{"id":35528,"date":"2022-04-16T00:01:53","date_gmt":"2022-04-16T07:01:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=35528"},"modified":"2026-06-06T09:27:56","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T09:27:56","slug":"pete-holmes-stephen-colbert-and-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/pete-holmes-stephen-colbert-and-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Pete Holmes, Stephen Colbert (and God) on Life and Death"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Pete<\/a>
The folks at my church put a candle on the altar in memory of Jon. The rector tells me that the congregation is holding on to me and doing for me what I can’t do for myself.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Pete Holmes, Stephen Colbert — and God<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Where is Jon? Jon died on February 19, 2021. That’s more than a year ago. And I still can’t bear to think of my husband with any kind of specificity or clarity. Thinking of Jon, visualizing him, picturing him as he once was, in the flesh, devastates me, it brings me to howling tears.<\/p>\n

That’s because thinking of flesh-and-blood Jon causes me to think of non-Jon. The gone Jon. The Jon who is no more. The Jon who evaporated into nothingness on a hospital bed late on a Friday afternoon fourteen months ago.<\/p>\n

Jon is gone. He is nothing.<\/p>\n

Or is he?<\/p>\n

This Is Easter<\/strong><\/h5>\n

This is Easter. And Easter is when Christians celebrate Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. Jesus was dead. And then he wasn’t.<\/p>\n

Was Jon dead — and then not dead?<\/p>\n

That’s the promise of Christianity (and of many of the world’s wisdom traditions, each in its own way). That is the promise — that Jon is not dead.<\/p>\n

But for me, most of the time, any promise of an afterlife is too big and fat and wondrous to believe.<\/p>\n

The widow of a dear friend of Jon’s sent me an Easter card this week. Her husband and mine had laughed a lot together over the years. She tells me that she imagines the two men enjoying each other’s company now, somewhere, just as they always had<\/p>\n

I can’t do that.<\/p>\n

Colbert Interviews Holmes<\/strong><\/h5>\n

The other night I watched Pete Holmes get interviewed by<\/a> Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, and I was struck dumb by the words that Holmes let fall (I think he was channeling Joseph Campbell). “Who you really are was never born, will never die, and can’t be harmed.”<\/p>\n

“That’s beautiful,” Colbert said.<\/p>\n

\"colbert-and-holmes-daily-show\"
Comedians Pete Holmes and Stephen Colbert on The Late Show.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Wow, I thought. Pete Holmes, Stephen Colbert — and God? Those two no-nonsense guys believe<\/em> that stuff. Maybe I could as well.<\/p>\n

I’m my father’s daughter, though. I don’t know whether my father was an atheist; he never said as much, and I never had the temerity to ask. But I do know that the great life lesson he wanted to pass on to me and my brothers was, “Don’t kid yourself.”<\/p>\n

Dead Is Dead<\/strong><\/h5>\n

I have taken my father’s caveat to mean, face the facts. There’s no way to be alive once your body is dead.<\/p>\n

Which is why I avoid prayer these days. Opening myself up to God might get results. It might make the reality of the Christian promise all too real — or all too false, hopeless and vain.<\/p>\n

A few weeks after Jon died, I finally got around to praying. I’m a practicing Christian. I belong to a church. My husband of 44 years had died. It seemed I should pray.<\/p>\n

No sooner had I turned my attention to God than the assurance arrived, unbidden — Jon was with God.<\/p>\n

It felt true in the moment. But I’ve had plenty of moments since then when that assurance has eluded me.<\/p>\n

So, mostly I avoid God. Because if I were to pose the where-is-Jon question again, I might get a different answer. It might be, “Jon is nowhere.”<\/p>\n

I can’t live with that thought.\u00a0And my plan is to keep on living.<\/p>\n

There’s more about my wrestlings with God in my 2015 book, which got nice reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly.<\/a>\u00a0 If you’d like to hear from Jon first-hand, check out his guest post, “Does ‘Under God’ Belong in the Pledge of Allegiance?”<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Pete<\/a>Here is Jon, very much alive, sailing the Douro River in Portugal a few years ago. His posture, the way he purses his lips and holds his hands — the details break my heart. <\/span>Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"Pete<\/a><\/p>\n

At Easter Christians celebrate Jesus’s resurrection — Jesus was dead, and then he wasn’t. Was Jon dead, and then not?\u00a0 Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49322,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[2584,187,34,1427,21,29,1209,2585,2586,2419],"class_list":["post-35528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-my-rocky-spiritual-journey","category-widowed","tag-church","tag-death","tag-dont-miss","tag-easter","tag-god","tag-jon","tag-joseph-campbell","tag-pete-holmes","tag-stephen-colbert","tag-widowed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35528"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49324,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35528\/revisions\/49324"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}