From Olympic Bongs to Free Corn Flakes: All Things Work Together for Good..
We have discussed the fact that some bad things just happen for no good reason. But as people of faith, we cannot stop there. We must not concede that evil always has the last word. Many truly bad things can be used to bring about truly good things. First of all, this could include some things that we “perceive” as bad at the time which are, in the end, good things. Several types of events come to mind. Cindy’s trip to the doctor for bronchitis leads to an x-ray that reveals an unexpected, but treatable cancer. Stan’s job loss leads to the opportunity of a job in a career that he always kind of wanted to do anyway but he hated to risk his stability. The situations could be more extreme. A wealthy couple’s new home burns to the ground, forcing them to rely on each other and discover what’s really important to their family. A painful infidelity leads a rock singer to the woman he always should have been with in the first place. (cf. Chicago’s 1988 mild hit, “If she would have been faithful” off Chicago XVIII). In all of these cases, something that was truly perceived as bad, later can be seen as a blessing. It is not fair for us to say that these events weren’t really bad, at least at the time. All of these events were bad in and of themselves, especially something as tragic as the loss of a home or infidelity of a partner. But seen in a broader context over time, these events are not seen as being as bad as they once seemed. We might call these experiences, “Not so sucky after-all events.”
There are other events which remain as bad as they ever were, but God somehow brings good out of them, often ironically, and sometimes humorously. The most recent example I’ve encountered of this occurred recently in the midst of the Michael Phelps’ bong photo debacle. Here we have an 8 time gold medal winning Olympic American hero. The good kid who hits the big time and makes his country and momma proud. Proud, that is, until he hits something else besides the big time. What makes things worse is Michael fails to notice his buddy over his shoulder with his camera phone trained on his pot-bong whilst he takes that hit. Granted the event was not intended to cause an uproar in his life, but a few months later it wreaks havoc on a truly Fox-Network-free American idol. Michael comes clean, apologizes, and accepts many forms of societal punishment for his mistake. One of the most financially painful punishments is the loss of some lucrative sponsors. Kellogg’s is in a dilemma. Here we are, the promoter of wholesome cereals.. And now we just produced a butt-load of Corn Flakes with a stoner on the box! What to do with all these Phelps-faced corn flakes? Ironically, corn flakes make a pretty good munchy so any Kellogg’s action against hashish is a bit self-defeating. Still, the brass at Kellogg’s decide to drop the Phelps sponsorship. No official action was taken with the cereal boxes that bore Phelp’s post-bong, pre-mug shot. However, the San Francisco food pantry experienced a miracle. 3800 pounds of Kellogg’s cereal randomly showed up on their doorstep, all with Michael Phelps’ awkward grin on the boxes. Cereal is very difficult to get donated, apparently, and the cereal has flown off the food pantry shelves faster than Phelps’ swam the 100 meter breast stroke. The result is that a an American sports tragedy becomes tasty corn flakes for thousands of San Francisco’s poor.
It seems to me to hold true that if Jesus can feed the 5,000 with 2 loaves of bread and some crappie, then God can feed 5,000 with a digital photo of a sports hero taking a bong hit. This is not just divine providence. This is divine poetry. It is not only God having fun, but God simply taking something bad and making something good out of it. This is God doing what herm does best, take the broken tragedies of our lives and make something beautiful out of them. It is the speech-impeded fugitive, Moses, leading his people out of Egypt. It is the coniving, momma’s boy, Jacob, fathering the 12 tribes of Israel. It is the murderous David who can’t keep his rocket in his pocket becoming a “man after God’s own heart.” And it is the folly of the cross on which a murdered homeless man becomes the savior of the world.
Romans 8:28 is a powerful verse that has been wielded in many a bad situations. “…God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose.” This verse is often turned to as a quick fix for any concern that may arise as to why something bad has happened, usually in someone else’s life. But the wording is important here. It doesn’t say God causes all bad things to happen or even that God causes anything specific to happen. It says that God causes all things “to work together for good....” This means that although life sucks, God is able to do something beautiful with our screwed up world. It means God is in in the business of recycling our discarded trash, dislodging the shrapnel of our bad decisions, restoring the softness to our dried up Play-doh lives so we can try again. It means God can and does take that which is meant for evil and turn it to good. This is what it means to turn discarded champions into real Corn Flake heroes and turn the murder of the Son of God into the ultimate symbol of love and hope. ( save this for next chapter?) And this leads to the central tenet of the Christian faith, God’s work in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
There's Not a Reason for Everything
“There’s not a reason for everything.”
