Blaise Pascal, in one of his excellent Pensées (194 on The Project Gutenberg) writes that there are two kinds of people; those who care about their role in the cosmos and what eternity has in store for them and those who do not. The 17th-century philosopher and mathematician concludes this not just from revelation but entirely from reason and self-interest. If it is even possible that there is something awaiting us after death, shouldn’t any self-interested person make it their top priority to figure out what could possibly be awaiting us? Instead many slough off perennial questions and still divert content themselves with worrying about the most petty and fleeting things. Pascal writes:
Thus the fact that there exist men who are indifferent to the loss of their being and the peril of an eternity of wretchedness is against nature. With everything else they are quite different. ; they fear the most trifling things, foresee and feel them; and the same man who spends so many days and nights in fury and despair losing some office or at some imaginary affront to his honour is the very one who knows that he is going to lose everything through death but feels neither anxiety nor emotion. It is a monstrous thing to see one and the same heart at once so sensitive to minor things and so strangely insensitive to the greatest. It is an incomprehensible spell, a supernatural torpor that points to an omnipotent power as its cause.
Even when I wasn’t Christian, I was concerned with “what it all means.” I don’t know if this is a result of my temperament or that I was encouraged to investigate things by my parents but I have always, even when I claimed agnosticism, thought it was worthy trying to figure out my role in the cosmos. As I went on in my life I met more and more people who simply did not think it worth investigating.
Like Pascal, I’m baffled by this position. Even when I didn’t believe in Hell (which for Pascal is a great motivation of why you should care about eternity) I thought deep down that what I did with my life had to somehow fit or correspond to something greater than myself. To just shirk that off and content myself with the things around me horrified. If there is no bigger picture or no commensurability between humans and it, how can the smaller picture matter? I’ve met people who seem to think simply that if they care about something strongly, that is sufficient. But they never ask SHOULD they care about it. And in light of the fact that we’re all going to die, why care?
That we are going to die is sometimes thrown around as a reason why we should stop worrying about “cosmic” stuff and just “embrace the moment.” This just leaves me entirely cold to the point of thinking this is what divides Christians from those who aren’t. Either you care about how you fit into the big picture and that that is what gives meaning to the little things in life, or you reject the big picture entirely and chase after the little things inordinately.
How do we incite the longing for meaning in those who see no point in it? Without this longing, without recognizing the “forever empty” of Louis C.K. or that we are “restless until we rest in You” as St. Augustine says, how can we begin to evangelize our culture?
Comment by mcorps on December 15, 2014 at 11:04 am
We are told that the Methodist concept of Grace means that everyone is equal in terms of afterlife, that Mother Theresa and Hitler are on the same footing. This is difficult for me to get my arms around.
Comment by Orter T. on December 16, 2014 at 1:05 pm
mcorps; you have been told wrong; that is a modern aberration of what Wesley taught. Unless, of course, Hitler asked for forgiveness and professed a faith in Christ before he died; which we have no way of knowing. One of the characteristics of early Methodists was that they never gave up on anybody; they were the only ones that would get in the death cart of a condemned prisoner on his way to execution and try to persuade him to believe in the forgiveness Christ offered.
This post brings to mind a quote from C.S. Lewis: “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were those who thought most of the next. The apostle’s themselves, who set out on foot to convert the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English evangelical who abolished the slave trade, all left their mark on earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become ineffective in this one. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth “Thrown in.” Aim at earth and you will get neither.”
John Wesley is proof positive of that statement. He aimed his own life at heaven, enabled others to do the same and the church, England and America were thrown.
Based on my experience with the United Methodist Church, the problem lies in that the Greatest Story Ever Told has become the story barely or even rarely told. I had to distance myself from all things church to learn of the existence of a God worth loving and trusting: the triune God of holy love who is most definitely way more verb than noun; an unfathomable God of mystery who is determined to love all of us, even me, more than I could ever think about loving myself.