| It's very moving, valuable, humbling, and sobering to consider the tragedy, pain, and suffering all around us. I worked with physically handicapped and terminally ill German boarding students for a couple years. One young man had a degenerative disease like muscular dystrophy. I once asked him if he were god, would he allow people like himself to have been born to experience life as he had. He said simply, "no." He would have preferred never to have been born. That exchange was one of the most amazing and powerful in my life, along with having children, and other huge moments. Karl Rahner, the catholic theologian behind Vatican II, said "the real argument against Christianity is the experience of life, this experience of darkness. And I have always found that behind the technical arguments levelled by the learned against Christianity--as the ultimate force and a a priori pre-judgement supporting these scientific doubts--there are always these ultimate experiences of life causing the spirit and the heart to be sombre, tired and despairing....What does Christianity really declare? Nothing else, after all, than that the great Mystery remains eternally a mystery, but that this mystery wishes to communicate Himself in absolute self-communication--as the infinite, incomprehensible and inexpressible Being, whose name is God, as self-giving nearness--to the human soul in the midst of its experience of its own finite emptiness." If there is no god, the vast majority of human experience throughout time is pretty bleak due to injustice, suffering, disasters, disease, inhumanity, etc. The quip,"that's life" is very despairing. If there is no god, then this is our ultimate experience and meaning--the immediate misery and occasional ecstasies life affords us. Zilboorg says this explaining Freud, "he had constantly before him the vision of a man who is always unhappy, helpless, anxious, bitter, looking into nothingness with fright, and turning away from "so-called posterity" in anticipatory....disgust." If there is a god, then there is the possibility that all these relative miseries, huge as they are, are not the ultimately determining experiences of our existence. It would then be possible to take a deeper meaning from existence, connected to god, than the meaning of our immediate physical and emotional happiness, injustice, or pain. |