One key to learning to live the porpoise driven life is realizing that there’s not a reason for everything. A few days after starting to write this opus, I was struck by a breaking news story in the background of my living room. After spending a the requisite 4 minutes finding a sofa cushion to house my bowl of grape nuts and locating the remote in the ass crack of my recliner, I honed in on the news story. Dolphins had just made an evolutionary leap. A dolphin in Orlando had just developed the ability to blow bubbles. The video footage was impressive. With his mouth, the dolphin had created a large ring-like bubble and was bouncing it to and fro with his bill, beak, mouth, whatever. The dolphin swam its way keeping the bubble bouncing in front of him like David Beckham with a Voit on his way to earning his 10 million dollar contract with another goal. Soon, however, the bubble burst, to both the frustration and delight of the dolphin. The news’ story continued by declaring that, surprisingly, all the other dolphins in the tank picked up on the trick and soon were producing and playing with their own bubbles. Soon, the tank became a bubble bath with more bubble’s being blown than in a 7th grade science classroom with no teacher and a case of Bubblicious. Of course, the questions and commentary from the dolphin community began to explode. Why did they do this? How did they develop bubble making ability? What does it all mean? Surely this is an evolutionary breakthrough of some kind. I’m no biologist, but I think even Chuck Darwin would be hard pressed to prove that bubble blowing was somehow a necessary step in the dolphin quest for survival of the fittest. The truth is who knows why the dolphin bubbling and who cares? Odds are there are that is no reason why the dolphins started blowing bubbles except maybe the reason that one of them simply realized that he could. This should just be a great opportunity for marine biologists to stop taking themselves seriously, pull up a Sea World lawn chair, and enjoy the show.
Accepting some things as happening without reason is easy for us. No reason needed for why there are Braille letters on drive-thru ATM machines, or why we park in a drive way and drive on a parkway. The problem comes when something catastrophic happens in our lives. Then we soon begin to tell ourselves that there must be some reason for it. How could anything this bad happen for no good reason? As a chaplain, I’ve logged many hospital hallway miles and been with hundreds of families at the time of death of a spouse, father, or child. Many of these deaths are sudden, tragic, and sometimes even medically unexplainable. Hardly a death goes by that someone doesn’t search for the reason that something like this happens. Some are what we call “good deaths” where the patient has been sick forever and now the reason for the death is clear to the family. “God didn’t want him to suffer anymore.” “Now, he’s in a better place.” Other situations don’t present the family or the staff with such easy answers. A teenager is brain dead from a car wreck. A young father of three has an aneurism. Other tragedies raise the reason question every day. A house burns down. A retirement fund disappears. A family dissolves. These events sooner or later send us scrambling for answers as to why. Surely, there must be a reason? We say we don’t know it yet and may never know it, but God has a reason for all this bad stuff. The truth is there may not be a good reason. Or if there is, you and I are probably not going to know it for years. It is a scary proposition to think of the possibility of random, inexplicable, bad events happening to us or someone we love for no good reason. But this is exactly the world we bargained for when we attached ourselves to that uterine wall. The universe is full of beauty, life, and harmony. But it is also full of randomness, accidents, and uncertainty.
Two major natural tragedies took their toll on our souls this decade. The first happened on December 26, 2004. Suddenly the earth’s crust under the Indian Ocean couldn’t take it any more and went on a killing spree. The second largest earthquake ever measured pushed its way into the ocean around it and the result was a wave of tsunami that ultimately claimed the lives of 225,000 people in Southeast Asia. Having spent a formative year and a half in Thailand doing volunteer mission work and teaching, I was particularly troubled by this heinous act of Mother Nature. Not long after the tragedy struck, well-meaning religious people felt the need to either find deeper meaning in this nightmare or cover God’s butt for sleeping on the job. Various theological justifications emerged. They ran the gamut from God’s punishment of Indonesia for having the largest Muslim population in the world, to this being a clear sign that God was fed up with all of us. Now he is finally beginning to destroy the global house of cards he created 4000 years ago. The mounting death tolls, the destruction of villages, the orphaned children, all began to create a tsunami of its own in my own soul. I could quickly fend off the moralistic explanations of many of my fellow Christians, but I couldn’t muster up any better reasons. There is no comfortable position when something like this happens. The liberal is just as bankrupt as the conservative. There’s no easy answer or clever song that can get us out of this one. John Lennon and Toby Keith find themselves floating in the same silent boat in this tsunami of meaninglessness. The best we can do as people of faith is to admit that we are forced to decide between or reconcile three very unpleasant truths.
