What if you, like Berenger in Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros, found yourself the only human being left on earth?  Or what if you, like Denali, a character in a short story I wrote many years ago, awoke one morning to realize that he was, after a series of nuclear conflagrations had decimated the planet, were the last person standing?
     If you were the only person left on earth, would you still know who you were?  And after you, too, were gone, would anyone know it?
     Of course not.  No one would be there to know it, much less care about it.  The earth would sit, alone and unloved, a lifeless globe circling and rotating through an empty universe.
     And what would anything mean then?  Would anything have mattered at all?
     Not unless we had a reason to be here in the first place.
     And the only way that we would have had a reason to be here would be if our origins had been grounded in purpose.  And purpose is only possible with personality.
     And personality, yours, mine, and everyone else's, is only possible if there is a God.  Can chemicals really speak?
     Unless there is a God, it would not matter one whit whether you were the first person here or the last person left:  nothing would matter, anyway.  Yes, Nietzsche's "Last Man" observes in Beyond Good and Evil that he was indeed happy and free, but what, we may ask, in a world stripped of God and meaning, will he in fact ever be?
     Do you really think you're an accident?

     If, as the absurdists, be it in drama or literature, say, life is absurd, that is, there seems to be no point to a person being born only to die and be no more and to along the way beget other people who do the same--although everyone caught in this continuum looks for a point anyway--how do we know it?  If life really is absurd, and we along with it, any conclusion that we draw about either one is absurd, too, which then begs the question:  how can absurdity know that it is absurd--when everything else is absurd, too?
     Oddly enough, unless meaning exists, absurdity cannot be.

     Thirty-eight years ago, on roughly this day of the month (I do not know the exact day), I had an experience, call it an encounter, a profoundly remarkable encounter that changed me and my life forever.  It was an encounter that undergirds everything I believe and do, guides and explains every part of my life and that, among many other things, leads me to contemplate and write this blog.
     Let me explain.  Thirty-eight years ago, in the wilds of Canada's Jasper National Park, after many years of wandering and wondering about the meaning and purpose of existence, I found the answer I was looking for, the answer that addressed and resolved all my questions and inquiries, the answer that then, now, and, I expect, forever, explains and encapsulates everything I need and want to know.
     In a remarkable flash of a moment many decades ago, I came to realize that in the person of Jesus Christ I had found--and continue to find--the fullest and most absolutely complete picture of what life and existence mean, in this life and the next.
     I share an excerpt from my book, Imagining Eternity:  A Journey Towards Meaning, in which I recount this moment, a moment at which I arrived after a lengthy and tumultuous journey of angst, quest, and adventure, a journey of revolutionary fervor, mountain sojourn, and countercultural glory, a voyage of what seemed like several lifetimes rolled into one (for details, you'll have to read the book!).
     At the end, however, I found what most mattered:  lasting meaning.  Here's the excerpt:

     "I couldn’t believe it.  Even as I talked, I heard everything in me answering “Jesus!  Yes!  Do it, do it!”  All my hopes and dreams, all my longings for meaning and meaningfulness, transcendence and eternity, purpose and destiny had come down to one word:  Jesus.  I was amazed.
     "I couldn’t resist myself.
     "'Okay, Jesus,'" I heard myself saying, slowly and carefully, “'I’m here, alone and apart.  I’m at your mercy.  You’ve finally got me.'
     "'I’ll stop running from you, Jesus.  I’ll stop ignoring you.  I’ll give you a try.  I’ll say yes.  Come to me.  I want you to.  Come now.'
     "The world didn’t come to an end.  No fireworks, no sudden surge of warm air, no exploding stars.  My clothes didn’t burn up, my hair didn’t fall off.
     "But things were different.  I knew.  Even as I spoke, I felt a tremendous release, as if a dam had broken deep within me and a rich and warm peace, like a new born river in spring, was flooding deeply and gloriously through me, filling every part of me, all at once, with a calm and serenity exceeding all I had ever known.  It was a calm that surpassed that of my most wondrous mountain days and nights, an incredibly brilliant tranquility of mind and soul that seemed to fulfill and answer the deepest longings of my heart, the deepest yearnings of my being, totally and forever.  I felt as if striving and struggling for meaning were no longer necessary, that in some amazing and mysterious way the vision was here, all of it.  I had found it.  Nothing more was needed, nothing more was required, nothing more was desired.  Everything was here.
     "'I’m free,'” I’m whispered, “'I’m really free.  Meaning, sweet and wonderful meaning, is finally mine.'
     "Something had indeed happened.  Without a doubt.  And I knew that it was not something I had consciously tried to create.  It had come upon me like a flash flood.  Total surprise.
     "Jesus was real.
     "No one was awake when I walked down the hill and returned to camp.  I entered my tent, crawled into my sleeping bag, and fell asleep.
     "I awoke to a cool and clear morning.  The mountains across the river still looked like multicolored crystals, sparkling beneath the dawning light.  The river was still flowing by, moving smoothly and easily to the north.  The world was as it had always been.
     "Then I felt my heart breaking.  I couldn’t believe it.  I had an overwhelming urge to read the Bible."

