I think most of us have an ongoing vulnerability to people who will tell us that life is more simple than it really is. We like it. It feels good. Consider this popular therapy:
- If you just buy this product and wear it prominently when you hit the town, the girls will line up.
- If you just think about yourself more positively, life will straighten itself out.
- If you just trust Jesus, everything will go well.
- All desire is bad, but stop wanting anything and life is beautiful.
In every act there is a component—call it inclination—that determines whether real work, real good, has been accomplished or whether the exertion was utterly wasted. This means, in a very significant sense, that life is not simple but complex.
There is this dimension of thought-act that can make everything I do futile and invalid. I can make money hand over fist and be living, spiritually, a contradiction. I can win every game I enter and be engaged in self-annihilation. I can volunteer my time and sell my soul.
By the same token, there’s a dimension that can transform the most putrid duty into a glorious engagement with reality, a poetic affirmation of my identity as God’s man. I can pick up trash from the gutter and revel in my creaturehood. I can lie sick in bed, apprehend my disease, and still understand that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. I can even die happily.
The ultimate act of self-destruction, for the materialist, may be the greatest act of worship for the Christian. That’s why Christ is either a pitiful laughingstock or a thing of awful beauty. There is a hidden dimension in life, underlying every weekday, turning every act to gold or ashes.
It is because of this spiritual reality that I can say with Paul, “For me to live is Christ (even in prison or when beat up by Jews on jihad), and to die (even painfully) is gain.”
Once this realization dawns, in its distilling brilliance, the shadows of complexity fade into the background and simplicity takes center stage again. As Kierkegaard said, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” Worship—praying, talking with, and pursuing God—brings a clarity, a center, a refreshing focus.
Life is complex, but worship can trace the unifying strands that weave throughout the bittersweet.
3 comments:
"Life... don't talk to me about life."
Thus saith Marvin the Paranoid Android of H2G2.
I love the simple complexity of your title. In life, there is the process of cause and effect, for every action, there is a reaction, and so on. I am resigned to believe that life brings a certain amount of love and pain, but I don't think it brings any more pain than love. When doing everything in the name of God, I am satisfied that everything God provides is beautiful and that's an irony that includes heartache, sadness, etc. Is life really complex or is that the propaganda from our mental faculties at rest? Sometimes our minds need rest to recharge and inspire again. I know you have been under the weather. Hope you feel better. :)
I like an ordered life and so I see an ordered existence. I may not be able to grasp all the fundamentals of what is going on in the world, but I am confident that God is running a tight ship. But someone who embraces the chaos inherent in life would look at the world differently. They would see beauty in the randomness of life, acts of kindness as poetry, and joy in pain. I think Christ is both of these world views at once. His death is both culmination to the ordered existence of the world and poetic love for mankind. And that is a hard thing to comprehend for most of us.
P.S. Thanks for all the great blogs. I come here to bring my mental and emotional thinking up to a professional level. I always leave your blog feeling like I've been thinking my "A" game. From Keirkegaard to Christ - The Bittersweet Formula to Existence.
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