What is our condition?
Imagine for a moment that I asked you to look into the night sky and determine who was winning.
“The darkness” You’ll say.
why?
“Because there is more empty space than stars. In fact, the empty space overwhelms matter by infinite orders of magnitude. Even within every atom of every star, there is empty space. More nothing than something.” you’ll say.
But there used to be no light. No stars. Only darkness. As many orders of magnitude more there is of darkness, there are infinitely more magnitudes of light than there used to be. And that light has to permeate throughout billions of light years of space just to reach our eyes. The whole of space is saturated with light for us. Does that seem like losing to you?
You are born into a terrible world. Tragedy, betrayal, pain, loss and injustice lurk in every corner of every life. Even the most privileged of us will fail to escape the indomitable pressure of the suffering of life; And if you encounter no suffering until your twilight, which you certainly will, everyone you know and love will die. Just like the sky and her emptiness, darkness consumes all. Surely suffering wins. Surely we are shackled like slaves to the hurt. Surely we are children of the darkness. Born from it, sentenced to live in it, damned to be consumed by it. Forced to watch it eat our brothers and sisters. We are foot soldiers on a nuclear battlefield, under assault on every front, overwhelmed by an impossibly powerful force. There are no prisoners of war here. Only those lucky enough to earn a swift death. It is an unrelenting, indifferent, cruel and taunting darkness. Surely the darkness wins.
But what’s this? Amidst the chaos and the suffering, someone is knocked down for the hundredth time. Thousandth maybe, they’ve lost count. They’ve lost their jobs. They’re homeless. Their heart’s been broken. They’re ill. They’ve lost their spouse, or their brother, or their mother, or all three. They’ve been raped, assaulted, robbed, buried, addicted. Shrouded in the cold indifferent abyss they lay, tired and wounded. The darkness bears down on them with impossible weight. “Stay down” it says. “I win”.
And on a battlefield of which victory is unheard of, they resist. They stand. Despite it all, they determine to love, to be virtuous, to defend the weak, to oppose, in every possible vector, the darkness that closes in. To engage in an unwinnable fight of which they will surely not survive, someone else stands. “Stay down” says the darkness. Someone else stands. “Stay down” it says. Then another, and another. Thousands, millions, billions rise to face the void, on a battlefield of which victory is unheard of. Weapons of virtue in hand. Galaxies of effort stand unified against the abyss. Before them, there was only darkness, and so it will be after them. But in this moment, there is unprecedented light; and the more intolerable the fight, the brighter they shine. Every ‘i love you’, every charitable act, every kiss, every hug, every sacrifice, every truth told, every good deed is a swipe of their sword that cuts unbearably deep into the void. Penetrating the darkness with blinding light. And, if only for a moment, there is meaning. Potent and intemperate, impossibly profound meaning saturates and overwhelms. On a battlefield of which victory is unheard of, without respite, they overpower their adversary.
The human condition is not characterized by suffering. Rather, It is defined by our rebellion. When the world buries us, when the universe compels us to hate, to sin against ourselves, to forsake love, to forsake effort, to forsake meaning, we rebel. when the darkness says “stay down”, we stand. And when we stand, we bring life. We bring meaning. We bring weapons unheard of. God slayers that subdue the infinite power of our adversaries. The universe is infinite and meaningless, and we are its necessary and mortal opponent; Finite and infinitely meaningful. Just as there is no light without darkness and no good without suffering. Just as the night sky would not have stars without her emptiness, we are the response to nothing. We are the stars that illuminate and define the shrouded and undefined. We find ourselves in a battle of attrition, and we will be outlasted. For now, we stand.
Psuedothought 