47: "That Sounds Wonderful"

I once heard an atheist repeat that worn-out argument that people believe in an afterlife because they can't handle gazing into the void. "The void", it seems, is like sleeping, only deeper, with no dreams, and you don't wake up.

This sounded wonderful to me. I still have no idea why this view would be harder to handle than the various religious visions of the afterlife are.

I once talked to my sister about all the things that weren't worth the risk to me and she said, "Well, if you wouldn't have some ups and downs, then you'd just be floating around through an eventless life,..."

Floating around through an eventless life. This sounded wonderful to me.

The Stoics were accused of going for a sort of happiness that was "like the happiness of a stone."
This, too, sounds wonderful to me.

Jesus said of Judas that it would have "been better for him not to have been born."

Not to have been born, I thought, and the words sounded wonderful.

Paul Simon says in one of his songs "I am a rock, I am an island, and a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries."

I know he's being satirical, but taken at face value the words sound wonderful.

You'll notice that I'm interpreting all these things in exactly the way they weren't intended.

What sounds somewhat threatening and scary are Jesus' words: "I live, and you too shall live." They sometimes make me shudder. To me they open up a curtain upon a long, long road full of danger and suffering and loneliness and hardship and getting beaten again and again and again until anything one has learned to call one's "self" has been shattered. Sure one is clothed with a new self in the end, a shining and radiant and joyful self. But I still find that there is nothing in me which considers the exchange worthwhile, and that the only thing (in me) that holds me to this image is a fear of what God might do if I reject what He intends to give me as a gift. (Outside of me, the Grace of God also holds me to this image, but that's without -- possibly even against -- my will.)

I think you get the picture. I knew before I had started on this pilgrimage that I would be confronted with this fundamental conflict in my life. Call it Weltschmerz, because there are several ambiguous meanings to words like pessimism, depression and despair.

We all know that feeling where it seems that the world is upside down, and we find to our dismay that it is we who are upside down, and have to be turned right. This may be easy the first few times, but it can get extremely difficult.

It takes no astute observer to note that my general attitude towards life is inconsistent with my Christian beliefs. However, I rarely meet someone who can understand just how deeply rooted this attitude is in me, and how impossible it is for me to surrender it. For every time I tell myself, "Hush, you mustn't talk that way," an inner voice rebels, "but it's true!" I understand that it must be me who is upside down, but I cannot relinquish the perspective that it is in fact the rest of the world which is inverted.