Wisdom

The Nonsense of Life

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Jackson Pollack, "Number 8"Recently, I spoke with a peer who is a dedicated educator. He is going blind rapidly. This will end his career and render him disabled.

This doesn’t make sense to me.

I am 50 years old. At an age when I should be awash in wisdom, most of life makes little sense. I don’t understand why some people prosper and others don’t, even when both take the same course to success. I don’t understand why some people get handed insanely difficult burdens that leave them perpetually struggling to keep that burden from crushing them. I don’t understand how people can work for years toward a goal that seems blessed and then overnight it blows up and leaves lasting wreckage.

Perhaps I am admitting my own folly, but I just don’t understand.

Not understanding is not the same as not having an explanation. I can tell you from a theological perspective what the explanations might be. I know how living in a sin-filled world works. I get the sovereignty of God. I can call up chapter and verse. I can answer you with logic and “wisdom.”

But that doesn’t mean I understand.

The title of this post is “The Nonsense of Life.” And indeed, despite being a Christian of many years, I still find life to be nonsensical. Again, this does not mean there is no sense in it at all, only that I am unable to comprehend it.

God says that His thoughts are far higher than mine. For this reason, they appear as nonsense to me. Like the directions for building a complex microprocessor, one paragraph in Finnish, the next in Hungarian, finishing in base 3. It reads like gibberish because I don’t have what it takes to understand.

Tragedies reverberate through time, the ripples spreading out and colliding with other ripples, both good and ill. Some cancel out, while others amplify.

I know another teacher, many years ago, who had saved most of her career to go on a year-long cruise around the world when she retired. Her students were excited for her because she would take that cruise a month after retiring. Yet within a week of getting her gold watch, she died unexpectedly, never having set sail, all that preparation and hope wasted.

Why? I can’t tell you. I’m sure another teacher in another place at another time DID take a similar cruise. Sure I can offer theories, and perhaps they have some element of wisdom, but in the end, they won’t be any more enlightening as to why one took that cruise and the other never made it.

Sometimes, I think the worst thing we can do is try to explain. Sometimes, the best thing we can do is show up and be available for the ones left behind, the ones with questions we would be foolish to answer.

I am a Christian because no other way offers the same truth. No other way explains life more thoroughly. All the other options are meaningless in the long run.

I wish I could say that being a Christian has answered all my questions, but that would be a lie. If anything, I have more questions the older I get, and the answers I defended so vigorously as a younger man are less crystal clear today.

One day, I will understand. Until then, there is the nonsense of life.

42

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If you are unfamiliar with the works of Douglas Adams, particularly his The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of novels, the title of this post will be inscrutable. What it is supposed to represent is the answer to the most basic question of life, the universe, and everything. What does this crazy existence all mean? Well, 42. In one of the books in that series, that’s what a sophisticated computer the size of a planet determined was the answer. Then it complained about the question.

I talked one-on-one with Douglas Adams many times at MacWorld conventions. He was an official “Apple Master,” and oddly enough, he tended to seek me out rather than the other way around, perhaps because I worked for Apple and he was able to get tech info from me. Anyway, we seemed to keep running into each other. At one point, he was my favorite novelist. I also learned he was one of the foremost atheists and often spoke to atheist groups around the world. When I talked with him the last time before he died unexpectedly at 48, he was his usual frantic, overworked self. Too many irons in the fire and none of them heating properly. In short, 42.

As a Christian, I don’t share Adams’s worldview. However, 42 is as good an answer as most people will experience when it comes to trying to find meaning in life.

It’s not that life has no meaning. It’s only that you and I will drive ourselves insane trying to make sense of anything that happens in this life. Meaning is most definitely there, but not a single person this side of heaven will be able to scry it out.

The wisest mortal who ever lived had this to say about the question of what it all means:

Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. So I turned to consider wisdom and madness and folly. For what can the man do who comes after the king? Only what has already been done. Then I saw that there is more gain in wisdom than in folly, as there is more gain in light than in darkness. The wise person has his eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. And yet I perceived that the same event happens to all of them. Then I said in my heart, “What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise?” And I said in my heart that this also is vanity. For of the wise as of the fool there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten. How the wise dies just like the fool! So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind.
—Ecclesiastes 2:11-17 ESV

Many people would simply fall into despair at that point. But here’s the thing: While you and I may not understand from our limited perspective, God DOES understand. He gets it.

