Christopher Hitchens has died.

I pause to take note of his passing because I loved him, and I love him still.  I love him in the same way that I love thinkers and writers, artists and ordinary people who live their lives and who do their work with skill, integrity, determination and courage.  He wrote with an authenticity of cool.

I loved him because he gave me words.  Whenever I sat down to read his work, I made certain that I had my dictionary within reach so that I could look up the words I knew he would introduce to my mind. I loved his contrarianism, and I agreed with much of it.  He was right to indict Henry Kissinger and by extension the approach to foreign policy that he represented.  He was right to defend justice for the Palestinians.  He was wrong about the Iraq War, but I understood his arguments,

I am a believer who believes that God Is.  I thought his anti-theistic challenge was a good thing for those of us who believe in God.  It made me ask:  How deep is my Love?  I believe that God is LOVE, emphasis on the LOVE.  This is my confession of faith because most people who do not, who cannot believe in God or religion or this or that religious or spiritual tradition can believe in love.  They themselves have loved, and they have been loved.  This capacity to love and to be loved is the spiritual aspect of humanity and of creation that is not only rational but is also transrational and indestructible.

I believe this is the anima/animus; it is the vivifying life force that comes into our physical being when we take our first independent breath and departs from the body when we breathe our last.  Yet, this spirit does not die.  It returns to the Source.  For me, this Source is God.  Divine, Radical Love.

When I read the news that Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with cancer, I prayed for his healing.  Now he is healed because death is the ultimate liberation from all of life’s suffering and tears.  Our grief is not for him, our grief is for ourselves.  Since I am a believer, my faith tells me that he has returned home.

However, I will not dishonor my beloved brother -writer, brother-thinker, brother-citizen, brother-friend with my imaginings that he has been gathered to his people, to relatives, friends, poets, philosophers, and fools that he loved.  I will not imagine him having conversations with Moses, Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him.) about ethics and politics and religion.  I will not imagine that Mother Teresa has greeted him to the afterlife with a motherly kiss.  I will not imagine him in a smoky club in heaven drinking some really fine liquor, listening to Miles Davis play, Billie Holiday sing, while Katherine Dunham dances.

Christopher Hitchens is dead, and the party that is life on this earthly dimension continues. But, it does not continue without him.  His work, his courage and his example live.  And that will have to suffice to comfort those of us who will miss him.

I will honor his unbelief and imagine that the flame of his candle, his bright brilliant light, has been blown out.