I
increased my possessions … I did not
restrain myself from getting whatever I wanted … Yet when I reflected on
everything I had accomplished and on all the effort that I had expended to
accomplish it, I concluded: “All these
achievements and possessions are ultimately profitless – like chasing the wind!
… So I lamented to myself, “The benefits
of wisdom are ultimately meaningless!” … Alas, the wise man dies – just like
the fool … So I began to despair about
all the fruit of my labor for which I worked so hard on earth … What does a man acquire from all his labor
and from the anxiety that accompanies
his toil on earth? For all day long his work
produces pain and frustration, and even at night his mind cannot relax!
(Eccl
2:4-23)
Even
if a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, but cannot enjoy his prosperity – even if he were to live forever … if he should live a thousand years twice, yet
does not enjoy his prosperity. [He will
eventually] die! All of man’s labor
is for nothing more than to fill his stomach – yet his appetite is never satisfied!
… It is better to be content with
what the eyes can see than for one’s heart
always to crave more. This continual
longing is futile … For no one knows what is best for a person during his
life – during the few days of his fleeting
life – for they pass away like a
shadow
(Eccl
6:1-12).
Imagine a metaphoric
scenario of a person who does not believe there exists a way of escape from our
human mortality in this dying universe. While we imagine this scene, we should
keep in mind the view point depicted in the verses of Ecclesiastes at the
beginning of this section. Passages from this text depict what the limits of
human understanding expresses concerning the apparent hopeless and transient
fatalism of all mortal humanity[1].
The person we imagine, consequently, does not believe in the possibility of
humanity passing into eternal life within an undying universe. Imagine that
this person as a woman who sees herself as a castaway, who before she embraced
this disposition of unbelief once spent sleepless nights in her youth gazing
out from the shoreline of the Land of Darkness. She lingered here longing for
another world and a savior to sweep here away to this paradise. Let us back
track in time to see her painstakingly trying to make out what lies beyond the
chaotic waves of transience and futility. These waves crash to and fro across
the tumultuous scene that lies before her. She dares not go further, seeing as
just a few yards in front of her tumultuous waves crash about in the ocean’s
shallows that lie filled with sharp jagged rocks jutting out from the water.
Amidst the turmoil that
unsteadies her hopeful gaze, she tries to make out what lies beyond this
chaotic scene. Her searching gaze, however, never discerns anything except a
pitch-black void of emptiness. In her desperation, she becomes so exhausted to
the point that the hope within her seems to be dashed to pieces among the
roaring collision of these waves against the rocks of despair. The content of
her once dream-filled vision of an eternally blessed future now becomes filled
with an ominous black-hole that bids her to step into despair. This
hopelessness pierces her soul with the empty void of meaninglessness that
appears to inescapably await every mortal bound to the shores of a dying world.
Worse yet, would it be for her when she realizes that this grim darkness of
ultimate desolation edges closer inland. Such a realization produces in her
mind a vision of an hour glass. She imagines the hour glass of temporality
counting down to the expiration of not just her life, but of all life in this
dying world. She witnesses firsthand the cold chill permeating a soul realizing
its inevitable fate of extinction. She comes face to face with the fate foreshadowed
by the stories she has heard before about the periods of catastrophe and
wide-spread extinction on planet Earth. She realizes how the stories that she
has been taught in the real world present her with a factual accounting for the
existence of humanity and the world she inhabits that leaves out the
possibility of escaping mortal transience and the gone-wrongness in this world.
She now sees that these
intelligent stories explaining to her the factual human situation are a flat
out denial of fulfilling her inner aspirations of inhabiting the ideal world of
her dreams. These stories explain as normal what she inherently knows as the
gone-wrongness of this world and the people around here. They even justify what
she sees as the gone-wrongness of humanity, selfishness, as normal animalistic
instincts that have gone far to shape our materialistic and consumeristic
society, as well as motives our superficial judgments of ourselves. Consider
even the tendency to treat people and relationships as commodities. Not only
that, but she notices that these stories account for reality apart from the
existence of a higher Being, e.g. a Divine Creator. With the acceptance of
these educated narratives, all sorts of doors shut in her mind of possibilities
that once filled her thoughts, imagination, and dreams regarding the
possibility of the existence of the Divine.
