existential anxieties

I had a dream of all my failings. Failings and rejections. Failures of place, relationships, motivation, of moving forward. The drudgery of living.

Depression of winter or melancholy of the uphill battle? Therapy seems to be a distraction within the absurdity of living–how things are an how things ought to be. It is said courage and wisdom are virtues for the Christian because it is seeing how the world is and working on making it how it ought to be. Of course, grace is the divine element needed.

Here is a very limited way of understanding life’s progression: a child, discovery and wonder of the world and all things around the child; in your twenties, understanding a little more about yourself and interests, wants and needs, and the confusion of it all; thirties, aiming toward and nearly accomplishing a goal you set out on in career or family; forties, uncertainty, possible discontent, having met some goals but some seem arbitrary or regret of goals rejected or unfulfilled–the “now what?”

In your late thirties and early forties observing youth reminds of the wonder and beauty of the world, maybe the naivety of how the world is–youth, at least children is a reminder of how the world ought to be. Those in their twenties are still learning the way of existence, some melancholy sets in or just recklessness and aiming toward an ideal. Then ideals are shattered. Isn’t that grace though? Seeing the reality of the way things are.

Is the rest of existence a learning to see? See reality. But also the vision of things through the lens of faith, hope, and love (the theological virtues). Didn’t Jesus say to be as shrewd as snakes and gentle as doves? Meaning don’t be taken advantage of, be wise, but show compassion and grace.

Just some musings and ramblings…

the rock and the hill

Sisyphus pushes the rock up the hill

at the top he is conscious of the absurd

the absurdity that life is repetition, suffering,

a monotony

but realizes there is no orchestration that is outside himself

but he creates his own fate

therefore Sisyphus content to create his own meaning

he, happy in the monotony and repetition,

controller and creator of his meaning.

If there is no God or gods, no design

to imagine to be happy in a meaningless repetition is despair,

at least to me. I create my own happiness amidst a world of suffering

all I can do is distract momentarily and fall right into despair once again

or worse, distract from the suffering with endless pleasure, which quickly becomes despair.

The Copenhagen philosopher found a life committed to the aesthetic, a life of despair;

also the ethical …

It was only in the religious life that one finds full meaning and is not in despair, though one suffer.

The one isolated by his own shame, ennui, acedia

stuck, a vision of eudiamonia lost, gazing upon a field of fog,

still has hope when the infinite entered the finite world, suffered with us– giving meaning to suffering,

redeeming wretched trauma.

The story ends after man creates his own fate. But only if we are finite.

If there is a God, this life of purgatory has meaning toward redemption, ever calling us home. The finite desiring the infinite but only finding it in the infinite, not the finite. God, the infinite, although incarnate, suffered with us, knows us, calls us, beckoning us each moment to turn toward God. The journey, the rock, ever pushed, but also constant turning toward or away from the infinite.

Are we to believe Sisyphus to be happy ever pushing the rock up the hill? To create our own fate? Or are we to ever push the rock, yet ever seek to gaze upon a God who created us, gives us the freedom to do God’s will or our own or to match our will to God’s … which is freedom? Freedom is a heavy weight to the atheistic existentialist; solely our responsibility.

Freedom in Christ, less of a burden– “My yoke is easy, my burden light.”