Perspective #83

. . . and the Soul Felt Its Worth

I was watching officials trying to comfort those who lost family members at the Brown University shooting this past week. They wanted to say something helpful, but could only start down the road of “Our thoughts.....are with you.” The format is about prayer and God’s help, but our secularized culture considers that comment to be over the line. Sad.

So what if the entirely secular world were candid about life unanchored by the personal creator God? That’s what I write about today with a fictional eulogy that makes the point. It includes a comment on mosquitoes that made me laugh...and sad...when I heard it.

The essay’s title comes from the carol: ...”till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.”

Blessings at Christmas.

Thanks for reading.

John

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I’m going to ask for your patience as I write from a purely secular perspective briefly/below. We all long for a safe middle ground with fewer life problems or global crises. We desire life to be comfortable, to be surrounded by kind, agreeable people, and to make a positive difference for our family and others. Unfortunately, that ideal only exists as a wish. Others often create a mess around us (or of us), and we complicate our own lives all too frequently. We yearn to escape, but that safe middle ground is merely an illusion. We are either purposeful human beings or just random, meaningless bits of bio-logical life.

Today, I write an imaginary but candid eulogy that confronts meaninglessness without dwelling on its horror. Recently, I have seen two remarkable Christian leaders pass away. They discovered true life (zoé, not mere bio) in Jesus, whose birth we will soon celebrate. I have admired these men and many other men and women in my life who have a simple confidence that God has sent his son for many and for us.

The sad comment at the end is about not destroying humans on earth because of mosquitoes’ needs. It came from a cartoon I watched with my six-year-old grandson; it made me laugh and yet feel sad.

Hang on—there’s good news coming at Christmas. Brace yourself for some sad honesty.

“We feel a sensation of regret over the death of a carbon-based biped that we called our friend. His conscious impressions brought joy to us and all who knew him. His passing marked the end of the biological functions that sustained his existence as we have come to understand it during his brief time with us.”

“It wasn’t long ago that a random shift of enzymes led to the passing of one of his offspring. This loss was accompanied by a deep feeling of grief and the calling out of the name given at birth by those recognized by our social conventions as family and friends. While both the individual and the offspring will soon be forgotten, it fits the sad truth that their lives were lived without purpose, except for the ones they constructed themselves, recognized by the society around them.”

“When I think of the community of ‘us’ who knew him, I envision the vast Canadian landscape that we fly over when traveling to Europe. I often think of that trackless, roadless land as having one square foot that I could dig up on a frost-free day. That shovel full of dirt has its own life forms. They exist in a community like ‘us’, even though they lack the consciousness to recognize it. What if we named them and delivered a speech like this one? They are no more interesting than we are, as we all share a common life that ultimately depends on plankton’s ability to convert sunlight into proteins that sustain us.”

“If we consider the stars, like our bio-life-giving sun, we gain a sense of how brief our lives are. We are barely a blip in time, yet we have allowed our consciousness and the Seven Molecules (like dopamine) to distort existence into a sense of meaning and pleasure. Our artists and thinkers remind us that such thought, while wishful and hopeful, is not even wrong; it is akin to the life of the grime in the sink.”

“In closing, we must recognize that we serve as essential hosts for various life forms, disturbingly referred to as parasites, and we are especially critical to the mosquito biosphere. Each of us can feel the dopamine of knowing that we have kept thousands of them and billions of bacteria alive.”

We must confront life without inherent meaning or purpose, where our sense of self and worth is a thin illusion. When we reach this point in life, the good news of Jesus’s incarnation resonates with us. “In him was life (zoé), and that life was the light of mankind.” We often focus on our reluctance to trust him, but each of us, at rare times, senses a profound resonance in the meaning and hope this strike in our souls.

On my first Christmas as a Christian, I stopped at Chicago’s Golf Mill Mall and just soaked in the words of the familiar Christmas carols played everywhere back then. How could I have missed such a vivid message of hope? “Long lay the world in sin and error pining/till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.”