Such thoughts gave rise
to the possibility of making a way of escape from the gone-wrongness and
transience around her, so that her childhood dreams could come true. But now
these narratives come to negate the possibility of receiving a truly meaningful
destiny, an eternal purpose that she was made for; the possibility of receiving
truly unconditional love, acceptance, and belonging that cannot be found among
mutable people prone to selfishness and fickle emotions. In view of such
possibilities, she had once hoped she could receive revelation of how exactly
she was created as distinctively beautiful, in spite of what others, the norms
of societal expectations, or even the norms of science may say. She had even
imagined that someday she could walk through a door that led to a ‘library’
where she could find answers to all of her deeply personal questions that
revolve around her individual existence, such as why she exists and who she was
meant to be. Here she imagined meeting a Heavenly Father in a type of workshop
where she could receive from Him a guide to rightly living out her life, seeing
as He was the One who made her, as the apple of His eye, His “princess”.
With such dreams that
depend on the existence of the One who made her now shattered, she now has a
different outlook on life. As such childish hopes and dreams fade, her hope for
supernatural intervention dissipates like a mirage of an oasis in the desert.
Such intervention from Heaven, she had thought, could enable her to become the
good self she knows she should be, yet no matter her efforts to become this
good self, she fails. She wants to be set free from the fear of failure, in
view of how they disappoint others and cause her to be labeled as unacceptable
in the eyes of others. She also hoped and prayed for Divine help to dispel her
fears at the possibility of accidentally hurting herself and others, especially
those she cares about by her mistakes, specifically considering her
ever-present liability to gone-wrongness.
She had not just longed
for Divine deliverance from inner gone-wrongness but supernatural “miraculous”
intervention from worldly circumstances. Chief among these longings of
miraculous deliverance would be from what she sees as the gone-wrongness, and
not the “norm”, of grief, pain, disease, sickness, decay, and death, in
particular. Such longings especially became vivid for her when she locked
herself in a room, ran away into a forest, or found another form of isolation
where she could cry in private or drown out her pain. Here she dared to hope in
the possibility of being supernaturally rescued by the arms of Divine Love from
the cruelty, rejection, mockery, hatred, and vileness of those around her. She
desperately hoped to be rescued from the abuse, pain, and suffering inflicted
upon her by a gone-wrong world with people who intentionally cause pain in the
lives of others. Also in her soul would ring out the prayerful cry to Heaven for
help in view of the possible and actual death of loved ones, especially those
who die too young and those who she felt truly loved, accepted, and believed in
her. In conclusion, this woman has since
then come to “out-grow her” childish dreams and hopes, such as when her naïve
ignorance became ‘enlightened’ by these stories of reality that seem to explain
away the effectiveness of prayers to Heaven. They have informed her of the
inevitability of extinction, of not just human life, but the childhood dreams of
humanity to be ultimately swallowed by a formless void, along with eventually
our shared planet and the solar system we inhabit.
As her hope of rescue
and life in a better world, gives way to despair, anxiety grips her soul
threatening to wrest all hopeful optimism away from her. In a last feat
involving her desperately trying to break free of this grip by throwing off the
burden of this inescapable fate of doom, she tries to cling to a belief in an
alternative possibility. This last flickering of the candle that once burned
brightly within her now gasps for fuel, and this drives her to frantically
travel miles and miles along the shoreline hoping to find a sign of hope.
Nevertheless, she only discovers the dismal truth that the chaotic ocean of
ultimate extinction closes in all around the Land of Darkness, we call this
present world. It does so like ominous clouds of meaninglessness coming to
permanently block the sun’s rays of purposeful significance and an eternally
brighter future. She now succumbs to the doubt that all the good things that
dreams and wishes are made of, which are longed for but merely glimpsed in this
life, will permanently come to an end. Her gradual surrender
to accepting this inescapable fate drowns her hopes by the darkness of despair,
as it dissolves her dreams of eternal life, everlasting love, and eternal
happiness in an undying world. For her, there are no more opportunities to
fulfill her dreams, and in her mind all such imagined opportunities have now
become proven to be mere naïve illusions. Consequently, she comes to believe
that the sudden fateful end of this world, as well as the entire solar system
and the universe itself. Such optimistic dreams stretching out towards a life
in a paradise now descends into ignorant disillusionment and the meaningless
nothingness that appears to ultimately await all that exists in this universe.
