Benevolence

There are a lot of things I could and perhaps should be doing right now. There are those moments though when it is indubitably time to set everything else aside -- and write. Tonight is one of those nights. I'd like to start with a video clip from one of my all-time favorite movies: American Beauty. Unfortunately, embedding of this particular clip has been disabled on YouTube, so please click HERE to view it.

We humans are such curious animals. Our capacity to think and reason, to weigh facts against one another, to tease apart the details and reveal such splendid subtlety, it boggles the mind. To think that this life, this capacity for thought, this consciousness could emerge over billions of years from utter lifelessness seems all but unfathomable, and if science hadn't revealed such a compelling case for it, I'd certainly be inclined to question such a hypothesis. But here we are, and our story, life's story, is ultimately one of patient perseverance, one of process and not of product, one of journey and not of destination. Think of life literally eking along, embodying what must be the grandest experiment in trial and error this universe has ever seen, as the subtlest of changes over time yield sets of either adaptive or maladaptive characteristics, and ultimately result in survival and propagation of a species, or extinction. Our story is one steeped in majesty, wonder, and the most profound commitment to existence, to being.

This sense of grandeur, however, is quickly usurped by the business of living our modern lives, and often times rightfully so. Were one to sit on the couch all day dreaming of billions of years and the universe's ever expanding nature, it's entirely possible that we wouldn't be of much good to anyone, least of all ourselves. There is a present, practical reality that demands our attention if we wish to live. If we want food and shelter, we need money. If we want money, we need a job. If we want a job, we need an education or marketable skill (and these days a good bit of luck). These are just the basic facts of life, and we have little choice in acknowledging them.

However, I think there is a danger in never taking time to step back and really remind ourselves of the bigger, vaster context in which our lives are operating. After all, we are stardust! Literally! "Every atom of carbon inside our bodies was once inside a star. We are all made from the ashes of dead stars." (Polkinghorne, "Quarks, Chaos & Christianity", p. 40.) It doesn't get much more miraculous than that, and I think it's important every now and again to remind ourselves of our history, by which I mean our macro-history, our meta-history, the history of all histories, the history of life itself. And when we do, an amazing story reveals itself, a story of epic determination and fierce will, a story of profound commitment and sacrifice, and yes, a story of benevolence and grace. By whatever means, we have been given a gift that needn't have been given us. The gift of joy, friendship, pain, love, tragedy, touch, laughter, sex, tears, spontaneity, loss, romance, confusion, anger, thought, ecstasy and on and on and on. It is all a gift. It is the opportunity to compose, or at the very least take part in, a story of our own, chock full of drama and plot twists, humor and heartbreak, cliff-hangers and surprise endings. And our stories inevitably intersect and interact with the stories of those around us. The story of life itself is being spun out before our very eyes, a breathtaking amalgam of our individual and collective stories. What a gift to be given. If this is not the embodiment of benevolence, I don't know what is.

The storyteller's claim, I believe, is that life has meaning--that the things that happen to people happen not just by accident like leaves being blown off a tree by the wind but that there is order and purpose deep down behind them or inside them and that they are leading us not just anywhere but somewhere. The power of stories is that they are telling us that life adds up somehow, that life itself is like a story. And this grips us and fascinates us because of the feeling it gives us that if there is meaning in any life--in Hamlet's, in Mary's, in Christ's--then there is meaning also in our lives. And if this is true, it is of enormous significance in itself, and it makes us listen to the storyteller with great intensity because in this way all his stories are about us and because it is always possible that he may give us some clue as to what the meaning of our lives is.

Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat, pp. 58-60.