God lost his cool and exercised his capricious judgment by drowning hundreds of thousands of people just because they were near the water, while I got to sleep in my safe, dry home, and enjoy the holidays with my family.
God didn’t do it, but “allowed” it to happen. That is, God was sitting on his hands, couldn’t get to the remote fast enough, or just didn’t give an Asian rat’s fanny.
God is in fact not in control of natural stuff like this. It just happens and he experiences the consequences too and grieves just as we do.
You won’t find in this Sunday’s Joel Osteen sermon, but sometimes we have to choose which truth is the least appalling to us: A God who is sometimes angry and unfair, a God who doesn’t care enough to intervene, or a God who is powerless to stop some bad stuff that just happens. The truth probably lies in some dynamic combination of these options Admittedly, none of these theological positions is very easy to sleep with, but unless we are prepared to defend one of these views in the face of major tragedies that happen to those around us every day, we better keep our mouths shut.
Hurricane Katrina rolled into our coast in 2005 providing the U.S. with our own domestic tsunami. However, enough has been said about Katrina and I don’t have time to cut myself today, so let’s move on to something a little lighter and happier.. Let me close this chapter by saying that while there is not a reason for everything bad that happens, there is a reason for why many things happen and learning to wait and learn that lesson is a huge part of learning to live life well. Meanwhile, don’t forget to mindlessly enjoy your dolphin bubbles.
One key to learning to live the porpoise driven life is realizing that there’s not a reason for everything. A few days after starting to write this opus, I was struck by a breaking news story in the background of my living room. After spending a the requisite 4 minutes finding a sofa cushion to house my bowl of grape nuts and locating the remote in the ass crack of my recliner, I honed in on the news story. Dolphins had just made an evolutionary leap. A dolphin in Orlando had just developed the ability to blow bubbles. The video footage was impressive. With his mouth, the dolphin had created a large ring-like bubble and was bouncing it to and fro with his bill, beak, mouth, whatever. The dolphin swam its way keeping the bubble bouncing in front of him like David Beckham with a Voit on his way to earning his 10 million dollar contract with another goal. Soon, however, the bubble burst, to both the frustration and delight of the dolphin. The news’ story continued by declaring that, surprisingly, all the other dolphins in the tank picked up on the trick and soon were producing and playing with their own bubbles. Soon, the tank became a bubble bath with more bubble’s being blown than in a 7th grade science classroom with no teacher and a case of Bubblicious. Of course, the questions and commentary from the dolphin community began to explode. Why did they do this? How did they develop bubble making ability? What does it all mean? Surely this is an evolutionary breakthrough of some kind. I’m no biologist, but I think even Chuck Darwin would be hard pressed to prove that bubble blowing was somehow a necessary step in the dolphin quest for survival of the fittest. The truth is who knows why the dolphin bubbling and who cares? Odds are there are that is no reason why the dolphins started blowing bubbles except maybe the reason that one of them simply realized that he could. This should just be a great opportunity for marine biologists to stop taking themselves seriously, pull up a Sea World lawn chair, and enjoy the show.
Accepting some things as happening without reason is easy for us. No reason needed for why there are Braille letters on drive-thru ATM machines, or why we park in a drive way and drive on a parkway. The problem comes when something catastrophic happens in our lives. Then we soon begin to tell ourselves that there must be some reason for it. How could anything this bad happen for no good reason? As a chaplain, I’ve logged many hospital hallway miles and been with hundreds of families at the time of death of a spouse, father, or child. Many of these deaths are sudden, tragic, and sometimes even medically unexplainable. Hardly a death goes by that someone doesn’t search for the reason that something like this happens. Some are what we call “good deaths” where the patient has been sick forever and now the reason for the death is clear to the family. “God didn’t want him to suffer anymore.” “Now, he’s in a better place.” Other situations don’t present the family or the staff with such easy answers. A teenager is brain dead from a car wreck. A young father of three has an aneurism. Other tragedies raise the reason question every day. A house burns down. A retirement fund disappears. A family dissolves. These events sooner or later send us scrambling for answers as to why. Surely, there must be a reason? We say we don’t know it yet and may never know it, but God has a reason for all this bad stuff. The truth is there may not be a good reason. Or if there is, you and I are probably not going to know it for years. It is a scary proposition to think of the possibility of random, inexplicable, bad events happening to us or someone we love for no good reason. But this is exactly the world we bargained for when we attached ourselves to that uterine wall. The universe is full of beauty, life, and harmony. But it is also full of randomness, accidents, and uncertainty.
