Talking with a friend the other day, we reminensced on the movie “Love, Actually.” Amid its vignettes and points of humor, this movie paints a world of love sought, sometimes found, and sometimes, lost, yet a
world in which life continues on just the same.
It’s a beautiful (in the purest ancient Greek sense of the word) picture
of human intentionality trapped in human limitation, the aesthetics of a
bottomless yet meaningful existence.
Bottomless yet meaningful? When I consider the rambling cacaphony of humanity, I ponder the exigency before which we all stand. We see what is, we see indications of what we hope could be, yet we do not see full evidence of either, for we all are contingent, contingent in a porous reality whose possibility, if personal transcendence is absent, is itself contingent on itself, a decidedly paradoxical eventuality. It seems a stab into a darkness we cannot conceive or describe, the darkness into which we may think we will one day go, the blackness that, as Peter put it in his second letter, of the world's end.
When God came to Abraham and promised a covenant, Abraham had nothing on which to base his conviction that this covenant would actually come about except the fact of God. Similarly, when God spoke to Moses in the burning bush, Moses had nothing on which to base God’s vision of the future except for the fact of God. Sure, he saw the bush burning, and sure, he saw the staff turn into a serpent, yet these were all in the present moment. Could God guarantee the future? Could he provide evidence for things hoped for?
Or do we? It all hinges on the essence of the bottomless yet meaningful reality in which we all stand. If it is "it," nothing, really, is guaranteed, not even who we are. If it is "not," that is, if there is something in which it finds greater form and meaning, then human intentionality exceeds itself, and all things are possible--even God.
Bottomless yet meaningful? When I consider the rambling cacaphony of humanity, I ponder the exigency before which we all stand. We see what is, we see indications of what we hope could be, yet we do not see full evidence of either, for we all are contingent, contingent in a porous reality whose possibility, if personal transcendence is absent, is itself contingent on itself, a decidedly paradoxical eventuality. It seems a stab into a darkness we cannot conceive or describe, the darkness into which we may think we will one day go, the blackness that, as Peter put it in his second letter, of the world's end.
When God came to Abraham and promised a covenant, Abraham had nothing on which to base his conviction that this covenant would actually come about except the fact of God. Similarly, when God spoke to Moses in the burning bush, Moses had nothing on which to base God’s vision of the future except for the fact of God. Sure, he saw the bush burning, and sure, he saw the staff turn into a serpent, yet these were all in the present moment. Could God guarantee the future? Could he provide evidence for things hoped for?
Or do we? It all hinges on the essence of the bottomless yet meaningful reality in which we all stand. If it is "it," nothing, really, is guaranteed, not even who we are. If it is "not," that is, if there is something in which it finds greater form and meaning, then human intentionality exceeds itself, and all things are possible--even God.
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