Paradox and pain

"Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth"- Jean Paul Sartre.


In my linguistics class, we have been talking for the past week about the relation between language and ideas, the concept of language as a vehicle for culture. Our final project is to construct a message in the medium of our choice which we would choose to send to inhabitants of other planets as a representation of human life on earth.


So, I've been thinking, what is human life on earth?


Actually, all semester, no, even longer- almost, it seems, for as long as I can remember, some such question, vast and indefinable, has been smoldering in my heart, furious as suppressed lava, threatening to erupt and leave me empty and utterly cold.


How to define the human experience, the purpose of human existence? The answers I've accumulated fail to satisfy, somehow. I barely can explain my own past and place in the world, and my story is a pleasantly uneventful one. In those homes where pain is daily nearer and more vital than I can imagine, in those lands "where life is evil now", what is the unifying thread? What pattern can be traced in senseless suffering?


Sometimes, like a fever in the brain, I'm haunted by the contrast surrounding us everywhere in our world- the shining displays in department stores against the crowded disease and filth of a refugee camp, gleeful, laughing children beside tottering skeletal ones, bright eyes smiling beside blank, horror-shadowed faces. Smug materialism beside raw, hoarse desperation. The deep, simple naturalness of love allowed to run its course unobstructed beside the despair of loss, of separation, of sudden devestation. And I ask myself, which is real? Children weaving daisy chains in a May meadow, or a bus blazing in a Palestinian street? Clear northern lakes reflecting the unruffled majesty of mountains, or grass whispering over the nightmare secrets of Babi Yar? Man defying injustice, or Man breaking under torture?


And I wonder, is no one else wondering the same thing? How can we go about daily life so calmly? I have been waiting all my life for someone to snap under the weight of it all- to stand up in the middle of a crowded room, and shout aloud "Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Nanking, Dresden- Oh, God, let it not be true, or let me die!"


I can't help but feel that, when we think of these things at all, we are instinctively idealists. The nightmare is everywhere, does not have to be searched for, but the happy ending is like buried treasure, sparkling in some secret cache beneath the smoking rubble of earth. Journalists dig for it, optimists paint it in sweeping strokes on the blank canvases of the public imagination. The truth is that we cannot grasp the things that happen in the world every day, especially in nations like the U.S. where life wears blinders and death is neatly sanitized, respectably whisked away from public view. Lurid newspaper articles have the flavor of science fiction; we read them with something that is almost pleasure, because, at our core, we do not believe them to be true. We are ahistorians. We do not believe in history- if we for a moment comprehended it, we would go mad.


And yet the beauty cannot be argued away. The world is fiercely full of life, flourishing, replenishing, dazzling. Vegetation billows and races like green wildfire over the killing fields of Cambodia. In China, the grandchildren of the Cultural Revolution and famine go to the movies, chat online, and discuss sports and celebrity gossip. Normalcy sweeps with merciful rapidity over the indescribable and incomprehensible years of each nation. I am lost in this paradox- the rosiness and darkness of mankind, the cruelty and kindness of nature, the inescapable horror and irrepressible delight of the world. And I have, as yet, no complete answer to my question. What has man done? Why does man continue?


I have always been seized, when faced with the dangerous and fractured state of so many other places, with the desire to leave this semblance of sanity and go there, to face down the lurking nightmare and know, once and for all, what this other half of reality is, if any ointment can soothe it. To effect even a small change for good, to live and die for something difficult and deeply right is a leaping instinct, more powerful than cowardice.


A scene from 'The Robe', a favorite book from high school has haunted me for years. On the road to Jerusalem, two Roman commanders fall into a discussion of the ideal God- what God would be like were they allowed to create Him for themselves. Demetrius, a Greek slave, is listening, and begins pondering the idea for himself. He thinks of the destruction of his home and family, of his enslavement, of the injustice and suffering he's witnessed over the years, and decides:


"This nobler god- if he had any interest in justice, at all- would appear, at such a tragic moment, and sternly declare, 'You can't do that!'"


For me, this has always been the essence of human need. For God to sweep in and disperse evil in one breath, crying out in a voice which would echo beyond the universe, 'You can't do that!'


Western culture is inundated with the chivalrous ideal of the knight in shining armor galloping up at just the right moment to rescue the helpless and imprisoned. Somehow, my vision of God seems to tangle itself inextricably with myths of Camelot and the slaying of dragons.