Illustration of Different ways of
Copying with this Fate of Mortal Transience
For those who somewhat
share this despairing belief, consider some of them, who unlike her still do
not give up hope of coming across a hypothetical means of traversing these
chaotic torrents of crashing waves. They realize that the inhabitability of
this dying planet for those living creatures occupying it, however, only
persists by the radiation of a dying star within a dying solar system. So,
until we can flourish elsewhere we live with no certainty that our planet will
still be inhabitable in the near future no matter the efforts of humanity to
curtail it Nonetheless, imagine each of them slowly but surely becoming
convinced that even if such a path were found, e.g. a spaceship that could
travel to other solar-systems, neither eternal life nor an eternal safe haven,
as the context for this eternal life to unfold, can possibly be discovered. All
life in the entire universe, not just our planet and solar system, has an
inevitable expiration date. Leaving these shores in search of an eternal
undying abode would, therefore, appear to these individuals as nothing but
share vanity and disillusioned optimism.
Just like the girl
discussed previously as the years pass by with more vivid fleetingness, one’s
mortal life becomes represented more clearly by the diminishing layers of sand
at the top of the hour glass of their transient mortality. In their
consciousness each subsequent layer disappears faster than the one before. As
they disappear into the bottom of the hour glass, which they believe represents
a void of meaningless nothingness, like a black hole for the soul, those growing
older become aware of how their lives confined to inland pursuits of meaning
and belonging take on the brevity of transience. At times this brevity of life
becomes perceptible to them with tragic realizations of the inescapable nagging
fact that nothing inland has truly brought them into a state of home-dwelling
rest, like a person during a mid-life crisis. The more one lives, the more
clear it becomes to them how impossible it is to quench the inner yearnings of
the otherworldly hopes and utopian dreams of their childhood. These dreams were
fueled by feelings of homesickness and restlessness for something that in
reaching adulthood they no longer believe in.
If this lack of faith
truly corresponded with the situation of humanity on this dying planet, then we
would be right to say to others: “Deliverance is far from us and salvation does
not reach us. We wait for light, but see only darkness; we wait for a bright
light, but live in deep darkness” (Isa 59:9). Imagine that no traversable way
of escape from mortality, transience, and ultimate meaninglessness existed for
us human beings. Imagine that no eternal destination existed that we could sail
towards where our childhood dreams could truly blossom freely without the
growing pangs of apparent disillusionment in the face of “reality”. In such a
world of human existence, the sense of homelessness for eternity discussed
previously would forever linger within the innermost depths of every individual
of the human race. Each of us who truly came to grips with the actual human
situation would have to live without any hope of sojourning to an eternal home,
where eternal life, everlasting love, immortal bliss, and unending peace is
reality and not myth.
Such a place that we
castaways have never known with our waking eyes would be simply that, nothing
more than a myth of fiction taught to children in the early years of their
naive ecstasy from reality. The “castle in the clouds” – a place free of the gone-wrongness of
painful suffering, tears of grief, murderous hate, narcissistic bitterness,
despairing hopelessness, selfish pride, anxious fear, emptiness of meaning,
self-loathing depression, self-mortifying guilt, purposeless living, cruel
rejection, sting of failure, demeaning mockery, withdrawn reciprocal love, cold
withheld affection, and the cruel thievery of death – would be nothing but a fictional story.
We would know some of
this fictional utopian homeland by traces of our imagination that lie within
our subconscious from the times when these stories entered into our dreams.
