We Were Made for This

“For God alone my soul in silence waits.” –Psalm 62

I seek solitude. It seems I can’t get enough of it.  How do I go on?  Why am I being so dramatic? No one close to me has died.  And yet I cannot escape the truth that something in my core has been assaulted by love.  When I reflect on this summer I find I am in a state of unlearning more than learning.  I am having to recognize that what I was taught about life and meaning are in error, they do not stand up to suffering and death.  How can I explain?

I remember I was talking to an atheist woman who had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer.  It was bad, and it would take her life very soon; she had just received the diagnosis.  We talked awhile, and in the end she said that I probably had no words of comfort for her because she has no faith.  I told her she was right, but I did say something to the effect of, “if you ever get a time where you are afraid or panic, just remember we were made for this.  We were made to live, to have joy, to suffer and to die.  It is who we are as humans.”  “We were made for this.”  In all honesty it was something I heard a classmate say when he was talking about his wife having a baby, but I extended the metaphor.  We were made to live, to have joy, to suffer, and to die.

Talking to a young woman at my church this week, she likened such a cycle to her garden.  She said, “you plan, you toil, you care, you watch it all grow, you pick the fruit…but in the end it all dies.”  How profound! Of course what I am talking about is not new, it is found in the Gospels, and more explicitly in Ecclesiastes.  “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return,” this is wisdom that the ego hates.  Even when the ego accepts death of the body it insists on immortality of the soul, it insists on glory.  But what is immortality and what is glory? 

Is glory or immortality leaving a permanent imprint on human history?  Is it having a legacy?  “Vanity! Vanity! All is Vanity!”  No, this is not what awaits us…it awaits no one.  Even the most famous of our past have little day-to-day impact on our lives.  No it is a vanity; ego in the face of death leads one to madness.  But that is precisely what I am unlearning: how to be mad. I am having to let go (unwillingly I might add) of the illusion that my life will have some transcendent impact on the cosmos; it won’t.  I have to let go the illusion that I am indispensable part of God’s plan; I am very expendable.  I am having to let go the illusion that I can fix the world; nope.  And the worst one: I am having to let go the illusion God will miraculously care for everyone on Earth in a material, “practical” way; that doesn’t happen either.

I…we are all rather fragile, small and insignificant creatures.  Our days are spent in toil and struggle in the effort to bring about some meaning, some glory, some justification for our existence; but there is none.  Do I despair?  Perhaps.  But I am attempting to come to that place where we all will be one day…that place, that point where we come to understand our entire delicate existence is completely dependent on something other than ourselves.  To be at that place is to be at a place of absolute surrender; and yet only there can we experience our identity as it is; our true identity.  But this can be more terrifying than death.

Who are we if we cannot justify our own existence?  And then what justifies our existence?

Love and only love…perhaps.