"Atheists ought not to be offering consolation," asserts Christopher Hitchens in Mortality, his account of his dealings with esophageal cancer (from which he died in December of last year at the age of 62).  Though it is difficult to determine precisely what point Hitchens is making here, perhaps he is saying that, given an atheist's contention about the irredeemably terminal character of existence, there really is no need to offer a traditional form of consolation to his survivors.  Most forms of traditional consolation come as assurances to the survivors to the effect that even though their loved one is gone from this life, he is doing much better in another one.  Life does not end with the grave.  Yet such thoughts do little for an atheist:  he has no belief in an afterlife.  When this life ends, that is it.

     So what is left?  Very little.  For an atheist, however, this is not so much depressing (as it would be for a person who believes in an afterlife) as it is bravery.  It is far braver, the atheist would argue, to face the fact of absolute nonexistence upon death head on than to set one's hopes in what they believe to be the unprovable possibility of an afterlife.  To do the latter is to commit intellectual and emotional suicide.  It ignores an incontrovertible truth of existence:  people live, people die, and never, ever do they live again.  Death is final, totally and frightfully final.
     However laudable this bravery may be, however, it overlooks one very important point.  Although no falsifiable evidence exists to demonstrate definitively that there is no afterlife (how would we know?!), there is ample evidence that the opposite is true.  Time and space had to begin somewhere, and they had to begin in something much richer and longer lived and, spatially and chronologically (in an infinite sense), bigger, in scope, than they, something that we might call eternity.  And if there is an eternity, chances are very good that there is eternal life, a place where space and time originate and have their ultimate purpose and meaning.
     (We say this quite apart from the testimony of the New Testament that in dying and subsequently rising again, Jesus of Nazareth affirmed for all time the fact and presence of a real and genuine afterlife, a life in which he invites all of us to join him.)
     So we are entirely justified in offering the consolation of another life to those who have lost loved ones.  The universe (and even the most ardent evolutionist will eventually admit to this) simply cannot be without, in some form, an eternity.

     In her Illness as Metaphor, the late Susan Sontag dissects and analyzes numerous instances in which illness has been used, wrongly, as she sees it, in a metaphorical way that tends to point to or underscore other issues or causes which may not necessarily serve the ones suffering from a particular illness.  To wit, metaphors of illness have often been used to justify various actions, not all of which serve the common good.

     Metaphorical or not, intrinsic to illness, it seems, is a fundamental assumption of weakness, that the one suffering from an illness is somehow physically or psychologically weaker than those who are not.  Often this is true.  On the other hand, often it is not.  Those who are sick among us often present to us a picture not of weakness but of strength, a portrait of steadfastness and fortitude, a vision of a decision to live life to the fullest regardless of the circumstances in which one finds herself.  It is a choice which those of us who are healthy often overlook, burdened as we let ourselves become by our various existential challenges.  We forget what it is really like to be healthy and well.  We come to suppose that it is normal.
     Normality, however, often breeds complacency and myopia.  It forgets to look behind and around itself, to dig beneath the surface, to seek out the hidden and unseen.
     For this reason, perhaps it is in the sick that we can best learn about health and wholeness, for it is in the sick, undermined physically and, sometimes, psychologically--but who are often, to reiterate, nonetheless stronger than most of us will ever be--that we see the real essence of health.  Being healthy is far more than physical and mental wholeness.  Genuine health is admitting to the fact of our evanescence and fraility, to embrace the truth of our tiny place in the universe and the ineluctable finitude that comes with it, to recognize the inescapable reality of space and time and the God who made them, and to be, regardless of how we feel, physically or otherwise, comfortable with and secure in it.  Real health is to recognize that we, human we be, are weak, weak in body, weak in spirit, weak in mind, our knowledge limited, our purview small.  Real health is to admit to our dependence on the grace of God.
     Sometimes it takes sickness to awaken us to who we really are.

     In Theology of the Event, a book published a number of years ago, theologian John Caputo sets forth what he terms the "weakness" of God.  It's an intriguing proposition:  can God be weak?  According to Caputo, yes, God can be weak.  God is weak because unlike the God of orthodox Christianity, God is not apart from the events of the world, nor does he guide or grant purpose to the events of the world.  Instead, God is an event; he is not a being.  God is an integral part of the fabric of this reality, as subject to chance and circumstance as much as anyone and anything else.
     This is a powerful thesis.  Given that in our cause and effect universe every event is merely a prelude to another one and therefore an open book, its effects ever subject to alteration and change, it means that God as event means a God who is no more than another flash of activity in an evanescent and dying world.  He is nothing more than the next thing, no more than the next random twist of matter and time.
     In order to mean anything to us personally, however, God must be more than event.  He must be a person, a person with individuality and purpose.  Otherwise, we may as well put our trust in a slab of granite.
     On the other hand, quite apart from Caputo's assertion, God did, at one time, become weak.  Although he is the creator of the universe, at one point in history, God, the strongest of all beings, became weak, as weak as you and me.  He became a human being.  Though he remained God, a personal being, God became an event, an event of weakness that rocked the world.
     But it was precisely in his weakness that this God, unlike Caputo's God, subservient to and defined by event, displayed his strength.  Because God in his strength--the strength of cosmic supremacy--became, in the person of Jesus Christ, weak, God demonstrated that strength is ultimately the servant of weakness, and that it would be in weakness--a weakness of, oddly enough, strength, the strength of one who chooses to be weak--that he would make himself fully known.
     And in this was the greatest event of all time.

