect. What growth could any adventure grant Him? Jesus’s story is one of sacrifice, tragedy, and martyrdom—not one of personal growth. He does not slay sin; He becomes sin and dies on the cross, on behalf of all mankind.

Christ’s Passion is antithetical to the monomyth, a complete inversion of the hero’s journey. And this may be one of the best pieces of evidence I’ve encountered for the validity of the Gospels. If Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were spinning up an epic story, they would have made Jesus a hero. They would have made Him flawed and relatable, not perfect.

If the Gospels were created just to tell a compelling story, they would have at least followed a three-act structure.^[4] But no! There’s Act I: The Last Supper, Judas’s betrayal, and Christ’s crucifixion. Then, there’s Act III: His resurrection and His ascension to Heaven. The whole middle—all of that Saturday—is absent from the Gospels. Apparently, there’s scant evidence in scripture for the idea that Christ went to hell when He died, before his resurrection. It’s a hotly debated topic among Christian theologians and likely will be for at least a few more millennia.

By some accounts, Jesus dies and “descends into the underworld.”^[5] While there, He strips the devil of his powers and and saves all the just souls that came before Him, bringing them with Him to the Kingdom of Heaven.^[6] This mysterious ordeal is referred to as the “Harrowing of Hell.” So much of this is speculation, inferred based on the first and third acts of Christ’s Passion.

Try to write a two-act story with no character growth and see if it sticks to the top of the best-seller list for two thousand years. Maybe Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John weren’t trying to spin up a compelling story. Maybe they were documenting their mortal perspective on an unfathomable mystery, known in Catholic churches today as “the mystery of faith.”

Or, maybe not.

* * *

I’m agnostic, and this has been the holiest month of my life. It has reminded me of what matters and shown me what I will never know. I will move forward in life with the following truths in mind:

Faith is necessary. Prayer is important. Suffering is inevitable. Death is meaningful. Mystery is magical.

Springboard

What is something you’re passionate about? Does that passion give meaning to your suffering?

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