Christopher Hitchens died yesterday. He was one of the smartest people I never knew. He was also charming. I say that only because every time I heard him speak or interviewed I was charmed. That is powerful language from me. The finest complement that I ever heard of my dad was that he was charming. So it is a powerful word for me in that I searched my heart and found the words true about my father and true about Christopher Hitchens.
My father probably would not have liked Hitchens. I don't know that for sure. I might be selling one of them short. I am not sure which. I don't even know who would be more offended by the perceived slight. They were two wholly different sort of men and yet also an inverted, squinty eyed, photographic negative of each other.
That paragraph above is why I write. I don't often get hard evidence of why I record my thoughts, which seem to matter much more to me than to anyone else. Until I was in the act, until fingers were dancing across the keys in an effort to find clear thought in their rhythmic movements, I had never thought about a connection between my father and Hitchens.
My father was a devout Christian who identified with the thief on the cross who knew he deserved his fate. If Hitchens ever identified with a person in the Bible, I think it must have been the pragmatic thief on the other side of Christ who tried to cajole an all too earthly escape from Roman fascism. But I see the connection now in my mind and why Hitchens has a soft spot in my heart while I am exactly like the willing slave and ultimate hindrance to human evolution that he must have despised.
Hitchens was smart. He was the kind of smart that even in that time in my life when I would not allow anyone to be smarter than me (only better educated), he was smarter than me. He could make the English language dance and he did not care who he offended. Indeed, he measured himself, I think, by who he offended.
He did not believe as I believed on almost every subject. But he had at least thought it through. He had thought my ideas through to a harrowing extent as far as I was concerned. Camille LaPagilia (forgive me if I have misspelled her name) was the first to disabuse me of the idea that if I could only communicate my thoughts to a person in perfect clarity, they would believe as I believe. Hitchens was the first to clarify my beliefs better than I could and then blow them up to the point that I sometimes wondered why I believed them.
Once I accepted that he was smarter than me, with all the heightened adrenalin that implies for someone as arrogant as me, he actually began to clarify my beliefs. When he explained with disdain that a Christian such as myself was eager to be lead, eager to be a slave, I knew it was true. He looked at that with contempt. I learned to look at Western need for theological freedom with the same intensity as I learned (ongoing process) to welcome Christian slavery from a God who knows better how to live my life.
I maintain that I would much rather have a glass of Scotch with Hitchens, a man who viewed Christianity and all other religions as a crime against mankind, and argue, than to have a glass of awkward tea with Mother Theresa (a woman he loathed). He was a man that I think I would have liked if I had ever gotten to know him personally, even if he would have viewed me with disdain. As a man that views the vast majority of mankind with disinterest, if not disdain, that is a complement.
For my fellow Christians who view my not so subtle awe of the man with derision and who take solace in the fact of his passing, go pray. Not for him. He is beyond hope as we see it most likely. He knew he was dying of cancer and planned to not be a death bed conversion. If you doubt him, know this: he did not like the term atheist. He felt that an atheist was free to hope he was wrong. He tried to establish the term "antitheist" which is someone who not only believes that God does not exist but HOPES that God does not exist.
By my faith, he already knows that he is wrong. He has already had to bow before Christ and acknowledge that Christ is sovereign in all things. He has found out how wrong he was in all things on this earth and is now facing the horrors of hell. I found myself incapable of typing burning in hell in the previous sentence. But in honor of the man, I owe him that honesty of my beliefs. He burns in hell this morning.
If any of you who have known of him before I wrote this, or if you have only heard of him as I type this - if you take any joy in that last paragraph, stop reading now and pray. Pray not for Hitchens, but pray for yourself. We Christians are meant to agonize over any souls that find themselves bereft of Christ's salvation. I pray for you who have no mercy and I pray for his brother.
His brother was recently reconciled with Hitchens after years or estrangement. His younger brother is a devout Christian and suffers today. May God's mercy be upon him. And upon us all.
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