     Consider the notion of land.  Land is our beginning, land is our ending.  In land, however we define it, we find ourselves, we locate our path, we endeavor to shape our destiny.  Land is a metaphor for all that we find good and worthwhile in the world.  Land is the foundation, and repository, of dreams.
     But land is nowhere without sky above it.

     If we are to fully make sense of what seems to be an utterly confusing reality, we must learn to think in terms of paradox.  We must learn to embrace things that do not seem to fit together, things that do not appear to align cleanly, but things which, if we are sufficiently wise and honest with ourselves, we admit that, even if we do not wish to, we must nonetheless accept.  As Blaise Pascal noted long ago, we must accept the limits of our reason.  We must accede to conclusions which may explain in part, but not in full, conclusions which, as the theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg puts it, are “contrary to experience by exceeding its capacity” (italics mine).  Again, this reflects the demands and constructs of our humanness:  we will never understand everything as it actually is (a fact which Immanuel Kant pointed out as well).  Logic, as Cardinal John Henry Newman argued toward the close of the nineteenth century, has its limits.
     For finite creatures living in a finite reality and searching for meaning, real and genuine meaning in that finite reality, paradox is inevitable.
     Consider the Greek word αρχη.  Aρχη denotes a beginning which never really began, a beginning which required nothing to be, for it has always been.  Yet αρχη is a beginning which, if we hope to develop a credible picture of global origins, we cannot do without.  We need an αρχη to make sense of our origins.  As odd as it seems, we need a causeless beginning to explain our own “caused” beginning.  Can we who have a beginning really explain why we are here?  We need a beginning which nothing else can claim it began, a beginning without cause and beyond effect, a beginning which never really began.
     Clearly, this is a paradox.  But it is also inevitable.  We are creatures of finitude who inhabit three and four dimensions in a universe with, according to cosmologists, at least ten more.  We have limits.  We have boundaries.  We simply cannot grasp everything, to borrow a term from the legal profession, prima facie.
     We must learn to live with what we do not fully understand, we must learn to live with things that are beyond our ken but things whose factuality we must admit to being present, if not always available.  We must learn to live with paradox.

A longing for freedom is one of our most fundamental passions.  We long for freedom, long to be liberated from the constraints of finitude—spiritual, mental, physical—and break into a higher understanding of what is real.  We long to make our will, our free will (at least as we see it), the sole and unchallenged arbiter of our truth and reality.  We want to be, as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau have noted, and exist in a way that releases us from all constraint.    
So did Nietzsche set forth his Ubermensch, and so did Tom Wolfe, in Bonfire of Vanities, call his Wall Street protagonists "masters of the universe," people in total control of their worlds, their freedom limited only by their willingness to realize, guide, and further it.  They are total masters of their destiny.  There is nothing greater than they.  As Titanic director James Cameron remarked upon receiving the 1997's Academy Award for Best Picture, “I’m king of the world.”

But there is a problem.  It is the problem of God.  If God exists as a sentient and active and omnipotent being, acknowledging him as such means that we no longer have absolute freedom.  Sure, we can still do whatever we choose to do, but we now do so aware that we do so under the aegis of someone who will one day judge how we have used what has been given us.  Our entire life equation changes.

In addition, even if we do not believe that God exists, we must nonetheless understand that no one has unlimited freedom in a finite universe, much less a universe whose ultimate parameters are beyond her control.  Our freedom is merely the degree to which we believe ourselves to be free.  It has no genuine substance.

Moreover, though we of finitude can criticize this God, we cannot change this God, and we certainly cannot give ourselves any more freedom than what our limited constitutions and fragile and temporary occupancy of space and time allow us to do so.  We realize that we have unlimited freedom only to the extent that we are free of who and what we are, something we will never be able to fully do.  For who we are will never change:  we will always be human, nothing more, nothing less.  As the Smashing Pumpkins put it, “Even after I finished venting my rage, I’m still a rat yelling in a cage.”

So are we free?  Yes.  Are we free to be free?  Yes.  Are we free to be free to be free?  No.  Were we totally free to be free, we would never struggle with limits, never struggle with meaning, never struggle with the conundrum of evil.  To be free is to know and successfully wrestle with what constrains it.  Only this is a freedom that makes itself free.  Any other freedom means nothing.

     If, as John Rawls observed, justice is being fair, how do we define what is fair?  If, as much of America's judicial system seems to say, justice is being retributive, how do we decide what is appropriate?
     To the point, for the length of its relatively short history, America has arrived at what it considers "just" through social and political consensus.  Under the weight of cultural and historical circumstances, such consensus, however, inevitably changes.
     Hence, the issue remains:  how do we know what true justice is?  Compounding this dilemma is the challenge embedded in Emily Dickinson's long ago observation that, "This world is not conclusion."  Does believing that this world is but a part of a much greater whole solve the problem?  Will deciding that this world "is not conclusion" allow us to contemplate and do justice in a more expansive and realistic way?
     It can.  Only if, however, we admit that, ultimately, we will always be dependent, materially and epistemologically, on a presence in whom resides the final boundary and definition of what is just.
     Otherwise, we are creating justice with a justice that may not actually be just.  We're just dancing in the dark.