I am passionate about Jesus of Nazareth. In a devastating time during my life, I was shown a way to find his protection. This is painful for me to write and even to admit to myself. It is a sort of coming out of the closet. I don’t particularly feel like exposing myself and my feelings in this way and yet I don’t know any other way to be truthful.
For the truth is good news, excruciatingly good news. There is salvation – if you will give up your life for it. And salvation consists, I think, of finding the courage to live life to the fullest – in the face of its great difficulties. This of course is paradoxical – this giving up of life to have it. And painful too, devastatingly so. I have sometimes railed against God for this, screaming disapproval and anger at all that I and the people that I care for have to suffer. My suffering isn’t remarkable – which makes me even angrier in that what I am suffering is simply what people seem to have to suffer. I cry out to God, “Unfair, unfair, blessing and cursing from your mighty throne, allotting hell and heaven at your whim.”
The Big Questions
But there is Jesus. Jesus confronts this attitude, forces me to examine it, gives hope that the heart of life may be, as he says, a great and generous Lover.
It embarrasses me to admit this. For on the face of it Jesus is woefully wrong. Life usually doesn’t seem to stand as evidence for this belief in a merciful loving God. Good people are squashed along with the bad. There is something ultimately evil and malignant that seems to be behind much of life.
Why then am I throwing my support toward Jesus and his perception of the world and God? Simply because I have to if I would be true to my own experience. My senior year at college was the most painful time in my life. It was a time of total uncertainty about career choice and about emotional relationship. I no longer knew what I wanted from life. Life itself seemed stupid and purposeless and no job or relationship seemed capable of changing this. I had been brought up a Roman Catholic in the pre-Vatican II era– when dogma reigned and uncertainty was considered a kind of heresy. The first two years of college I attended Mass faithfully. It wasn’t until my junior year one Sunday afternoon when I got up from the table at the library to go to Mass that I seriously questioned the value of attending Mass. A good friend of mine asked me where I was going and I answered him. I will never forget his response, “To Mass! What for?” The question stumped me and I sat back down because I didn’t know. For the next two years, I rarely went to Mass and believed it to be an utterly meaningless, superstitious and fraudulent exercise.
This is not to say that I stopped questioning the universe, ceased wondering what life might mean – because I urgently needed to know. I have never lived well with meaninglessness. I find meaninglessness to be agonizing. It is as if I have a meaning organ within me that agitates when meaning is lost. I cannot stand a universe that is the result of random evolution, where I am the best that life has been able to do so far, where human life ultimately reaches no further than itself and space yawns abysmally toward nothingness.
Halloween Night, 1970
Yes, I am passionate about Jesus. I am totally subjective. I cannot prove what I believe except by the fact that I am still here—a remarkable fact to me because what I experienced Halloween night, 1970 in my dormitory room at the University of Notre Dame was so destructive and so overwhelming that only transcendent intervention could have saved me. You might find me overly dramatic. Recall that I am embarrassed by this myself, and note that embarrassment is usually based on fear of being discovered. So doing, you’ll understand where I am emotionally in relation to my personal story and to Christ.
That Halloween night, that night of goblins, vampires and terrors, found me at a movie—during which a sense of unreality came over me. I felt as though I was going to have a heart attack and die, and I was terrified. I wanted to scream, to shout out: “I’m dying. Turn off the movie.” As soon as the movie ended, I left the auditorium and hurried back to my room, somehow feeling that I would be safer there, but the walls were shimmering, surrealistic. I paced to and fro, short of breath, panicking, not knowing what to do. I knew that I was going mad or dying. Finally I called a friend and asked him to come and stay with me. When he arrived I burst into tears and he held me while I shared my utter panic with him. I decided to quit school, and I left for home the next morning. After a week there and making arrangements at the counseling center, I returned to school (because, quite frankly, neither I nor my parents knew what else I could do.)
Sustained by Friends
The next three weeks were hell. I consulted a psychologist who reassured me (based on one interview and testing results) that mine was a psychological problem, resolvable by psychological means, and that I could rest assured that I had no spiritual problem. I somehow knew that there was a spiritual dimension to my problem. If my problem was only psychological, I felt that my psyche was destroyed beyond recovery. I didn’t continue with psychotherapy.