Whenever our longings would turn towards this unknown world of restful bliss,
we would become forever lost to our thoughts with a type of resistant denial of
reality. In the end, however, such inspiring thoughts that comprise these childish
dreams of a truly perfect world that is our true home would betray us. Over
time these dreams would turn into nightmares painfully reminding us of what is
permanently denied to us mortals. The once encouraging idea of finally going
home would become misconfigured into a dreadful idea of never going home. This
dread would nag at the back of our mind unsettling us inwardly. It would
continually disparage us with the inevitability that there is no going home to
the place we feel that we truly belong. So, when the bitter sorrows of
shattered hopes become the norm of life, our innate childish longings for an
idealized Home of innocence would become consciously or unconsciously
suppressed.
Over time the inner
longing kindled by “wishing up a star” would become an ever fading reality now
looked upon with a bittersweet longing for a long lost bliss of childish
ignorance. Eventually, one grows up to accept the bitterness of reality that
falls far short of the dreams of childhood or the idealized fictions of adulthood
playing out in books and on screens. Consequently, the dream-like traces of
this other-worldly homeland digresses into mere formless and imaginative
feelings of a forgotten time. These should either be locked away or at least
only brought out for temporary enjoyment of self-escaping vicarious
consciousness, like when watching or reading one of these works of fiction that
stir within us a longing for what reality cannot offer us. This is because one
should not become lost in them and simultaneously lose their grip on reality,
like a person who turns their back on the real-world for a fiction-world.
For those believing
that every human being exists as an inescapable mortal dweller in transience,
the homeless feelings of childhood would eventually become like a memory that
still invokes a euphoric emotion within us. Nevertheless, this emotion no
longer conjures up anything before our mind’s eye but fictionalized
otherworldly experiences. The recurring trace of homelessness in “reality”
momentarily passing through our consciousness would leave behind a deep
indescribable pain in our heart. The longing for that which is absent triggers this inner turmoil, as
one must come to terms with the fact that a person’s existence is like a
temporary reflection upon the ocean of chaos that fades like a morning mist.
Overtime the presence of that which
appears absent that causes this turmoil
becomes entirely suppressed as a fiction that cannot truly become re-presented
as it is a non-existent possibility yesterday, today, or tomorrow.
Humanity’s true home,
as a child or a work of fiction imagines it to be, would be nothing but a
phantasm generated by the fables and myths conjured up by childish dreams or by
“escapist” imaginings of authors of something better beyond the horizons of
reality. In truth, such a place of eternal rest, belonging, purpose,
acceptance, love, and joy where pain, lovelessness, sickness, grief, despair,
or death never enters must be understood as a mirage of an oasis of eternity,
which contains a “fountain of youth” lying in the desert of temporality, and
nothing more. Given such beliefs, the re-occurring restless states of human
consciousness would simply be the human condition, just like our proneness to
catching a cold that we should accept along with our mortal fate. We should all
just get over it and move on with life in the moment. Some even simply put it
in a jesting light-hearted way, “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die”
(1 Cor 15:32). Even when accepting the inescapable state of the human mortal
condition, disheartening and depressing heaviness of such restlessness would
increase if a person walks closer to the incoming crashing tides that remind
them of their fate. They realize ever more clearly that no matter how hard they
try, they cannot deny that they still long for so much more than this world
offers to them. Somehow they cannot fully convince themselves that they are
truly at home in this dying world, even though their fate appears bound to it.
Now it is true,
however, that some will seem to have become so convinced of these beliefs of
mortal transience and our proneness to unrest to the point that they become
entranced by the ‘rhythm’ of chaos. Some of these people could possibly embrace
the apparent cycle of life (of birth, growth, and death) to the point that they
believe in it as the Infinite. Some people like this could even become
convinced that death is the door to the rebirth of endless reincarnations and
worship it as their savior. For instance, they might come to delight in death,
as either a deity to serve or a reality to master. This path can lead them to
the point of falling victim to an obsession with self-annihilation or suicidal
disillusionment. Some among this group become so transfixed by the chaos of
decay and death that it warps their minds and senses to the point of seeing the
volitional act of embracing this fate as the only pathway that to true freedom.
