This month we enter once more into the season of Lent. It is an important time—a chance to stop and reflect on both the fragility and preciousness of life. Officially it is the time when we remember how the story of Jesus Christ includes a harsh crucifixion and burial in a borrowed tomb. Yet it also is the time when we reflect on our own mortality, how we are born into this world and one day will leave it again. In considering the brevity of life, we remind ourselves not to take its daily miracles and opportunities for granted.
As we take stock of our life during the season of Lent, there are big questions we might be brave enough to ask ourselves: In the end, is it all worth it? Does my brief existence make any difference in the grand scheme of things? What exactly is the meaning of life? Those are important questions; however, they’re also questions we cannot answer ourselves. If you sat alone on the top of a snowcapped mountain pondering those deep questions, you would not come up with any satisfying answers for two reasons.
First, we do not fully exist in isolation from others. Sure, we can do things on our own and take pleasure in solitary walks and lifestyles, but we were not created to be autonomous, isolated creatures. We have been made for relationships—for friendship and conversation, for community and intimacy, for shared experiences and social interaction. We can see an image of ourselves in a mirror, but we can only truly see “ourselves” when we are reflected back from another person’s pair of eyes. If you want to know whether “it’s all worth it” and what your place is “in the grand scheme of things,” talk it over with someone else. In that shared conversation (and others like it) you will have the best chance of coming up with an answer that rings true deep inside you.
Second, we (human beings) are not the only players in the game of life. At the very least, we are surrounded by a vibrant ecosystem of plants, animals, microscopic life forms and natural elements, all of which have to be included in our “meaning of life” calculations. Over/above/through it all, there is God, the creator of life. The story of God-in-Christ, that is at the heart of Lent, offers the best framework for grappling with the big questions of life.
When the famed Catholic priest and author Henri Nouwen grieved over the death of his mother, he wrote a very personal letter to his own father (which has since been published under the title Letter of Consolation). It well summarizes the hope and comfort inherent in the season of Lent, both in the honest reflection on the death of Christ and the comforting promise of Easter resurrection. I’ll close with Nouwen’s words:
“If the God who revealed life to us, and whose only desire is to bring us to life, loved us so much that [God] wanted to experience with us the total absurdity of death, then—yes, there must be hope. There must be something more than death. There must be a promise that is not fulfilled in our short existence in this world. Leaving behind the ones you love, the flowers and the trees, the mountains and the oceans, the beauty of art and music, and all the exuberant gifts of life cannot be just the destruction and cruel end of all things. Indeed we have to wait for the third day.”