Samuel Beckett’s great play, Waiting for Godot,
features two tramps who spend the whole play doing nothing except waiting for
Godot, who of course never arrives. For Beckett, to wait for Godot is the
equivalent of believing in God, both are a waste of time. So Beckett in his
plays is describing a world without God and what an unremittingly harsh and
despairing place it is. In another of his plays, Endgame, two of his characters spend the whole play living in
rubbish bins and the last speech in the play sums up Beckett’s sense of what a
world without God is like in these words: “all he knows is hunger, and cold,
and death to crown it all.”
The
philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote: “That Man is the product of causes
which had no prevision of the end that they were achieving; that his origin,
his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental
collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and
feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours
of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness
of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar
system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be
buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not
quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy that
rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths,
only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation be
safely built.”
“Only
on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation be
safely built.” Russell, like Beckett, is saying that life without God is
despair. If we are here by accident, if we are shortly going to die without there being an afterlife
and if whatever we achieve in our short life will also be destroyed soon after
our death, then a life without God offers us no hope just unyielding despair.
Life without God is the equivalent of living in a rubbish bin or of spending
everyday pointlessly waiting for someone who does not arrive.
Jesus
said to Nicodemus that no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born
again (John 3. 1 - 21). He went on to explain that a person is first born physically of human
parents. In our physical, material existence we do not have to believe in God.
We have a genuine choice, we can grow up choosing to believe only in the
material world around us and in our own powers or we can encounter God and grow
in relationship with him. The world in which we live can point us to God but it
does not provide us with absolute proof of his existence. Therefore, we are
free to choose. Although, as we have just seen, to believe only in material
existence is not all that it is often cracked up to be!
For us
to believe in God, to believe that both the material and the spiritual exist
and are intertwined, involves us in coming alive to the spiritual. It therefore
involves a second birth, an awakening to the reality of the spiritual as well
as to the reality of the physical. The physical things around us are easy to
believe in because we can see and touch them. The spiritual, though, is like
the wind - it can’t be seen, although it can be experienced and felt. It is not
immediately apparent in the way that physical realities are and so we have a
free choice about whether or not we respond to the signs of the Spirit in our
world and when we do we are coming alive, being born again, to the spiritual in
our world.
Here
are some of the things in my life that have made me come alive to the spiritual:
When I
stand in snow on a mountain slope viewing a cobalt lake,
I come
alive.
When
the morning mist forms a white sea on the Somerset levels, islanding trees,
I come
alive.
When
my daughter nestles up and hugs me tight,
I come
alive.
When
my wife and I lie, skin touching, sweat mingling in the heat of summer and
passion,
I come
alive.
When a
friend listens with understanding and without advising,
I come
alive.
When I
sing and dance in the echoes of an empty Church,
I come
alive.
When
words cannot express Your praise and I sing in tongues,
I come
alive.
When I
hear the rustle of angel’s wings above me in the eaves,
I come
alive.
I come
alive to endurance
when I
see a hesitant smile form on the face of the Big Issue seller.
I come
alive to pain
when I hear a friend’s story
of depression and unanswered pleading.
I come
alive to patience
when I
see a husband answer again the question from his alzheimered wife.
I come
alive to injustice
when
the Metro contrasts Big Mac obesity
lawsuits with African famine victims.
I come
alive to suffering
when I
see Sutherland’s Crucifixion and read
Endo’s Silence.
I come
alive to grief
when I
remember the aircraft shattered and scattered across Kosovan heights.
I come
alive
when I
am touched and see and hear
the
beautiful or broken, the passionate or poor.
The
mystery or madness
of the
Other in which God
meets
and greets me
and
calls forth the response
that
is love.
I
wonder what it is that makes you come alive to the spiritual in life. Jesus
comes into our world to bring us to life. To wake us up from the despair of
living only in the physical and material. He does this, firstly by showing us
what life is like when it is lived as God intended and secondly, by the
threatened response that we as human beings make to him. To see someone
genuinely living by the Spirit is scary, it turns our understanding of life
upside down. We often respond to people who live life differently to us by
attacking them and that is what we did with Jesus. We focused on the physical, we
nailed his hands and feet to a cross of wood. As Moses lifted up the bronze
snake in the wilderness, just so was the Son of Man lifted up. We thought that
by killing him physically we were doing away with the threat he posed to our
material way of life.
But
God is greater than our materialism and he loves us too much for that to be the
end and so he raised his Son from death that we might be saved from material
existence and come alive to the Spirit of God himself.
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Peter, Paul & Mary - Light One Candle.
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