People with such beliefs put their hope in death alone. On the other hand,
those obsessed with death but who still see death as the enemy could come to
believe that the only way to ‘overcome’ the taunting disparaging power of this
abyss of chaos is to conquer one’s fear of death by choosing death. They
“freely” choose it by a belief that they have come to master its fearful
control over them by willfully choosing suicide with eager anticipation and
prideful gusto.
For most of us,
however, every time we would make our way out to the shores of the Land of
Darkness, it would become another dismal reminder of our unavoidable damnation
as dying creatures inhabiting a world of transience. Death would not be seen as
a friend or an enemy but rather an unwelcome guest. We accept it into the
periphery of our lives by acknowledging it half-consciously, but for the most
part we ignore it lest we become unsettled and distracted from the good things
around us. We would turn our back on coming to terms with our fate, at least
until death comes knocking at our door with something fatal or old age forces
us to linger ever closer to the shoreline. Nonetheless, most people vow never
to return with their fingers subconsciously crossed behind their back. Most
with such an outlook on human life do not want to get their hopes up just to
once again find out that whatever hope they chose to believe in beyond
transient possibilities betrays them again like an unfaithful lover.
So most people rather
live in the moment as if no tomorrow will come to them in which death is
waiting for them. Consequently, they live in “the notion” of immortality even
if they do not really believe in an afterlife. They may even look to
age-defying products or surgeries or other remedies, so that when they look
into the mirror they are less reminded of their mortality and nearness to
death. Although many choose to presume that there is an afterlife, they do so
without coming to terms with how it can possibly be or what it entails. This is
done so that death does not steal their transient happiness with its
unpleasantness or its demands. They prefer a shallow rooted belief in an
afterlife that does not govern how they live. If one truly believes the life to
come is eternal, one would think that it behooves a person to spend more time
preparing for the next life instead of accumulating and worrying about the
things in this temporary life, which is like a chaff in the wind compared to
the life to come. Nevertheless, when death bothers them, such as at a funeral,
they just pull out the “afterlife card”.
Ponder again on the
woman standing on the shoreline with her eyes gazing across the ocean of
despair. If she stayed in this position of inwardly submersing herself into the
abyss of nothingness, would she not surely come to the point of losing the will
to live? She would feel that whatever seemingly filled it once has long passed
beyond the reach of human beings and will not return as a possible habitation
available for her or anyone else to choose as their true home. Hence, any
homeward-bound hope within her would be absolutely set against reality and
would eventually disintegrate like a sand castle after being smashed by the
waves.
Her repeated comings
and goings from the shore and back would become like the routine of a fiancé
whose beloved sailed away to war many years ago, but whose ship will never
return out upon the horizon to meet her sight. Although, she seems to keep
returning to the shoreline as the same person, each time something becomes lost
inside of her that will never be recovered. Like this woman who has become like
a living sacrifice to Eros, each time
the woman we have imagined returns to the borders of temporality to stare into
the abyss of her bitter mortality, she would lose another part of herself. Even
the most optimistic of us could not steadfastly hold onto hope with the waves
of crushing disappointment crashing against us to unsettle and dislodge a hope
within our soul. With an agonizing sigh that offers no relief, like her most
people would time after time turn their back on such faith in an eternity that
cannot be seen or touched. Instead, they chose to only believe in what lies
inland, as they strive to elusively embrace homelessness as if it were a
phantasm of being home.
In treading back to
inland cities, some of us would clench our fists and try to grasp tightly the
“hope” that one day we would find a way out. Others, conversely, would choose
to embrace a self-deception. This deception seeks to repress their inner
feeling of homelessness in this abode of transience with worldly ambitions
constrained to the limits of this dying world. They subconsciously believe that
one day this self-deception will become complete by a conscious willfulness
towards contentment that becomes a self-fulfilled prophecy. Such a result comes
as the traces of the part of the self that feels homeless becomes made numb and
pushed down into the depths of a person’s unconsciousness. Nonetheless, deep
inside all of our hearts, this homelessness would well up at times like the
moments between waking and sleeping, when another hope for a better future
becomes shattered, when we stand by the death bed, casket, or grave of a loved
one. At such times our subconscious would cry out for a homeland we have never
actually known with our waking eyes, especially a place we can possibly be
re-united with loved ones who have died.