Two major natural tragedies took their toll on our souls this decade. The first happened on December 26, 2004. Suddenly the earth’s crust under the Indian Ocean couldn’t take it any more and went on a killing spree. The second largest earthquake ever measured pushed its way into the ocean around it and the result was a wave of tsunami that ultimately claimed the lives of 225,000 people in Southeast Asia. Having spent a formative year and a half in Thailand doing volunteer mission work and teaching, I was particularly troubled by this heinous act of Mother Nature. Not long after the tragedy struck, well-meaning religious people felt the need to either find deeper meaning in this nightmare or cover God’s butt for sleeping on the job. Various theological justifications emerged. They ran the gamut from God’s punishment of Indonesia for having the largest Muslim population in the world, to this being a clear sign that God was fed up with all of us. Now he is finally beginning to destroy the global house of cards he created 4000 years ago. The mounting death tolls, the destruction of villages, the orphaned children, all began to create a tsunami of its own in my own soul. I could quickly fend off the moralistic explanations of many of my fellow Christians, but I couldn’t muster up any better reasons. There is no comfortable position when something like this happens. The liberal is just as bankrupt as the conservative. There’s no easy answer or clever song that can get us out of this one. John Lennon and Toby Keith find themselves floating in the same silent boat in this tsunami of meaninglessness. The best we can do as people of faith is to admit that we are forced to decide between or reconcile three very unpleasant truths.
God lost his cool and exercised his capricious judgment by drowning hundreds of thousands of people just because they were near the water, while I got to sleep in my safe, dry home, and enjoy the holidays with my family.
God didn’t do it, but “allowed” it to happen. That is, God was sitting on his hands, couldn’t get to the remote fast enough, or just didn’t give an Asian rat’s fanny.
God is in fact not in control of natural stuff like this. It just happens and he experiences the consequences too and grieves just as we do.
You won’t find in this Sunday’s Joel Osteen sermon, but sometimes we have to choose which truth is the least appalling to us: A God who is sometimes angry and unfair, a God who doesn’t care enough to intervene, or a God who is powerless to stop some bad stuff that just happens. The truth probably lies in some dynamic combination of these options Admittedly, none of these theological positions is very easy to sleep with, but unless we are prepared to defend one of these views in the face of major tragedies that happen to those around us every day, we better keep our mouths shut.
Hurricane Katrina rolled into our coast in 2005 providing the U.S. with our own domestic tsunami. However, enough has been said about Katrina and I don’t have time to cut myself today, so let’s move on to something a little lighter and happier.. Let me close this chapter by saying that while there is not a reason for everything bad that happens, there is a reason for why many things happen and learning to wait and learn that lesson is a huge part of learning to live life well. Meanwhile, don’t forget to mindlessly enjoy your dolphin bubbles.
Intro to Porpoise Driven Life
Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven Life delighted and inspired millions of readers who needed to know that their life has purpose and wanted to know the steps to achieving that life. What about the rest of us? What about those of us who have long-since abandoned the quest for our lofty “purpose” and are just trying to survive the capricious, stormy, winds, that are banging against our double-wides every day? Some may have the luxury of waking every day to the esoteric question of how can I best fulfill my divine destiny?. I wake up wondering if I can find my glute with both hands on the way to raising the toilet lid for the 4th time since I went to sleep the night before.
Standing in front of the porcelain, ultimate questions flood my mind. Where is God in my day today? Uh,oh. I wonder if they pulled my car payment a day early since tomorrow is Saturday? How can I fulfill my earthly purpose? Crap, did I forget to take the garbage down. What areas of growth do I have as a parent today? Oh no, where can I scrounge two bucks for Jenna’s school lunch? And so the day continues with its probing questions: Why did I agree to be in charge of that? What is the best way to not take this call? Where’s my pager, keys, glasses, daytimer, and car? And so it goes, or at least so it went….. until that fateful day in October.