But the true story is something better, bound in the hearts which accept it with iron cords of loveliness and anguish. All-powerful Creator God, beyond human logic and understanding, made man. This I do not understand. Man sinned, and was divided implacably from God, is falling and sinning still. This, also, I do not understand. This God, this eternally existent I AM did not simply disperse us into non-existence, nor did he prevent our initial act of self-destruction. My mind reels uncomprehending in the face of it. God became man, and suddenly, some irresistable force became clear and evident in the world. How could God become an intimate participant in the strange sordid beauty of pregnancy and childbirth, live as God and child, God and man, in seamless holiness and humanity, embrace in humble, selfless obedience a brutal death, and something deeper in realms beyond human ken? How could the appalling wickedness and screaming agony of every man in every time be concentrated on the willing body of this Son of Man, this innocent one? This story I could not have written, is deeper and more wonderful than the simple, elemental 'You can't do that', which my heart is still hungry for.


At Chinese Bible study the other, night, while discussing a Gospel video, a dear Chinese friend explained to me "Actually, I feel that this cannot be the story of a god. I feel that a god should be somehow great, should be immortal, above man. But this story, it is a man born in shame under shameful circumstances, of ordinary parents, and in poverty, a man who grows up and dies the death of a criminal before he has accomplished anything- how can you call this a god? How can this be God?"
Sweet comrade, how can I tell you in words, this truth that I cannot understand myself- that this God-Man born in shame has taken away the shame of all who love Him, that this God-Man born in poverty, has brought light and hope, waited for in desperation and anguish over thousands of years, to an impoverished world, that this God-Man who, innocent, died the death of the guilty has bought all of us, guilty, the right to His own guiltlessness, His own utter rightness? How can I tell this wonder that dazzles my feeble mind, that the death and suffering and hatred I cannot accept are answered in Him, that dying, He crushed death forever under His feet, that in Him, Life and Love meet at last and are perfect, are conquering forces irresistibly reshaping blood, horror, and weeping. Faced with the question "How do we explain the existence of such suffering in our world if God exists and is good?", another Chinese friend answered, laughing "Obviously, the gods have no power."


It is with hesitation and trembling, but also with confidence, that my searching heart answers: 'No, it is not God who has no power. It is darkness which has no power. It is death which has no power. It is madness, and war, sickness and terror which are coming to an end, while God in His incomprehensible Goodness will go on forever, carrying we weak and foolish ones who were privileged to be His followers into eternity with Him.' This does not silence the tumult inside of me, or the rage of confusion, or the tears which won't stop falling- the instinctive cry of my heart 'But you can't do that'. But it is a rock which life is built on, a wall against endless falling into nothingness.


A message to another world, what would it look like? I search, and I answer, and I can answer only this: "The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it." "Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, 'He did not make me'? Can the pot say of the potter 'He knows nothing'?" "Much dreaming and many words are meaningless. Therefore, stand in awe of God." Satisfied to wait unsatisfied, resting in acceptance of restlessness, turbulent and soothed, stumbling and upheld, we live in the light of this, or die in the rejection of it. This, at last, is the meaning of man. And so, when torn by the double-edged sword of reality, of beauty and hideousness struggling within one another, we are not disenchanted, but rather enchanted all the more by the Lord who placed Himself in the whirling center of it, and gathered us into the shelter of His arms.

Pre-Culture Shock :-P

If I had to put into words (but which words?) the reasons behind this semester's difficulty, I would have to say that the cause is that every day makes me more vividly conscious of speaking another language- not only in the physical sense, but mentally, culturally, metaphorically. I sit in a room with family or friends, talking with them in English, but in my head, I'm translating to French, with exclamations and scattered words in Chinese. To hear one symphony is exquisite, but three symphonies at once is a cacophany. My ears are ringing at every moment with a cacophany which only I can hear. When I was a five year old entertaining myself by chanting the two or three French words my father taught me in a smug sing-song, when I was eight years old promising with reckless naivette to learn every language in the world, when a three year brush with Latin became a window for me into fairyland, I didn't know what it meant to pursue such a dream over years and years. I still don't. But they never told me, then, what we were giving up- that the price of belonging everywhere was to belong nowhere, that the more we could express to the globe, the less we could explain even the simplest things to the ones left behind at home, what it would feel like to have a head swarming and teeming with thoughts in three tongues, like paints on an artist's palette, mingling and flowing together till colors were formed that exist nowhere in reality, and are invisible to all other eyes. To be fluent in multiple languages has always been for me, the most magical thing in the world, but it's a terribly desolate magic at times- a one way ticket into Narnia. The end, I begin to realize, of persevering through culture shock, and finishing what I've begun, is to dwell on the fringe of multiple universes, and have no part in any of them. After choosing a life of wild adventure, there's no way of trotting cozily back home and returning to normalcy as though nothing had passed.


'That the Lamb who was slain might have the full reward of His suffering', the creations of the culture-creating God choose a lifetime of culture shock gladly. It is because of Him, and not because of this, that we will never be the same. It is a people transformed by joy who choose the agony of transformation across cultures and languages. No retreats- No reserves- No regrets.