The meaning of life (a.k.a. blasphemy)

So a few weeks ago I went to dinner with a friend and we were talking about Christianity. We both attended ACU (at different times, though) and have some of that conservative CoC stuff in common. He was saying that he doesn’t really agree that Christianity is all about getting to heaven/avoiding hell. Or it shouldn’t be, anyway. And that got me thinking. And watching out for other people who felt the same way.

Today as I was surfing the ACU blog circuit and looking busy, I came across a blog by someone who graduated when I did. And she had this to say:
So I'm still reading Mere Christianity. . . Anyways I just finished the chapter on Hope. Basically its about how we forget Heaven. Heaven is the point of who we are and how we live isnt it? We dont try to live righteously for the sake of goodness do we? We don't go to the grave with Christ on our lips for glory do we? No. We read, we love, we evangelize, we give, we missionary, because when this whole thing we've been doing for so long is over...we're looking for the greener grass.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I disagree. Who wants to live life if the only point is waiting for death? What’s the point of getting out of bed if my only reward is heaven? Sure, I want to go to heaven. Yes, I want to avoid hell. But I want. . .well, something else. Something to get me through today.

Mission Year was the first time that I ever really understood why people said they were looking forward to heaven, because I never really had. There were still things I wanted to do and accomplish before I died. But when I was miserable and staring face-to-face at the ways our society fails the people who most need help and how unable I seemed to provide them with a little love, much less anything else, then I got it. I understood why heaven would be alluring and even comforting. I recently finished a book called 90 Minutes in Heaven, about this guy who died in a car wreck and experienced heaven and then was brought back to life. (It sounds like a junior high kissing game, I know, and it wasn’t quite what I expected, but it was interesting.) He talked about how wonderful heaven was and how he saw all these people from his life and how he forgot about things happening on earth. He spends most of the book on his tedious and painful recovery and how angry he was that he had to leave heaven to come back here. And I get that. But I can’t believe that that’s the only part of God’s plan, the only story we have to tell.

I think we need to change our story, anyway. Another thing this friend and I discussed was how the gospel we preach paints us as really bad and God as really good. (That’s a horrible way to say it, but just stick with me here.) I get that God is good, and much better than me. But the thing is that yelling at me about how bad I am and how much I need saving turns me off. Offering me “salvation” from my bad-ness doesn’t get me excited. I guess because I don’t think I’m that bad. Don’t get me wrong, I know that I’m not perfect, and I’ve done some awful things, but I think the good things I’ve done kind of balance it out. I know I can be nasty and still do things I don’t want to do, but I also care about people, I donate to charitable causes, I believe in God and try to do what he wants, I try to use my gifts to help others, I floss (sometimes). So telling me that I’m an awful person and need to be saved from myself doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

What DOES make sense to me, though, is offering me a life free of mediocrity. A life of meaning. Life’s going to be hard however you live it, but life with someone to walk beside is much more comforting. Life is also going to be confusing and unfair and not make sense, but believing that perhaps it makes sense to at least God, that perhaps it is working itself out into a beautiful pattern somewhere is helpful. Even one-sided communication with someone bigger and stronger than me makes me feel better (most of the time). Promising me that I’ll SOMEDAY get my reward for a hard life? Not so comforting.

Robert Fulghum tells a story about Alexander Papaderos, a Greek man who worked to heal the hurts and hatred between the Germans and the Cretans, wounds which have existed since WWII, when the Nazis invaded the island of Crete and were met by villagers wielding kitchen knives and hay scythes. The retribution by the Germans was horrible, and whole villages were lined up and shot for assaulting Hitler’s finest troops.

Papaderos, a native of Crete, has established an institute to heal the wounds of war on the site of those horrible events. Once, Fulghum got the chance to ask him if he knew the meaning of life. He tells it this way:
Papaderos held up his hand and stilled the room and looked at me for a long time, asking with his eyes if I was serious and seeing from my eyes that I was. “I will answer your question.”

Taking his wallet out of his hip pocket, he fished into a leather billfold and brought out a very small round mirror, about the size of a quarter.

And what he said went like this:
“When I was a small child, during the war, we were very poor and we lived in a remote village. One day, on the road, I found the broken pieces of a mirror. A German motorcycle had been wrecked in that place.

“I tried to find all the pieces and put them together, but it was not possible, so I kept only the largest piece. This one. And by scratching it on a stone I made it round. I began to play with it as a toy and became fascinated by the fact that I could reflect light into dark places where the sun would never shine—in deep holes and crevices and dark closets. It became a game for me to get light into the most inaccessible places I could find.

“I kept the little mirror, and as I went about my growing up, I would take it out in idle moments and continue the challenge of the game. As I became a man, I grew to understand that this was not just a child’s game but a metaphor for what I might do with my life. I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of the light. But light—truth, understanding, knowledge—is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it.

“I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have I can reflect light into the dark places of this world—into the black places in the hearts of men—and change some things in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of my life.”

And then he took his small mirror and, holding it carefully, caught the bright rays of daylight streaming through the window and reflected them onto my face and onto my hands folded on the desk.

Now THAT’S a story I can get behind. And it sounds strangely like what we call the gospel, but more practical, somehow.