I was on sabbatical from my job as a hospital chaplain. I had just worked about 60 hours a week for a month, watching people die, fight, cry, and swear at the chaplain’s inability to assuage their medical needs. “What good are you to me!” exclaimed one angry vet to the sheepish chaplain who couldn’t produce a piece of dentyne to ease his palat. Realizing that I was quickly becoming “no good to anyone” I booked a cheap Southwest ticket to Tampa, haggled over a 17 dollar rental car promotion and checked into a “tier 1” motel room on my hotel rewards account. The next day I braved the oncoming rain to make it out to the pier for a guaranteed “dolphin sighting” boat cruise. With the storm headed in, all of the dolphin entrepreneurs were shutting down early. “No way you’re going to be able to make it out there today,” said one old crusty sailor as he finished tying up his boat for the night. But soon I was atop the lone cutter, brave enough to take the die-hard group of dolphin hunters for one more ride. We were told that we were “guaranteed” to see dolphins or promised another miserable wet ride for free where we might not see dolphins again. It’s kind of like those dating websites where losers are promised that if they don’t find a mate in 6 months, they are guaranteed another 6 months of humiliation for free. For a while the sea was silent as the waves crashed against our boat and the water sprayed us like a small child being hosed down after being caught playing GI Joes in a neighbor’s garden. But just as the Captain’s scripted nautical jokes began to run ashore, a huge-arse dolphin jumped in front of me. “Shit!” I exclaimed as my 100 kilos fell backward into the personal space of the parents of a small-child. So much for a family-friendly boat cruise. My excitement at my 17 dollar investment began to soar as the dolphin-quest took me places that I haven’t been since my surprise 9th grade birthday party. Suddenly I realized I was enthralled by the dolphins jumping willy-nilly in our wake. I felt like Doc when the flux capacitor first gave flight to the De’lorean in Back to the Future 1. I was more excited than the kids on the boat, the retirees, and the Captain Kangaroo who was dependent on the mammals for his semi-livelihood. The jovial, aquatic, creatures were appearing and disappearing at will, leaping and turning in the air, screaming and silent as they played their land mammal fools like a Charlie Daniels’ fiddle. They were not seeking their purpose in life. They weren’t dependent on formulas and effort for their salvation. No calendars, blackberries, wide screens, or Facebook events. Their spirituality was simple. They were happy and in control of their surroundings. The Porpoise Driven Life was born.
Standing in front of the porcelain, ultimate questions flood my mind. Where is God in my day today? Uh,oh. I wonder if they pulled my car payment a day early since tomorrow is Saturday? How can I fulfill my earthly purpose? Crap, did I forget to take the garbage down. What areas of growth do I have as a parent today? Oh no, where can I scrounge two bucks for Jenna’s school lunch? And so the day continues with its probing questions: Why did I agree to be in charge of that? What is the best way to not take this call? Where’s my pager, keys, glasses, daytimer, and car? And so it goes, or at least so it went….. until that fateful day in October.
I was on sabbatical from my job as a hospital chaplain. I had just worked about 60 hours a week for a month, watching people die, fight, cry, and swear at the chaplain’s inability to assuage their medical needs. “What good are you to me!” exclaimed one angry vet to the sheepish chaplain who couldn’t produce a piece of dentyne to ease his palat. Realizing that I was quickly becoming “no good to anyone” I booked a cheap Southwest ticket to Tampa, haggled over a 17 dollar rental car promotion and checked into a “tier 1” motel room on my hotel rewards account. The next day I braved the oncoming rain to make it out to the pier for a guaranteed “dolphin sighting” boat cruise. With the storm headed in, all of the dolphin entrepreneurs were shutting down early. “No way you’re going to be able to make it out there today,” said one old crusty sailor as he finished tying up his boat for the night. But soon I was atop the lone cutter, brave enough to take the die-hard group of dolphin hunters for one more ride. We were told that we were “guaranteed” to see dolphins or promised another miserable wet ride for free where we might not see dolphins again. It’s kind of like those dating websites where losers are promised that if they don’t find a mate in 6 months, they are guaranteed another 6 months of humiliation for free. For a while the sea was silent as the waves crashed against our boat and the water sprayed us like a small child being hosed down after being caught playing GI Joes in a neighbor’s garden. But just as the Captain’s scripted nautical jokes began to run ashore, a huge-arse dolphin jumped in front of me. “Shit!” I exclaimed as my 100 kilos fell backward into the personal space of the parents of a small-child. So much for a family-friendly boat cruise. My excitement at my 17 dollar investment began to soar as the dolphin-quest took me places that I haven’t been since my surprise 9th grade birthday party. Suddenly I realized I was enthralled by the dolphins jumping willy-nilly in our wake. I felt like Doc when the flux capacitor first gave flight to the De’lorean in Back to the Future 1. I was more excited than the kids on the boat, the retirees, and the Captain Kangaroo who was dependent on the mammals for his semi-livelihood. The jovial, aquatic, creatures were appearing and disappearing at will, leaping and turning in the air, screaming and silent as they played their land mammal fools like a Charlie Daniels’ fiddle. They were not seeking their purpose in life. They weren’t dependent on formulas and effort for their salvation. No calendars, blackberries, wide screens, or Facebook events. Their spirituality was simple. They were happy and in control of their surroundings. The Porpoise Driven Life was born.
