It is easy, maybe even inevitable, for us to look out at the world and to be confronted by our insignificance. There are a few people living, and we could probably name most of them without much effort, who could with the stroke of a pen or the gesture of their hand bring instant resolution to some of the deepest conflicts and problems facing humanity.
Last year, one of the world’s richest men said that if the UN World Food Program could tell him how six billion dollars could end world hunger, he’d write the cheque. They offered a proposal; he was unsatisfied. If he was ever serious at all, then the proposal was just not quite good enough, and it wasn’t worth giving up what today would be just over half a percent of his wealth to reduce the suffering of millions and millions of humans.
None of us could write that cheque, but I’d like to think that we would.
Instead, we mostly watch as world events unfold. We watch a few things get better and too many things get worse, and in the binding and loosing of humanity, we feel lost.
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As a planet, a species, a people, we more or less live in a world of our own choosing, but at the level of the individual, the human person, and the soul, it feels rather more like we are surfing the most incredible waves on the most inadequate platform.
For some, the antidote to the seasickness of the living is to retreat into something like nihilism, and to see our own efforts and lives as truly meaningless, to just content ourselves to watch the waves. There is a kind of aimless awe in watching just how much destruction the surf can do to the next person over, and maybe indifference or even relief as it comes down upon us in turn.
A lot of humanity has been abandoned to that kind of nothingness, and to the cheap thrills of watching life fall apart or enjoying the illusory power of the cruelty of rooting for the waves. Humans love to root at a distance for the winning team, and thereby to imagine themselves important.
You can live a long and rich life in a world devoid of intimacy or hope.
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The life we live shows something of who we are, whether in adversity or in abundance. If we steal away our best moments for ourselves and retreat into privacy when we feel like we have enough, then that is a part of who we are. If the slightest tinge of need draws us out to take from others, then so is that.
If we face adversity and suffering and are routinely pummelled by all the destruction the waves can offer, only to tentatively try to reach out, even for a moment, in hopes of connection, or to offer of our meagre scraps to those around us, then that is who we are.
In some sort of way that remains a mystery to us, life reveals who we are, and who we are has some kind of importance. You can think of that in the twee image of St. Peter greeting you at the pearly gates, or you can reserve yourself to asking what your impact on the world will have been and how you will be remembered, but the life we live and who we are seem to amount to something. If nothing else, they are the final word on our worldly existence, which so often comes to an end with little fanfare and great discomfort, but has nonetheless been lived by us.
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I don’t think there’s some scorebook, or some litany of faults and flaws awaiting us. I know my own well enough in life, and I suspect that most of us do, even if we sometimes use denial to bypass confrontation with what is real and to get on with the business of living.
Life seems to me to be something more like art, something crafted, something made using old tools and old ways to express new ideas and do new things. We have this canvas which is not entirely blank, but all these choices we can make about what happens to it next, and how that shapes the final picture. It is a chaotic and uncertain process, but it invites us in — to play, if not to master.
The result will be the result. This is not a matter of indifference, as though the artwork has already been made. Neither is it final, as though death truly closes the chapter on our souls and the unfolding of all the seeds we have sown, the marks we have made. Still, at some point, it becomes the life we have lived.
So it is that the world is simply the world we have made, at times in ignorance, and in others, greed, with the dissonances of cruelty and dashed hopes, but real moments of something lovely made by human hands with great care and respect for the medium.
This art, this life, this world has some eternal imprint. Our souls are displayed in some cosy gallery in the Kingdom of God, to be appreciated by the One who makes the canvas and who offers us the gift of a space to work, to make, and to play.
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May you know that the one who made you watches with delight your strivings and your kindness. May you find the smallest piece of beauty that you can hold and hone and share. May you know that your life is significant on a stage far greater than that of the world, and that what you love is loved forever, and that that might be good enough. May life be to you a gift, and love be your greatest and most eager mode of play.