I attended a “celebration of life” (read: post-funeral party) this afternoon with my wife. It was for my wife’s friend. She was only 36 and had a 3-year-old son. Absolutely tragic.

It was a bit of a weird scene. They had a DJ who was playing dance music and dancing in the corner. Lot’s of drinks, food, and chatter. They were going for good vibes as a way of honoring this woman who lived life full of energy. But it was a jarring juxtaposition given the reason that brought us together.

Have you ever noticed that some don’t call them funerals anymore, “but celebration of life” services? Our culture doesn’t like to deal with death. We like to keep it out of sight and out of mind. We find it unsettling. We probably don’t know what to do with it existentially. So even when we do have to deal with it, like at a funeral, we like to recast it as life, “a celebration of life.”

But the juxtaposition made me think: Gosh, this is all so tragic, this woman dying at the mere age of 36, leaving her son behind who will likely barely even remember her. It’s heart-breaking.

But the reason it’s so heart-breaking isn’t because we’re the natural result of some mere evolutionary process that causes us to develop attachments to others due to its evolutionary advantage, with the byproduct that we grieve their loss. No, the reason we experience such deep tragedy in this world is because it’s haunted by what it should be. And the more beautiful and good something is meant to be, the more tragic and distressing its loss and destruction is.

We don’t just live in a world where unfortunate things happen—and that’s just the way it is. No, I think we sense something more sinister at play. Thus, we’re instinctually unwilling to accept this world as is. We internally want to resist it. We internally protest. We feel it as evil. We deeply sense something has gone wrong, that things are not the way they are suppose to be. And not just that, but that something good and beautiful has been disrupted—making it all the severer.

Think about those movies where a curse is invoked. The curse becomes an active force wreaking havoc, ruining the good, a force of harm. Tragic events aren’t just happenstance, the way things are. They are the torturous workings of the curse. The characters are constantly haunted by its reality. It chases them down. It won’t leave them alone. They struggle to escape it’s presence.

C.S. Lewis speaks of Christianity as the “true myth.” By this, he wasn’t saying that Christianity is unhistorical or untrue. No, he was saying, Christianity makes sense of our myth making. Myths provide meaning. And Christianity is that meaning-making story that explains all of our other attempts to make meaning.

So too Lewis said he believes in Christianity like he believes in the sun, because it illuminates and makes sense of everything else. It resonates with reality, our existential longing, our deep desires and sense of this world. Christianity “resonates” with the way things actually are.

One of the ways I think Christianity resonates with reality is this idea of the curse. When Adam and Eve sin, creation came under God’s curse (Gen 3).

The older I get, the more and more messed up I feel this world and this life are. It’s not just happenstance unfortunate events. It’s like a curse from a movie, an active presence wreaking havoc. We feel the tragedy not merely of unfortunate things we wish weren’t the case but of things we know ought to be beautiful and good, like the life of a young 36-year-old woman and her three-year-old boy.