The one and only answer to our cultural ills

There is an understandable spate of reflections on the past week's two big celebrity suicides, those of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. I've not come across one yet as poignant as that penned by Kirsten Powers, writing at USA Today. I was not aware, and you probably weren't either, that she went through a suicidal period some years ago.

It's what she says about the broad cultural context in which the rising number of suicides, though, that bears further discussion:

If only we get that big raise, or new house or have children we will finally be happy. But we won’t. In fact, as Carrey points out, in many ways achieving all your goals provides the opposite of fulfillment: it lays bare the truth that there is nothing you can purchase, possess or achieve that will make you feel fulfilled over the long term.
Rather than pathologizing the despair and emotional suffering that is a rational response to a culture that values people based on ever escalating financial and personal achievements, we should acknowledge that something is very wrong. We should stop telling people who yearn for a deeper meaning in life that they have an illness or need therapy. Instead, we need to help people craft lives that are more meaningful and built on a firmer foundation than personal success.
Yes, there are people who have chemical imbalances who should be supported and treated with medicine. But most Americans are depressed, anxious or suicidal because something is wrong with our culture, not because something is wrong with them.

 You may know this about Powers: she became a Christian a few years ago. She's written about that experience, saying she was the quintessential secular agnostic who, at the behest of a boyfriend she had at the time, attended an evangelical service. She felt like she was in the most foreign environment she'd ever found herself in, yet she felt compelled to return, and soon joined a Bible study group. (She's now a Roman Catholic.)

I can relate. I was likewise relying on my own intellect to guide my life decisions. I felt confident that the secular aspect of the foundations of my worldview provided me with all I needed to address the inconsistencies and irritants that life presented me with. Still, something drove me into a church. In retrospect, I think it must have been prevenient grace.

And when I started into earnest church involvement - at the small country church with a congregation that skews older  that I still attend - it struck me as weird, as I'd anticipated that it would. But a voice in my head said, "Keep at this. There's something of great value for you here."

And my persistence paid off. I found myself reaching out to, and networking with, Christians I knew as causal acquaintances, striking up conversations about the basics of this faith they were immersed in.

To cut to the chase, for the first time in my life, I came to understand the centrality of Jesus Christ - to everything. I came to see the depth of truth in C.S. Lewis's explanation that Christ could not be just another wise moral teacher, or perhaps prophet, if one were going to accede to a religious model.

Suddenly, all the business about him being the wellspring of living water, his body being our bread, his being a vine from which we extend as branches, leapt from the level of metaphor to being a truth as plain as a foot equalling twelve inches. He was the Son facet of the triune God, and had all authority in heaven and Earth. When you read the red-print stuff in the Gospels, that's the creator of everything that has ever existed and is ever going to exist speaking.

And that's why it's important to study the four accounts of his gruesome death and subsequent resurrection very deeply, and contemplate what the apostolic letters have to say about it.

There is nothing like it in all of human experience. When you fully let in who He was and is, there's no abstraction left in the statement that he died for our sins. It was a visceral act of Herculean proportions. He heaved and groaned and bled and writhed in order that you - you personally, you individually - might be brought into his eternal embrace. He knows the number of hairs on your head, and he'll go to any length to keep you from getting lost, from being cast adrift.

I suspect that Powers didn't wish to get too deep into proselytizing for the kind of wide audience that a USA Today column gets, but I think we can be pretty sure that this is what she was suggesting.

It's a perfectly appropriate thing for me to say in a LITD post, however.

Lord Jesus is the answer to everything. Whatever the question. Turn your eyes upon him. Look full in His wonderful face.

That's the remedy for the sickness that has befallen our culture.