We have only glimpsed
such an other-worldly homeland by the elusive trace-like remainders from
dreams, mirages, and moments of ecstasy that always slip through our fingers.
Remember, for instance, when we despairingly awoke from such a dream and longed
to go back to sleep, so that just maybe we could re-enter into a dream world
where we truly and completely felt at home. Nevertheless, as such attempts
prove futile, and we have to accept the reality that stares us in the face from
the vantage point of our bed. We realize how truly tragic is the stage upon
which human existence plays out. This holds especially true in view of the tantalizing
fictions our dreams subject us to. Upon such a tragic stage as this can be
found adult actors and actresses dangling between the borders of temporality
and eternity, foreigners of both realms. We could rightly considered to be
creatures cut off, on the one extreme, from the pitiful yet blissful rest of an
animal lacking self-consciousness or an ill-informed child, seeing as both
unaware of their transience. And on the other extreme, we are cut off from the
blessed blissful rest of an angel caught up in an eternal chorus. Hence, each
individual would find themselves somewhere in between throughout their lives.
What this Fate of Mortal Transience
means from a Christian Perspective
Now let us consider
such a hopeless faith from the vantage point of the Christian faith. From this
point of view, we would metaphorically recognize this situation with the woman
as a human race permanently bared off from accessing the blessed realm of the Holy
of Holies. This realm lies within the depths of the heavenly sanctuary of our
Creator within the created world, as the intended place of eternally blessed
residence reserved for the children of God. The Infinite-finite communion of
the God-relationship would absolutely remain off-limits for us castaways
permanently exiled from the intimate presence of God. Eternal separation from
the temple of God, our true immortal home, would be our inescapable fate. Our
unholy state that permanently restricts us from having partnership with the
Holy Spirit would inevitably mean that a possibility of returning to communion
with God would not be available to us in our fallen human situation. In
consequence, we could neither undergo spiritual sanctification that outfits us
with the immortal god-likeness necessary to inhabit eternity. Both of these
existential actualities that absolutely depend on the realization of the
God-relationship would be forever denied to us, because of our inescapable
“gone-wrongness” and our bondage to unholiness that alienates us from our
originally assigned destiny.
Hopeless would our
mortal situation be in this dying world without direct personal access to the
Creator’s sanctifying indwelling presence. Apart from it we cannot eternity by
being recreated into His glorious immortal image. Departing from the shores of
temporality as eternity-bound seafarers would not be a choice any of us fallen
creatures, who have distained the eternal destiny freely offered to us, could
ever make. The freedom to choose between a transient existence authored by our
own vying for self-governance and the eternal vitality authored by the
Creator’s plan for the never-ending story of His creation would not be ours to
make, after our first fateful choice we have all made. Like our first parents,
we have all stubbornly, persistently, and unrepentantly not been willing to, by
His liberating grace, let go of living as a former as a prodigal child of God.
In this scenario, none of us would have a “second chance”. Like the animals, we
would not have the freedom to reconsider the ultimate outcome of our lives, for
the end of meaninglessness would be the unavoidable fate of all our willfully
embraced transient narratives in this dying world. Without such a life-path
available to us that attains eternal persistence, never would Heaven’s door of
eternal rest be open to a single-individual from among the rebellious human
race. Therefore, our end would be like our beginning, out of nothing have we
come and back to nothing will we return. Alternatively put, according to the
secular narrative of world-history, out of disordered matter have we come and
back into unformed matter will we go.
[1]
Consider also the following passage: I saw something else on earth … The fate
of humans and the fate of animals are the same: “As one dies, so dies the
other; both have the same breath. There is no advantage for humans over
animals, for both are fleeting. Both go to the same place, both come from the
dust, and to dust both return. Who really knows if the human spirit ascends
upward, and the animal’s spirit descends into the earth? … Who can show them
what the future holds”
(Eccl 3:16-22; See also Eccl 9:1-10)?
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