Vaclav Havel once said, “the deeper the experience of an absence of meaning- in other words, of absurdity- the more energetically meaning is sought; without a vital struggle with the experience of absurdity, there would be nothing to reach for; without a profound inner longing for sense, there could not then be any wounding by nonsense.” So here we are, in a world where my best friend’s mom has a sudden heart attack, where there are genocides of innocents, where there are senseless massacres of my peers, and we are left reeling, our minds spinning, our hearts in the throes of confusion and misery, wandering through the absolute, utter absurdity of it all.
All of this seems so arbitrary, so undeserved. Whether it be places we are born into, or the accidents that befall us, or the injustices laid against us, these indiscriminate actions and environments propel us into discovering ourselves, hunting for meaning and truth, and a quest for foundational standards, some sort of rhythm that the world should be moving in time with. We are thrust into finding something to exist for.
Who we are now, is only because of who we have been, what we have experienced. Our future is inextricably tangled in our past, and our present is a proverbial collision of the two. What has happened to me, and what is happening to me, are giving light to the potential that my life holds. For as Jonathan Safran Foer so poignantly reminds us, “Our futures are illuminated by our past.”
So all these painful, somewhat tortuous experiences push us to look further. If we do not look further, this horrific, random life inevitable becomes a perpetual delay of suicide. Our days become our battles, and decisions are no longer at face value, but are taken as giving of life and reason and motivation, or they are nothing, empty in a sea of senselessness. We must start, not to just tell ourselves, but to believe wholeheartedly, that life is worth more than aimless meandering, sorrow filled hearts, and vacant stares.
So where do we go? We must give reason for the deferral of our hopelessness. If we take the introspective route, we will undoubtedly be terribly disappointed. We will find nothing more than earthly hurt, tainted intentions, a complete lack of strength, and a surplus of apathy. There is no possible way we, on our own, can bring ourselves back to meaning.
Thus, we must move outward, outside of ourselves. And while I was walking around my strangely eerie campus today, thoughts of Tech racing through my head, I was thinking how nice Deism looked. The idea that a God made us, created us, formed this perfectly crafted world, and let us go, and let us ruin it all. It made so much sense for the moment. Life in that minute had seemed too absurd for a God to be able to care. He must be distant. He cannot be a close God, because he wouldn’t let us ruin life like this.
But Deism still gives no hope, it gives reasoning, but it doesn’t defer our deaths. If anything, it would encourage it, succumbing to this harsh world which is spiraling out of our control.
Out of all the religions however, the ever enigmatic Jesus figure has a foundation no one else has: a history in overcoming the orchestration of life’s absurdity. Dostoyevsky made the argument through Ivan and Alyosha’s interactions in The Brother’s Karamozov, that the faith of the Christian is founded on an injustice: that the death of Christ was nothing but an innocent man being punished for all of our faults and transgressions. The crucifixion of Christ was absurdity at its basest: innocence, injustice, senseless, aching pain. Ivan tried to use this argument as Christianity’s downfall, for we are founding “its edifice on [his] unavenged tears.”
But what Ivan is missing, is that Christ wrapped these two worlds in himself, the spiritual and the physical, the pure and the absurd, and he proved to overcome them both. I find comfort in that, that God has not forgotten or that God does not sympathize with the haphazard acts of this life.
There is love and meaning and redemption behind it all. Yes, life is absurd. It is senseless and tragic at times, and it leaves us spinning, sometimes into apathy or overwhelming pain. But there is hope to suspend our desperation, our grief, and our tragedies. And there is a God who not only sees this absurdity but has chosen to step into it, and defy it.
It is now only up to us if we are willing to accept, to believe, to act on this, whether in our joy and happiness, our mundane and mediocre, or our tragedy and pain. Its either this, or be swallowed in our own insufficiencies, or our own abyss of hurt.
“here i raise my ebeneezer,
hither by thy help i come
oh and i hope by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.”