What in Sea World am I Here For?
Part 1: What in Sea World am I here for?
The quest for the meaning of life has plagued humanity since the dawn of civilization. Wait a minute…no it hasn’t. 98.3 percent of the people who have ever lived never seriously questioned the meaning of life and I doubt if any one who has made it to page 3 of this book lost sleep over this question last night. The truth is that the proto-type of modern man was probably much more interested in how to dislodge the sliver of turkey drumstick from his molars than worrying about why he was here. And so it has been with humanity as we have it recorded in history. Very few of the Biblical characters ever discussed such lofty questions. None of the founders of the 3 major monotheistic religions ever discoursed on the subject. God calls Abraham from his home in UR, commanding him to haul all his family and stuff across the border. No record of Abraham asking why. In fact he makes it all the way to Egypt before we hear him speak, and then it is only to make sure he can pass his wife off as his sister so that Pharaoh will do her instead of killing him. The prophet Mohammed didn’t spend much time doodling on his philosophical Sudoku about the meaning of life. He was busy converting the entire Arabian Peninsula to Islam before his death. Jesus steered cleared of idle speculation about our purpose in life, saying only that he had come that they “may have life and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10 NAS ) When Jesus wasn’t trying to keep from getting pushed off a cliff or busy breaking up fights on the disciples’ short bus, he was way more concerned about how we live than why we live. Buddha didn’t raise the question of the origin and purpose of life at all. He compared life to getting shot with an arrow. You don’t have time to know or care who shot the arrow or why, you just got to figure out how to get it out. (cite reference) Even the great renaissance athlete and philosopher of the late ‘80’s, Bo Jackson, offered but one kernel of truth, “just do it.”
Only the writer of Ecclesiastes let himself get hung up on the question of the meaning of life. And, maybe not so ironically, he was the wealthiest of all of the bunch and had plenty of time to think about such questions. Unfortunately, his conclusion was less inspiring than a half hour of Nancy Grace: “I have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and striving after the wind.” (1: 14, NAS)
Homer, not Simpson, tackled this question sometime in the midst of charting two of his novels on the NY Times best-seller list, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Here is his happy synopsis of the meaning of life:
Insignificant mortals, who are as leaves are, and now flourish and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives, but then again fade away and are dead. Homer, 9th Century BC
Maybe we can learn from these and other great minds who devoted their lives to the quest for why we are here. Here’s the lesson, don’t think about it. If you do, you’re liable to end up more depressed than a Blockbuster shareholder on the eve of Netflix. I’m open-minded, inquisitive, and not afraid of the truth. But there are certain questions that are better off not asked. “When are you due?” “Did you not get my text?” “Is this my hair on this Whopper?” “W exactly is there a 13 dollar Ticketmaster convenience fee So it is with most “why” questions Usually, when the “why” question comes up in our daily lives, it’s not a good sign. “Why” did I pay 9.25 to see this movie? ? “Why” did we get up at 4 o’clock to stand in line for this Wal-mart Black Friday sale? “Why” exactly is there a 13 dollar Ticketmaster convenience fee? An “why” did I buy this 60 dollar Gordon Lightfoot ticket anyway? As long as life is good, rarely do ultimate questions of life’s meaning arise. And maybe that’s a good thing. As soon as we stop and obsess about the why’s of our existence, our soul slips into neutral, and we stop experiencing life.