(From Imagining Eternity:  A Journey Towards Meaning, copyright 2008, William E. Marsh)

     "When you're in a myth," the writer Franz Kafka once observed, "you believe it.   But if you step outside of it, you stop believing it."  So might say many people who do not believe in God about those who do.  As long as those who believe in God do not look past the curtain of their beliefs (think about Plato's allegory of the cave), these folks might suggest, the believers will continue in their, as the unbeliever would describe them, delusions.  But if these "deluded" believers could be convinced to step outside of their carefully circumscribed world, so the unbeliever might argue, perhaps they would see the folly of their beliefs and stop believing in the "myth" of God's existence.
     Perhaps.  But what if the myth is not a myth but reality?  And how would we, captives of our mortality, know it?
     Ironically, we will only know if we agree that there is something to be known.  And if the universe is a vast impersonal blast of dust and plasma--and we along with it--there is really nothing to know:  it's all an accident.
     And that's the biggest myth of all.

     "It is not forbidden for reason to speak of unity and even of unities,"observes Lev Shestov in his Athens and Jerusalem, "but it must renounce total unity--and other things besides. And what a sigh of relief men will breathe when they suddenly discover that the living God, the "true" God, in no way resembles Him whom reason has shown them until now!"
     Whatever else they may have done for him, Shestov's explorations of the limits of philosophical wholeness aptly enabled him to proffer this profound observation about the boundaries of reason.  Though we of finitude long for unity in our world, though we crave to see an inkling of comprehensive meaning in our experience, outside of looking beyond ourselves, we will likely never find it.  We live in a broken world, a world that, though pronounced good at the point of its creation (and remains so to this day), is a fractured world, a world in which those who live in it strive endlessly (for this is our bent) to identify some apex, some fulcrum upon which they may find how it--spiritually as well as materially--fits together.  And although we rightly employ our reason to pursue this goal, the nature of the world demands that we will never succeed fully, not least of all in regard to the inner workings of the divine.  "It" remains to be found.  As Shestov astutely notes, for all its marvel and wonder, reason will never show us the full reality of what really is, especially its relationship to God, for reason cannot fully grasp what it cannot fully see. 
     Only faith--faith as an informed, reasoned, and reasonable conclusion about the nature of immanent and transcendent reality, a reality inevitably undergirded by the presence of God and his communciation of himself in human form--has the eyes that really see.

     Can you love your enemy?  In October of 1950, the Communist government of China, fresh from its leader Mao Zedong’s successful takeover of the Chinese mainland, invaded the nation of Tibet.  Brutal and efficient, the Chinese army spared no one who stood in their way.  Thousands of people lost their lives, thousands of monasteries were destroyed:  an entire way of life vanished forever.  Among the many families affected was that of a certain Tibetan monk who was forced to watch, amidst the carnage and upheaval, Chinese soldiers torture his mother to death.
     For years afterward, this monk, despite his sacred oath and calling to love each and every one he came across, hated and despised the Chinese.  He loathed even the thought of them.  In 1971, twenty-one years after his mother died, however, he forced himself to eat at a Chinese restaurant.  As he did, he met someone whose father had died in the same way as his mother, and who had managed to put the past behind him.  It was then that he realized how wrong he had been.  No longer could he hate the Chinese.  That was over.  His former tormentors were, he now saw, just like he, people and human beings with whom he lived on planet earth.  He began to love his enemy.
     One of the most remarkable passages in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) is one in which Jesus, in describing for us his vision of a community whose people have committed themselves to live life differently—radically differently—than they had before, tells us that we are to love our enemies.  Hard as it is, difficult as it sounds, he says, we are to love those who hate and despise us.
     Why?  As Jesus well knew, inhumane and vicious though he or she may be, our enemy is a creation of a loving God.  Like us, our enemy is made in the image of the creator of the universe.  Our enemy is valuable, our enemy is important, our enemy has eternal value.  Our enemy has meaning.
     Does God like what our enemy does to us?  Of course not.  But he wants us to love our enemy anyway--because he made him (or her).
     On the first Christmas Eve of World War I, a number of German and British soldiers, after some preliminary bantering, emerged from their trenches to celebrate Christmas together.  For a few wonderful hours, these soldiers, long commanded to hate the other, recognized who, beyond all else, they really were:  fellow human beings living together on a planet blessed and sustained by God.  Although their countries had declared war on each other, these soldiers, for one remarkable night, did not.  They loved their enemy.
     Hating is easy, but loving is hard.  Hating, however, is for this life only; it’s as evanescent as a candy bar.  Love, on the other hand, lasts.  Love is for eternity.
     We'll never regret love.

 

     Rare is the person who loves, who really loves authority.  While most of us are willing to submit to authority, given the choice, most of us would also rather not have to deal with it.  Authority, be it from a teacher, parent, employer, country, or anyone else, by its very nature presents us with boundaries that contain us, bind us, and set fences around our ambitions, hopes, and dreams, be they for the moment, the day, year, or the entire scope of our lives.  It shapes our world in ways that we often do not invite or desire, ways that rework visions and intimations of what we might have wanted our life, or at least our immediate experience, to be.
     On the other hand, the fact and presence of authority indicates that we, as a community of people living together on this planet, believe that the world in which we move has order, that the creation in which we find ourselves has a structure, that it is the product of purpose.  It has meaningful content, content which we, by investing in authority, wish to preserve and sustain for our greater good.  OUr interest in authority underscores that we believe that beneath the rawness and wildness of the universe lies a greater purpose, a deeper intent, a richer vision, an order, human, divine, or both, into which we fit ourselves.
     Ironically, when we invoke authority, good or bad, we are telling ourselves that we and the world have meaning.