"You see, the worst of it is when you admit that it can’t ever change.  When you are young you think happiness will come later on, and you hope for things; and then the same old poverty gets hold of you and you are caught up in it . . . Now I don’t wish anyone any harm, but there are times when the injustice of it makes me mad.
     "And then, if only there were some truth in what the priests say, if only the poor of this world were rich in the next . . . no, when you're dead, you're dead . . . so there it is, we're done for."
     Depressing, isn't it?  Like the movie "Leviathan," a movie I mentioned last week about political powerlessness in modern day Russia, the lines I cited above, from a novel by nineteenth French author Emile Zola called Germinal, paint a similar picture of people who have lost all hope in their own ability to ever change their situation.  And in this case, the change these people crave is not political, but a change far more profound.  The protagonists of Germinal long for a change in their metaphysical destiny.  They want to know that even if they find this life unbearably difficult, they one day will find another life, an eternal life, of joy unbounded.
     But they don't see this ever happening.
     Physical pain and feelings of political impotence indeed make for a raw existence. When these are compounded with the pain of thinking that the remedy of an afterlife is not forthcoming, however, we are left with very few options with which to live a meaningful life.  Although Viktor Frankel in his classic Man's Search for Meaning demonstrated that regardless of one's circumstances, people will continue to strive for hope and meaning, the absence of some level of post-death leveling for those experiencing economic and political oppression can make these strivings seem, at times, rather hollow.  Where is the justice?
     Though I cannot describe precisely how God will one day remedy the injustices of this earthly existence, I do not think this is the point.  It is rather that this life is not an existence from dust to dust, and nothing more.  The fact of divine oversight of all things earthly underscores that no matter what happens here, it is how what happens here will determine what happens next that is the most important.  We do not live in a material vacuum.  We live in a world pervaded by supernatural thought and destiny.  And although we can pretend this isn't true, we cannot pretend that the inequities of this existence do not mean anything to us.  We know they do.
     We can't have it both ways.  Justice cannot exist without purpose, and purpose cannot exist without God.