Musings: Notes From My Daybook

Where you begin depends on who you are talking to. Some people come already engaged with the reality of God and simply are asking questions about the whys and wherefores. Others are drawn to the truth of Christian witness through their experience and relationship with Christian peoples. Yet there are others--people who are not so sure that God is for real or that faith is worth risking or that even religion has ultimate bearing on life.

It is to those persons that I speak to today.

The Princeton ethicist Max Stackhouse once said about the human condition: "the classical Christian view offers a truth that is more conisistent and accurate to the human condition, one that can and should be persuasive to all people, and to which all people ought to submit equally. To present a normative standared for human behavior is no threat to humanity, nor is it inconsistent with natural or social influences or human freedom. Human beings are both finite--made, as Genesis puts it, from the dust of the ground, and free--made with the capacity to cultivate the earth, name the animals, relate to one another, and respond to God. We are, thus, both rooted in the concrete limitations of physicality, social location, and need, and always able, in some indeterminate degree, to transcend precisely these limitations. The essence of human nature is that we have a complex character. We are in turn material, relational, and spiritual; we are less than angels, but more than beasts; we are products of our societies, but makes of civilizations; we are driven by passions, but we also choose whom to love and how to enact that love; we make real choices, but we know that we ought to choose rightly and well."

Finite and free. This tension between the human's material, physical limitations on one hand and the capacity to dream, to imagine, and to create on the other creates, in reality, a crisis. We can not ever fully reach the dreams we dream. Nor can we ever fully transcend the physical limits of our mortal selves--even though we can envision, though our imagination, a world without limits.

We are caught on the horns of these two realities--finite and free. Our longings give rise to our pursuit of art, music, and our interest in myth. Such things are ways of transcendence; paths that take us where we are otherwise not fully able to go. And yet, when night falls, we still are left with an emptiness, an inability to find satisfaction or completeness. Caught in the tension of our basic make-up we are left hanging.

Obviously, we do a lot of things to cover up our longing. We engage in grand pursuits--careers, entertainments, addictions, and much more offer adequate places to hide the tension.

More later.