I met this guy Koduri in the elevator. Once upstairs, I just checked in and sat down. A minute later Koduri was suddenly back with a smile, a piece of pizza, and a drink for me. Entirely unprompted. It made me so happy because I could feel the unconditional love he shared with me.
Grades, job titles, income, intellectual reputation, marital status, etc. We are all told over and over again that these are not the measures to measure ourselves by. But if none of these are the goal, what is? Why pursue any of them? How do I make my self worth truly independent of these? Because as much as we say that these don’t impact us or determine our worth, I don’t think we truly live that way. I, at least, have struggled with this all my life. Always looking for the next thing to fix, achieve, or prove in order to feel worthy.
I always felt inclined toward faith but could never quite understand it, and much of it I still don’t. Faith was important to my mom, who died when I was ten. She also named me after Constantin, the Roman emperor most associated with Christianity’s rise in the Roman Empire. I had always worn a cross, but always just out of tradition. All of this made me curious about faith, but after my mom died, I never really explored it. It wasn’t until I reached my lowest point since then that some of the pieces began, ironically, to make sense. The main idea was unconditional love, or agape.
One of the oldest criticisms of religion is simple: if God exists, why does he allow suffering?
So let’s start with the kind of suffering that feels most pointless. Playing tennis with friends, I simply tripped and twisted my foot underneath me. The result was an uninsured late-night trip to the ER and a $7,000 bill. It was my first week at a new job. A fully booked trip to our London headquarters the following week was canceled. I was also left choosing between surgery and accepting the risk of permanent instability and early arthritis. I chose the latter. Whether it was the right choice, only time will tell.
I fell badly behind at work, though I’m doing much better now. I slept that first night on my friend’s couch because I had nowhere else to go. I subleased a place for two months but still couldn’t find an apartment. Eventually I ended up back on my friend’s couch, where I’m writing this now, though I finally found a place.
Other things went wrong too, the visa among them, but this is enough to make the point.
All of this really hurt. Everything I had used to measure myself seemed to collapse at once. My ego was demolished from every angle. However, when everything that I thought gave me worth disappeared, I was left with the only thing that actually matters — love.
Writing this made me think back to the final conversation I had with my manager during my Wells Fargo training program in Charlotte. He spent almost none of our final hour talking about my performance. Instead, he kept returning to one idea: Consti, you’re the number-one analyst, but I want you to be the number-one person people love because of how you treat them.
I had measured myself against tangible goals that made me ambitious and successful, but also unhappy, unfulfilled, and less generous than the person and leader I wanted to be.
So I spent countless hours asking why. Every day, something else seemed to get worse. I started reading Dostoevsky, and certain ideas began to click, even if my life itself did not improve for a while. Somehow, this seemingly pointless suffering led me toward the faith and the understanding of love I had been looking for without knowing it.
When faced with this pain and suffering, strangers and friends would start helping me out of nowhere. One of my friends drove 1.5 hours just to watch a soccer game (on TV) with me. Random people would ask me what happened. Every single BART ride people would offer me a seat. A random person on the street stopped me just to share how they had been in the same situation and how hard it is. I could tell I was not alone.
They had no motive, no benefit for themselves. I never asked them to. Nevertheless, people seemed to automatically recognize that they ought to do something for another person. They did it out of love, or what in Ancient Greek is agape: an unconditional, selfless, and sacrificial love.
But why did they do it? My best answer is conscience, and this is where I began to understand what God might mean to me. I began to understand God as something present within us: the sense that we owe something to one another. The effects of these small moral choices often appear almost magical because they travel through people and time in ways we can rarely trace back to their source. Suffering is inherent to life. It’s not deserved. It does not necessarily make us better, even if sometimes it does. What makes that suffering bearable, I think, is this conscience acting through all of us: people choosing to carry one another when there is no obvious reason they have to.
This is not a new idea. About 150 years ago, John Henry Newman described something similar in A Grammar of Assent. He argued that conscience is a feeling of obligation and responsibility that seems to point beyond ourselves toward something higher.
I intuitively knew God existed but it was in these actions that I could feel and understand unconditional love. I realized I wanted to pass it on. I want to help people the same way. Maybe that should be the central mission of my life, because this is what makes human life possible. We especially need to pick one another up when we’re down.
One of my favorite things I have ever read is the chapter in Crime and Punishment when Sonya retells the story of Lazarus to Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov confesses that he is a murderer. Sonya, however, does not just let him suffer, but actually empathizes with him and helps him to renew himself (which is the human metaphor for Lazarus) by telling him that he needs to turn himself in and go to jail. She stays with him throughout the jail time despite his dismissive behavior, enabling him to make it through and become a loving person by loving him.
My name, the cross I had worn without understanding, and my mother’s faith began to look different when I saw them in retrospect. I still have so much to learn and do. For now, I’m still better at writing this than living it. But I’m trying.