BLOG 3/4/13: QUESTION: BEYOND MY FACEBOOK IMAGE, WHO AM I REALLY?
I’m fascinated by the coffee shops in which I hang out. Here are all of these people with their laptops, their iPads, and iPods … busily engaged in communicating, writing, talking to someone on their phones. There’s energy there. There’s more communication globally than was imaginable only a few years ago. I was talking with a cool guy at one the other day and he got a call from Afghanistan. I mean, I know I’m an octogenarian, but when I was the age of that guy I didn’t even know where Afghanistan was (except that Rudyard Kipling had some poetry about it), or how to spell it.
With all that, however, I have a question about what goes on in the lives of all of these same talented and energetic folk that stays hidden? What do they think about when the social networks are turned off, and the laptop shut down? What are the ultimate questions of life on whose answers hang a sense of freedom and wholeness? … something like that.
One thoughtful writer speaks of the four human quests that are common to all humankind. He lists: 1) A quest for justice; 2) a quest for spirituality; 3) a quest for relationships; and 4) a quest identified as a delight in beauty. If you unpack those four and pursue them into their implications for your life and mine, then their fulfillment, or realization could usher us into a level of understanding of ourselves that is fraught with all kinds of new dimensions into true joy.
A psychiatrist friend of mine had a different, but similar, set of perspectives on the human quest when he shared with me that there are three common anxieties shared by all humankind: 1) the anxiety over meaning (what does my life mean? count for?); 2) the anxiety over acceptance (does anybody know I’m here? really care for me? would they accept me if they knew who I really am?); and 3) the anxiety over death (what happens after this life? Is this life all that there is? Or is there something I’m missing here?).
Here, looking at these quests and anxieties I am incorrigibly one who finds all the answers in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. One writer described Jesus as the one who had made known the mystery hidden for ages, i.e., the meaning of this whole human experience. I guess I am totally hooked on the fact that the love of God for broken and imperfect people (such as I) is not some abstract ‘religious thing’. Rather, Jesus speaks to the deepest needs and longings of the human heart, so that we can look at these quests and anxieties and find God’s design for us and for God’s new creation in Christ and what he taught and demonstrated … and in so finding, also find the profoundest freedom.
I can know who I am. I can know that I am accepted by God. I can be free from any anxiety about death because death has been conquered by Christ. In Christ, I and so many others have found true and joyous and existential freedom.
When the card-carrying agnostic C. S. Lewis finally realized that agnosticism was a dry well (he was provoked to this awareness by his friends at the Eagle and Child Pub) … he describes his conversion: “I remember that night at Magdalen College when I heard the footsteps or him whom I so desperately did not want to meet.” What resulted was his conversion to become one of the great voices of the Christian faith in the 20th century.
I’ll bet you that C. S. Lewis could have some great conversations in the coffee shops of my habitation.
Peace!