During those weeks, I limped through life, sustained mainly by friendship. Several times I awakened in the middle of the night, panic-stricken. At his prior invitation, I called up my friend who would tell me to start walking and we would meet halfway across campus—as it happened, in front of the main church of the campus. We would then go to his room where he and his roommate would sit up with me—for the rest of the night on a couple occasions.
This friend was a pre-med student who happened to be taking a course called, “Pain, Suffering and Death.” At one of the class meetings after Halloween, he presented my situation to the class, and the professor offered to meet with me if I desired.
Hope and Trepidation
I arrived for the appointment feeling both hope and trepidation. During the previous three weeks I had told my story to several friends and none of them seemed to fully comprehend it—which left me feeling more isolated, strange and terrified. The meeting had a “last chance” feeling for me. I began to tell him the facts of my story. After a few minutes he stood up, put his hand on shoulder and said, “I know just what you’re talking about. The same thing happened to me twenty years ago.” Then he walked over to his desk and returned with a crucifix. “Put this on,” he said. “This will protect you against the darkness.” Remarkably, I believed him. I took the crucifix and put it on. The combination of finally being understood and being given the symbol of protection had an immediate effect on me. I felt relieved and hopeful. I drew my first deep breath in three weeks. I knew that I was not alone either humanly or spiritually.
How did I know this? Why did the crucifix give me such reassurance? Was it just my Catholic background? Obviously not, for I had seen several crucifixes during my life and during those three weeks—with no effect. Was it then due solely to artful psychotherapeutic maneuvering by the professor? Again, I think not. Something deeper happened. I felt connected to a strong spiritual source and I don’t know why. It does seem to me as if the reality of the crucifix somehow came to me, met me in my desperation, as I sat in the professor’s office.
To Hell and Back
I do not mean to imply by this story, incidentally, that all my problems were immediately and magically resolved, nor that mine was solely a spiritual problem. Ever since, I have struggled with my life and I have as many psychological problems as the next person. The point that I am making here is that something happened to me in that office. Paraphrasing the blind man in John’s Gospel, I only knew that I had been in hell and now I wasn’t. And the crucifix—that grotesque symbol of Christianity—was at the heart of it.
Thus began a thirteen year (thus far) journey toward self-understanding and into Jesus. I have subsequently become a psychologist whose practice is primarily with people living in turmoil (at least partly) because of spiritual and meaning problems in their lives.
And so Jesus has become central in both my professional and personal life. What is the embarrassment of this for me? Why do I still have the problem—here I am at a loss for words—claiming him as Savior? There are several reasons. First of all, I am frankly embarrassed by simplistic religion, by literal, Bible-thumping closed mindedness which labels all other views as heretical and demonic. Second, as a psychologist, I have been trained to understand people “scientifically.” Speaking out for the power of Christ touches my insecurity as a member of the field. It makes me feel peculiar and different from my peers. I suspect that my fear exposes a certain amount of cowardice on my part to stand up for the truth as I see it. But part of the truth is fear. Third, to be visibly Christian, to say why I am a Christian, is, as you now understand, a very personal thing. To speak of how Jesus is Christ for me requires that I again confront a time of great brokenness in my life, and this is very painful—as is the sharing of this brokenness with you. For I don’t know how you will treat my story. But even that finally doesn’t matter.
For myself, what is important is the meeting with divinity at the center of one’s life. For me, Jesus was the human vehicle and expression of my encounter with God. He has helped me; he has saved me; I was dead and am now alive. The theological questions are moot.
Excerpts from Understanding the Human Jesus, by Andrew Canale. Copyright ©1985 by Andrew Canale. Paulist Press, Inc., New York/Mahwah, NJ. Reprinted by permission of Paulist Press, Inc. www.PaulistPress.com.
Dr. Andrew Canale is a psychotherapist in private practice in Newton, MA. He is the author of two other books: Masters of the Heart (Paulist Press); and Beyond Depression. The books are out of print, but available through Faith at Work.