First, Jack, know this:
There is no miracle without suffering.
One day you will learn the story of Christ. Whether you become a follower of Christ is immaterial to the importance of his miracle. He created something greater than himself, something with a meaning beyond that of his own understanding.
The miracle is not Cavalry, not the crucifixion nor the resurrection. That—if it happened—is supernatural, and true miracles are not supernatural.
The true miracle happened in a place called Gethsemane, a garden, where the human Christ went alone to suffer, to plead for release from his commitment, to be denied that release, and to assent to his own suffering in the name of redemption.
That is the miracle.
If Christ were God alone, came down to earth, and saved the immortal souls of humankind, that does not have meaning, no more than a wave crashing onto a shore has meaning. There is no intent, no determination, no persistence nor suffering nor sacrifice in the breaking of a wave, nor in the hand wave of an almighty that spares the righteous from judgment.
It is Gethsemane that is the miracle, and it is a miracle *even if Christ is only a man* and is deluded of his own divinity. It is the willingness to sacrifice, to offer himself up on the altar of uncertain fate, that endures. That is what transcends both mere subjectivity and mere fact-of-the-matter, and instead becomes some third thing, which so often goes unspoken in human affairs but which I have come to know as miracles.
Your mother is lying on a hospital bed, shaking uncontrollably as her fight-or-flight response spasms repeatedly. She has suffered forty-one weeks to perform this miracle, and in a few hours it will be complete, and the enduring result, with a meaning far beyond either of us, will be you.
What makes you such a miracle is that you—what you will be, the specificity of you—was not promised when we set upon this journey. Like Christ in Gethsemane, we launched ourselves into an abyss of great uncertainty, saying “This, right here, this is us. We accept this pain and whatever it buys will be all we have.”
Now you will come. You will be what you will be, and we will do our best, but mostly it will be upon you to create your own life, day by day and year by year, until (and it is strange to write this when we’ve never met) you surpass either of us and become something more, vested of your own meaning that comes not from our efforts.
On this journey, you will have crucifixions and you will have resurrections. Things will befall you that you cannot control (and already I could weep for your pain), and things will happen for you because of talents you possess that others do not (and I ask you to live in gratitude for all I believe you will be given). These are determined. It is part of the ancient human song.
What I wish for you is that you do not run from your Gethsemanes. For those will come too, but you can shirk them. You will see people do this all around you. A moment will come upon them when something that could define their life will pass by, and by jumping on it and accepting certain pain with uncertain reward, they could have it, but instead they will be ruled by fear and let it pass.
And so, so often, it will never come again.
You will hear people declare hard things impossible.
You will hear people ridicule ambition as too strange or too pretentious.
You will hear people condemn others to avoid the cost of helping them.
And you will see people live whole lives without ever choosing a moment to launch themselves into uncertainty, to declare “this, whatever it is, is me”.
This above all else you must do—be ready for those moments, those opportunities, and do not let them pass you by.
You are coming into a world that is obsessed with other possibilities, in the most abstract and generalized sense. The most modern imaginable activity is choosing from a menu. Right there on a page or a screen is a list of all the other options, the things you might have been and done, the contingency of your sad, little choice laid bare and passed from hand to hand around the table.
This makes miracles harder to perform.
And yet the public performance of faux-miracles is a daily ritual. You will be asked to declare, in a thousand public ways, what you are. We have compensated for our anti-miracle culture with fake authenticity and substituted irony, and I fear this will not be fixed by the time you can read these words and appreciate them. If anything it will be worse.
I ask you to remember that Christ walked alone through Gethsemane. He begged God to deliver him, and when he spoke his words of assent and accepted his fate, only God could hear him.
I do not mean anything so base or saccharine as “don’t be afraid to be who you really are”. I have no doubt that you will be confident and charismatic and unique.
I mean that you must search your secret heart for the things that make your throat close when you try to speak them aloud. Go to places in yourself that most people are afraid to admit exist. Look your deepest fears and desires in the eye and do not submit to their control. Put them outside yourself, into the uncertain world, and accept the pain that comes as the price of the unpromised miracle you will make of your life.
You are the miracle I have made of mine. You, whatever you are, that’s me.
I can’t wait to meet you.
I love this line: “ you must search your secret heart for the things that make your throat close when you try to speak them aloud. ”