And so it is with the porpoise driven life. The perma-smile on a dolphin’s face is not the result of a benevolent obsession to make small humans happy, nor is it the sadistic smile of countless Jokers in 5 decades of Batman. The dolphin’s smile is a result of the fact that the dolphin is wise. He is wise enough to never stop and think about why his aquatic ass is trapped in a 10,000 gallon tank for the rest of his life while his intelligence is exploited by underpaid 16 year-olds. The unreflected life can be a beautiful life, or at least let’s wait until the credits start to roll.
The quest for the meaning of life has plagued humanity since the dawn of civilization. Wait a minute…no it hasn’t. 98.3 percent of the people who have ever lived never seriously questioned the meaning of life and I doubt if any one who has made it to page 3 of this book lost sleep over this question last night. The truth is that the proto-type of modern man was probably much more interested in how to dislodge the sliver of turkey drumstick from his molars than worrying about why he was here. And so it has been with humanity as we have it recorded in history. Very few of the Biblical characters ever discussed such lofty questions. None of the founders of the 3 major monotheistic religions ever discoursed on the subject. God calls Abraham from his home in UR, commanding him to haul all his family and stuff across the border. No record of Abraham asking why. In fact he makes it all the way to Egypt before we hear him speak, and then it is only to make sure he can pass his wife off as his sister so that Pharaoh will do her instead of killing him. The prophet Mohammed didn’t spend much time doodling on his philosophical Sudoku about the meaning of life. He was busy converting the entire Arabian Peninsula to Islam before his death. Jesus steered cleared of idle speculation about our purpose in life, saying only that he had come that they “may have life and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10 NAS ) When Jesus wasn’t trying to keep from getting pushed off a cliff or busy breaking up fights on the disciples’ short bus, he was way more concerned about how we live than why we live. Buddha didn’t raise the question of the origin and purpose of life at all. He compared life to getting shot with an arrow. You don’t have time to know or care who shot the arrow or why, you just got to figure out how to get it out. (cite reference) Even the great renaissance athlete and philosopher of the late ‘80’s, Bo Jackson, offered but one kernel of truth, “just do it.”
Only the writer of Ecclesiastes let himself get hung up on the question of the meaning of life. And, maybe not so ironically, he was the wealthiest of all of the bunch and had plenty of time to think about such questions. Unfortunately, his conclusion was less inspiring than a half hour of Nancy Grace: “I have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and striving after the wind.” (1: 14, NAS)
Homer, not Simpson, tackled this question sometime in the midst of charting two of his novels on the NY Times best-seller list, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Here is his happy synopsis of the meaning of life:
Insignificant mortals, who are as leaves are, and now flourish and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives, but then again fade away and are dead. Homer, 9th Century BC
Maybe we can learn from these and other great minds who devoted their lives to the quest for why we are here. Here’s the lesson, don’t think about it. If you do, you’re liable to end up more depressed than a Blockbuster shareholder on the eve of Netflix. I’m open-minded, inquisitive, and not afraid of the truth. But there are certain questions that are better off not asked. “When are you due?” “Did you not get my text?” “Is this my hair on this Whopper?” “W exactly is there a 13 dollar Ticketmaster convenience fee So it is with most “why” questions Usually, when the “why” question comes up in our daily lives, it’s not a good sign. “Why” did I pay 9.25 to see this movie? ? “Why” did we get up at 4 o’clock to stand in line for this Wal-mart Black Friday sale? “Why” exactly is there a 13 dollar Ticketmaster convenience fee? An “why” did I buy this 60 dollar Gordon Lightfoot ticket anyway? As long as life is good, rarely do ultimate questions of life’s meaning arise. And maybe that’s a good thing. As soon as we stop and obsess about the why’s of our existence, our soul slips into neutral, and we stop experiencing life.
And so it is with the porpoise driven life. The perma-smile on a dolphin’s face is not the result of a benevolent obsession to make small humans happy, nor is it the sadistic smile of countless Jokers in 5 decades of Batman. The dolphin’s smile is a result of the fact that the dolphin is wise. He is wise enough to never stop and think about why his aquatic ass is trapped in a 10,000 gallon tank for the rest of his life while his intelligence is exploited by underpaid 16 year-olds. The unreflected life can be a beautiful life, or at least let’s wait until the credits start to roll.
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