The Earthes All Staked

As I contemplated the Passion of Christ last week, I was struck by how well C. S. Lewis saw the parallel of the desperate end game of Jesus' life and the human condition. His prayers of anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane are unanswered. He turns to the Church he created, and it condemns Him. Then the State (Rome) considers his fate, and abandons Him out of political expediency. The final appeal to "the People" He has come to save from themselves results in a demand by them for his death. On the cross, he dies after uttering as His last words an anguished cry at His divine Self's apparent abandonment of His human Self: "Why hast thou forsaken me?"

You see how characteristic, how representative, it all is. The human situation writ large. These are among the things it means to be a man. Every rope breaks when you seize it. Every door is slammed shut as you reach it. To be like the fox at the end of the run; the earthes all staked.

Whether our run ends as a young man or an old one, sooner or later, for every single one of us, "the earthes are all staked." Suffering is our lot because we live on this Earth, and all of us must die. To deny this fearful fact, or to avoid facing it, is the reason many of us live our busy little lives of "quiet desperation," filling up our days with nonessential possessions and activities in the unconscious hope that if we don't think about it, we won't have to deal with it.

As someone much smarter than me in these matters stated once, the problem is that we are not made for this world. Certainly, the things of it will never buy us happiness nor make our lives ultimately content. The sooner you realize and accept this, the sooner you'll stop wasting your precious time and really begin to live.

Of course, I'm preaching to a deaf world, one that does its best to deride the notion of suffering as anything more than bad luck, rather than the lot of a fallen world. Before I left on a road thrip on Good Friday, I posted a typical short post on Twitter (there can be no other kind of post than a short one on Twitter) that merely quoted Dr. Gordon Allport, in his preface to Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning, in which he set forth the central tenet of "existentialism," a term coined by Frankl: "To live is to suffer. To survive is to find meaning in the suffering." That "Tweet" generated only one reply, from a Pilate wannabe lawyer in St. Louis, who so eloquently reposted: "Yeah, not so much into suffering, really." As Chesterton proposed, the only appropriate response to a nonbeliever when he asserts as to a believer's belief that he doesn't understand it is, "No, you do not understand." My response to the oh-so-cool fellow shyster was "No. Of course you're not." I'm sure that response flew right under his radar.

What a vacuous time and place in which we live! We're so busy denying the inevitabilty of death, drowning our natural fear in a cesspool of noise and inebrieation that we've lost the capacity to appreciate the fact that death gives our life meaning; that in the end, suffering is our lot, and how we respond to its inevitable occurrence is what marks our lives as full or barren. Instead of embracing the suffering and offering it up, we deny its existence or run pell-mell away from it until it grabs us by the scruff of our neck, by which time we are ill-equipped to cope with it on even a superficial level, much less able to find any "meaning" in it.

"These are among the things it means to be a man." So many of us are boys until the day death grabs us by the throat and throttles the last vestiges of our meaningless existence. 

Others of us understand that, while comedy teaches life lessons, tragedy teaches deeper ones. In the end, the bitter pill often seems much more like "life" than the sugar-coated one.

English theater star Ruthie Henshall as Fantine in the Les Miserables 10th Anniversary Special sings "I Dreamed A Dream" (with all due respect to the sensation-of-the-moment, Susan Boyle)

Comments

[Valerie]

Ah, Victor Frankl's quote again. You always seem to pull him out just when I need to be reminded the most about the meaning of of suffering. Thanks, Kevin.

[Kevin]

I'm glad to be of service, however small.