The Poignant Wisdom of Stephen Colbert

Last updated on: August 19, 2015 at 1:25 pm by Paul Asay

The Poignant Wisdom of Stephen Colbert 2015-08-19T13:25:23-06:00 Paul Asay

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GQ features former-fake-conservative-blowhard-turned-Late-Show-host Stephen Colbert in its newest issue. And Joel Lovell’s cover story, “The Late, Great Stephen Colbert,” might be one of the best things I’ve read all year. (But be warned: Colbert’s language can get a bit salty.)

I’ve always known that Colbert could be funny. I’ve suspected he’s kinda brilliant. I knew he was a Christian—sometimes becoming an unlikely defender of the faith. I never thought he might impact my own. But I think he did.

Colbert lost his father and two of his brothers in a plane crash when he was just 10 years old—a tragedy he’s talked about before. Lovell wondered how that experience didn’t embitter him. Why he still seems strangely joyful when he’s working. And he answers it in the simplest, deepest, most profound way I could imagine.

“MY. MOTHER.” He tells Lovell with, as the author says, dramatic intensity. Colbert learned from her example. He learned from her to be grateful and to love God. “That’s my context for my existence, is that I am here to know God, love God, serve God, that we might be happy with each other in this world and with Him in the next,” he says. “That makes a lot of sense to me. I got that from my mom. And my dad. And my siblings.”

Colbert talks about the sacredness of suffering—the mystery of it, the acceptance of it. And then he says something really, really strange.

Earlier in the interview, he mentions his experience with The Second City comedy troupe, and how he was told that he had to “love the bomb.” Not to just accept the evenings when things didn’t go well or laugh off a bad performance, but love it. Embrace the badness. And he calls back to that part of the conversation. “You gotta learn to love the bomb,” he said,” Boy did I have a bomb when I was 10 …And I learned to love it. So that’s why. Maybe, I don’t know. That might be why you don’t see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It’s that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

And then comes this:

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from [J.R.R.] Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien’s mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn’t mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

When I was 20, my girlfriend at the time and I started having sex. I suppose that’s no big whoop now. It wasn’t even back then in the early ’90s, really. Even at the Christian college I went to, most of my friends were doing it. But for me, growing up in a conservative Christian home and having remained abstinent—with some difficulty—throughout high school, it was a huge deal for me. I’d been taught that sex outside of marriage was a sin, and I just couldn’t seem to stop sinning. I was in a miserable cycle of lust and guilt.

When she got pregnant not-so-long after, it felt as though my world had come to an end. And during the several months of her pregnancy and all the emotional and societal and familial discomfort it entailed, I knew I was being punished.

And then my son, Colin, came into the world. And I saw him for what he was: a gift. Sixteen years later, that gift introduced me to Stephen Colbert.

Colbert talks about embracing all of God’s gifts, even the painful ones. It seems impossible, perhaps, but perhaps there’s truth there, as well. When I’ve talked with people who’ve watched loved ones die, they talk about what a privilege it was to be with them at the end. I hear stories about how failure and heartbreak proved to be foundations for a better future. “It’s not the same thing as wanting it to have happened,” Colbert amends. None of us want to suffer. None of us want the inevitable pain that sometimes life brings. There are things going on in my life right now that I wish weren’t—sorrows and worries and fears that I’ve prayed about, that I’ve begged to be taken away.

I hate them. It seems crazy to be grateful for them. But maybe, in a way, I am a little grateful. It reminds me what love is. What it can feel like. How worth it it is to love, even when it hurts.

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