The idea of our being immortal filled with the life of God is a rejection of the “dualistic” nature of some Christian thought—that our bodies and souls are completely separate. If this theology is wrong, it has been a terrible blind alley. It has led people to try and explain away transcendent moments, from sex to live music to literature, as something other than a direct manifestation of our godliness. It has denied the Christ living inside of us.

One of the smartest people to make the non-dualistic argument for oneness is Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart. In his recent book You Are Gods: Nature and Supernature, Hart argues that humans are “supernatural creatures with incorporeal spirits whose purpose is to commune with the divine by achieving grace.” Citing scripture and Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, Hart argues that the body and spirit are intertwined, and that what happens in this world has supernatural origins and ends. We can’t be gods any more than we can stop breathing.

In 2008, after my treatment for cancer, I became a fan of a great jazz singer named Kurt Elling. Elling, a former divinity student at the University of Chicago, had commingled the lyrics of the jazz standard “My Foolish Heart” with the poetry of St. John of the Cross. Seeing him do this in concert for the first time, I was seized with a kind of spiritual ecstasy—as the Biblical translator Stephen Mitchell once said about encountering God, it was a feeling so big that it wasn’t inside of me but I was inside of it.