God says this:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
—Isaiah 55:8-9 ESV

Magic Eye imageGod alone has the perspective needed to make sense of the nonsense you and I experience daily.

We live something of a Magic Eye existence. Our world looks like so much chaos, yet there is order there that may escape us because our perspective is limited by our humanity. Only God sees order in the chaos.

I don’t know why some people seem to experience more than their share of chaos. I used to think those people were receiving an extra measure of character building to make them better than those who didn’t go through repeated trials. I don’t think that anymore.

Some things in life just are—at least from your perspective and mine. Trying to make sense of them will drive us insane, and yet people try. Christians especially try to make sense of life because we feel a need to have to explain everything about how God works to people who don’t know or understand Him. Frankly, we might as well try to blow out the sun, because all the explanation about meaning will only lead us to an answer as profound as 42.

It all comes down to this: The only way to navigate life is to have faith in God, to trust that He knows how to make sense of the senseless. Because He does. Even if He chooses not to share that with us. And knowing that truth is what separates the Christian from the atheist, even if they both ascribe to the same puzzlement about what it all means.

Humility in Light of the History of Christian Thought

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Saint Dan?One of the things that bothers me most about believers in today’s churches, especially Western churches, is our assumption of superiority. Many of us church people display an inflated sense of arrival, as if we are the pinnacle of Christian expression in all of human history.

Those fellow believers in some old cave somewhere who wrote about their experience of the Faith? Morons. Those Middle Ages Christians who hid from “the infidel” and saw their numbers martyred? Know-nothings. Those theologians from the halls of 18th-century European centers of learning? Mental midgets.

Only we get it. Ours is the only understanding of Christianity that matters. The foundation upon which we stand is little more than a pile of spiritual-sounding ideas whose time has passed. Our knowledge and praxis are the epitome of what it means to be a Christian, and no one who came before us has anything to say to us about what to believe and how to live.

Here is the lunkheadedness in that commonly encountered line of thinking…

The predominant eschatology within the United States today is dispensational premillenialism. As an explanation of end times, it is only about 160 years old. The form most widely held, which mirrors what is found in Hal Lindsey’s 1970s-era series of Late Great Planet Earth books, is closer to 60 years old.

What is amazing about this is that nearly all the Christians who have ever lived NEVER believed that explanation of the events of the end. They held another view—one of many, it seems. I once took a class in college that covered 16 different understandings of the events in the Book of Revelation, each understanding predominant in the Church at one time or another.

If you are a betting person, you understand chances are high that not all those forebears were entirely wrong in their interpretations of the Bible and the practice of the Faith.

While it is true we have a bit more knowledge today about science than we once did, even scientific thought changes, and often in ways that reinforce what someone said a hundred years ago rather than last week. But as much as we want our faith to be scientific, most of the questions answered in the Bible are philosophical in nature, and to think what Christians thought 300 years ago has no application today is a grave error.

Every day, I must ask myself how much more of the Holy Spirit I have than say Justin Martyr, Polycarp, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Jan Hus, Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards, Alfred Edersheim, and so on. The answer? Probably less. Much less.

And I would suggest that given the reality of the presence of God in the lives of those long-deceased men of faith, you are not looking so good yourself. Yet you and I somehow think we know more about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the Christian Faith than they ever did because our teaching today is SO much better than it was in their day.

Hardly.

If anything, I find myself brought low by the reality that I know almost nothing. While there is no glory in ignorance, I am at least humbled by the truth that I am not the final authority on most things that pertain to the Christian Faith. People from the past, many centuries dead, can still speak to me today through their writings. And chances are—to the betting man, at least—they have more to say to me (and to you) than I care to give them credit. Perhaps I should read them to see what they knew and how they lived in light of that knowledge.

What is worse than a puffed-up Christian who thinks he knows everything—unless it is one who discounts the wisdom of those who went before him? And isn’t that what most blowhards do? Don’t most think they are the ones who have arrived?

More and more, a hand clasped firmly over the mouth seems to be the response of the wise. We know less than we think we do. Better to rejoice humbly and be quiet than to remove that hand and show our arrogance despite how little we actually comprehend.