Shadowgraphs is a column written from a progressive Christian perspective, based on a concept for an essay from Kierkegaard's work Either/Or.

In the past few months I have been the victim of two anonymous violent crimes. The first took place following a concert in St. Paul after parking a car I'd borrowed from a far removed friend. I had placed my book bag in the back seat and left it unattended, and upon my return it was stolen, the rear panel window of the car shattered.

The second act was a beer bottle thrown through the window of the room adjacent to mine in the late hours of the night. The damage was collateral; it ended up being the coldest week of the year and my apartment is not very heat efficient anyway, verily more so with a hole in the window.

In crime one, I lost a few meaningless material things--textbooks, CDs, and what have you--but I also lost a book of original poems I had written, one of which I was on tape reading publicly just the night previous. This yellow notebook with pink scribbles on the cover had value to me alone, and whoever ended up with it probably threw it away.

In crime two, my sense of security was the immaterial loss. Mind you, it's hard to live alone--and nothing makes it harder than to feel threatened.

In the end I suppose both acts were random and passionless, no matter how gratifying it makes me to think that I've been singled out (as if somehow my ideas were revolutionary and my poems rare and valuable). So then, I established that these crimes were random, meaningless, and passionless...and therein was I able to find the error.

Close friends who saw me cope with the recovery from these events were supportive and also astonished. In fact, my ability to move on opened an existential question: was I truly not bothered, or was I in denial?

Catholic theology (I apologize profusely for not having a specific document to back this statement up) declares suffering to be temporal, while memories persist. So, in having remembered clearly both events, this would suggest that I was not in denial, for to be truly in denial would mean that I refused to call to mind the events. As I type now, I am having no difficulty in that regard. In crime one, I prayed for two specific things: the serenity to drive home safely and cope with my loss, and the assurance that my writings would be reborn in the form of newer inspiration. Both outcomes occurred. In the weeks following, I produced excellent work and the event in itself formed the core of future poems.

In crime two, I do not recall praying. I recall laughter as I swept up the glass from around my window, filled with a bizarre vision in which I cut my hands with the shards, blood flowing in all directions, and the suffering turning into ecstasy. I remember calling to mind Jesus on the cross and His suffering--which was much more than the material pain of crucifixion--and realizing the high He must have experienced in His death. I knew I was being watched over by a perplexingly wise master.

That is the essence of Christianity, the transformation of suffering into bliss, wisdom into sadness, and back into wisdom again. For what is suffering to Christians, when as Kierkegaard once mused, the most excruciating type of suffering is following Christ and is "self-imposed?"