Me thinks, Blaise Pascal captured the spirit of our present age prophetically and profoundly, hundreds of years ago, when he wrote these words: "Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things."
It was on this past week’s fabulous vacation where I experienced “not thinking about such things.” What a joy to explore, the reality of changes occurring over the past fifty years since my boyhood’s, “Western stomping grounds.” Of mountainous landscapes, large and tiny communities, flows of creeks and rivers, bettle kills, and travel routes. With utter amazement, I experienced facinating changes in distant relatives, life-time friends, and acquaintances. It was in the visiting, and sharing life’s twists and turns that inevitably we came face to face, time and time again with the reality of suffering and the specter of death. We just could not leave those events from our stories. Yet, I noticed how quickly the conversations of such subjects, albeit unconscious, changed, by what I define as distractions. Sometimes it was scenery, wildlife, a picture album, a pet, television program, political conversation, physical ailments, recipes and a marinade of other things. Now, I confess, I am guilty of using the distractions technique as well. At times, I have used the technique through juggling of priorities, the relentless busyness of my age, study or just noise. My life is so full that I rarely give myself space or time to reflect. Maybe recognition of the distraction in others, this past week, is the reason I have become more aware and realize how I fill my life with mindless consumption that numbs me to the eventuality of my mortal condition and my finitude.
The advertising industry is not unaware of American’s propensity to consumptive distraction. I read that marketers spent over 295 billion dollars in total media advertising in 2007. I can’t imagine how much in 2012! I’m sure it would boggle the mind. Do you think that perhaps it might be that we mistakenly assume that our vitality is inextricably bound up in our ability to consume?
My experience as a professional chaplain makes it seems easy to understand how fear of death and suffering would compel people to live lives of distraction. Yet, the cost of that distraction is a pervasive and deadening apathy—apathy not simply as the inability to care about anything deeply, but the diminishment for engagement that comes from caring about the wrong things. Kathleen Norris laments in Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life: "It is indeed apathy's world when we have so many choices that we grow indifferent to them even as we hunger for still more novelty. We discard real relationships in favor of virtual ones and scarcely notice that being overly concerned with the thread count of cotton sheets and the exotic ingredients of gourmet meals can render us less able to care about those who scrounge for food and have no bed but the streets."
I become sad when thinking that my inability to recognize my own mortality and to live my life in light of the fact that I will die leads to the diminishment of my ability to genuinely care for others—because my care, by its very nature, will demand my willingness to suffer, and to lose my life for someone else. The more I love, the more I open myself up to vulnerability and the possibility of pain. And yet, if I choose against loving engagement, I am left with a diminished and distracted life.
The ancient Hebrew poets, while meditating on the brevity of life, prayed, "So teach us to number our days that we may present to you a heart of wisdom" (Psalm 90:12). It was the inevitability of death that motivated this prayer for wisdom for living. This was a wisdom that didn't try to hide from the realities of life—be they joys or sorrows—but rather sought to keep finitude ever before it. Indeed the poem ends with a cry for God to "confirm the work of our hands." Numbering life's days led to meaningful engagement in work—and this was the mark of wisdom.
Jesus, himself, faced his own death with intention and purpose as he walked the way of the cross, not only up the hill to Golgotha, but also as he offered his life in loving service to those around him. "I am the Good Shepherd...and I lay down my life for the sheep....No one has taken it away from me, but I lay it down on my own initiative" (John 10:14a-18). The way of wisdom demonstrated by the life of Jesus calls me to engage my mortality as a catalyst for purposeful living. While following Jesus insists on my laying down my life in his service, it can be done in the hope that abundant life is truly possible even in the darkest of places. For the one who laid his life down is the one who was raised. He is the one who declared, "I am the resurrection and the life; the one who believes in me will live even though he dies."
Sadly, being mindful of my own death sometimes leads to distraction, yet, if I choose, it can lead me to wise engagement.
