Space Invaded

Life seems so meaningless at times. We have created ways to make our lives more secure, through technology, education, the internet, you name it, and yet nothing quite works to alleviate the gnawing sense of instability. We can achieve a measure of security, but can we really have true stability without meaning. Perhaps I'm just projecting, but looking around at others my age (29) and younger, I'm left with the impression that meaning is no longer an operative concept; it's proven to be too elusive to grasp and fashion life around.

So we shove such destructive doubts away just so we can function. Secretely, of course, we're just waiting for the other shoe to drop. But we don't want to admit that openly, because there's a pact that we have with other similarly insecure individuals that forbids such honest exchange. In reality, though, the emperor has no clothes: our socially constructed meaning expressed in terms of progress, wealth, home-ownership, city-league softball, PTA meetings--you know, the building blocks of the all American way off life--is not meaning at all, but rather a coping strategy to keep us otherwise so occupied that we don't have time to think about discomforting issues of this type. We build a wall to keep reality out.

It's amazing, though, how reality sometimes invades our space. God is intimately aware of our subterfuge, our attempts to disconnect ourselves from life that is infused with his meaning-giving presence. Sometimes he uses hardships, such as the miscarriage that my wife and I endured and struggle even now to process, events that themselves seem so meaningless that we can't believe God could orchestrate them. Such doses of reality leave us wishing for a little more illusion. How could this be worse than following someone who crushes us inexplicably? The answer to that question is not always clear, but in the asking we are forced to grapple with him who cannot be confined by our contrived standards of happiness.

This is where the quote above is relevant. When the Green Knight appears on the scene, Sir Arthur and his entourage of like-minded chivalrous and heroic knights are gathered for a banquet that is to feature the usual--food, games, and entertainment. His presence and challenge, however, radically alter the life of Gawain, who has to come to terms with the Knight's imposing persona and his own weaknesses. Ultimately, though, it is the Green Knight's actions, which determine the denouement of the action.

Kenneth Bailey, in a book I'm currently reading, points out how Jesus' parable of the Prodigal son highlights a father who is on the surface a typical Middle Eastern patriarch; yet the father's actions radically depart from the expected pattern of behavior in that, or any, culture. Up until the actual physical reunion of the father and son, the son intended to manipulate his father so that he could avoid the public humiliation that would otherwise be the effect of his having squandered his inheritance in Gentile environs; he still saw the problem as one of money and shame. The father's proactive act of reconciliation disolved this notion. As Ibn al-Salibi, an early Arabic commentator puts it, "Why did he not say to the father, 'Fashion out of me one of your paid craftsmen,' when he had planned to say it? The answer is that his father's love outstripped him and forgiveness was everflowing towards him."

Reality invades our space. Meaning is in this reality that comes from outside us, and the beautiful thing is that when we embrace it, with all it's complexity and inability to be contained, life here and now is actually worth living. I don't know what this looks like in full, and I doubt anyone does, but that shouldn't stop us from exploring it further.