Thinking while shaving – what, if any, metaphysical significance is there in pouring water, wetting the shaving brush and lathering my face. Are these simply inconsequential events as meaningful, or meaningless, as the falling of a leaf, or the meanderings of an ant? Or do they have a resonance? And what about human actions? Is there any difference between a tree falling on a house and killing three children, a pilot mechanically pressing a button which drops a bomb from 30,000 feet on a house killing three children of whom he is not aware, and a man with a gun and malevolence in his heart who kills three children? How do the lives and deaths of these children resonate throughout the cosmos? Does the manner of their deaths have a significance and if so what and why? Are their deaths meaningful only for those directly affected by them or are there other factors of which we are not aware?
The big questions keep intruding. The news, the situation in Iraq, floods, kidnappings, murders, abuse, poverty, decrepit old age, my own impending mortality – either human life is an absurd and very sick, very unfair joke, or there is some meaning. But I cannot see any meaning, or imagine what such meaning might be. I cannot see what could justify some of the appalling and meaningless suffering we see and hear about. Nor looking back on my own life, or looking at the lives of others can I see what lasting value they have.
And perhaps that is the clue. In the visible and material sense there is no lasting value. Only the exceptional few have left their mark on history and continue to influence the minds of people today. Are these the only lives to have value? What about the billions of others, with their hopes, fears and aspirations, their strivings and loving – do they count for nothing? On the evidence available the answer must be yes. They are gone, gone, utterly gone, as though they had never existed. If the life of ordinary people has worth it is not measured by monuments or books, it is not something tangible, not something that can be demonstrated.
We all have moments of supreme significance when life is filled with meaning; when we touch and are touched by the lives of others – sometimes just a few others, sometimes thousands – but in the long perspective these moments are as ephemeral as wisps of mist, concealing rather than revealing reality. And it is in these misty shadows that we are comfortable and would, if we could, remain. But that is not possible. Eventually we all face the reality of mortality, an irrevocable closure that calls into question all that we have lived for. What is the point of anything if it is only temporary?
Love rejects this cold logic. Although the prospect of looming death and suffering sadden and depress, our love for others (and ourselves), our love for the astoundingly beautiful world we live in, our love for God, whose translucent presence we have felt from time to time, this love cannot accept that life itself, any life, all life, is meaningless and has no value. Or that the closure of any one life is the end of life, or meaning. To love is a blind acceptance, a stubborn in-the-face-of-contrary-evidence acceptance. It is an acceptance based on hope and faith, and on the imperative to love itself, that our lives, all lives, life itself, transcends the here and now.