Nonetheless

 

Nonetheless!

We’re all mortal. We’re all going to die. That, of course, is hardly news. We all know it.  We may spend most of our lives rarely if ever thinking about it, but we know it. I’m quite old now, 77 years old. And I can tell you that as you age, mortality becomes more and more of a reality in your life. Even if, like me, you don’t presently have a terminal medical diagnosis, you know that one could come every time you see a doctor. None of us ever knows when or how we will die until that terminal diagnosis comes, and even then some doubt probably remains about timing and the possible intervention of other causes of death. And of course, sometimes people die without ever having gotten a terminal diagnosis. They die from an accident. They die from sudden heart failure. They may even be murdered. All of that is true, and it all relates to the ultimate, that is, the last, fact of human life: We’re all mortal. We’re all going to die.

As I advance in years, my increasing age has changed the way I look at people in a couple of ways. I realize more immediately than I used to that every person I see is just at the particular stage of life in which I see them. They weren’t always the way they are now. They will not always be the way they are now. No one is stationary in life, everyone is passing through life. Everyone’s life had a beginning, and everyone’s life will have an end. Indeed, the earth itself will have an end, and it appears that perhaps even the universe will have an end. Nothing is permanent. Everything passes away.

And I have to fight the temptation to think that because everything passes away, nothing means anything. Whatever anyone does, whatever anyone thinks, whatever anyone says, whatever anyone writes, it will all pass away. It will all become ancient history, and will almost certainly be completely forgotten and insignificant ancient history. Then, we hope a very long time from now, humanity will cease to exist, and everything humans ever did will no longer even be ancient history because there will be no one to consider it as such. So why does anything matter? Doesn’t the mortality of all existence, especially the mortality of us human beings, render everything meaningless?

It sure is easy enough to think so, but there are also reasons not to think so. For people of faith, the main reason not to think so is God. If there is a God, and there is, nothing that God has created is insignificant. All creation is significant because it matters to the love that is the ultimate reality, the love we call God.

There is another reason not to think so that should appeal both to people of faith and people of no faith. It is an existential reason. We exist. We have life. We have lives to live. In those lives we live with ourselves and with others who are living with themselves. When we stop thinking about our mortality and focus on our lives rather than our deaths, we find that we matter to ourselves. Most of us, if we’re lucky and loving ourselves, matter to some other people. We and they matter to ourselves and to each other in the only life we have or will ever have, on this earth at least.

We have only two existential choices in life. Each person can either end their life or live their life. Ending one’s life hastens the coming oblivion we all face unless, that is, there really is a God; and there is. To end one’s life, except perhaps as a self-induced euthanasia, is to throw away that which makes you some kind of reality. It is to throw away the only shot at reality we’ll ever have on this earth.

Our other choice is simply to live the life we have for as long as we have it, then let it go when it comes to an end. If we’re going to do it, however, we have to do it despite our mortality and the mortality of everything else in creation. That’s not easy. Mortality is a dominant fact of our lives, and it’s hard to ignore it completely. So let me suggest one way to do it.

The great Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall once wrote that faith is looking reality squarely in the eye and saying “nonetheless.” Hall spoke of faith, but I think we can expand his meaning here to good effect. The ability to look all of reality squarely in the eye and say nonetheless is a good way of understanding not just faith but all of life. Unless we seal ourselves off from the world entirely or just don’t give a damn about other people’s suffering, it is the only choice we have. It is the only way to live.

There’s no way to conform the world to our will. There is no way to make the larger world be what we want it to be, something it just flat isn’t. So we can end our lives, or we can look reality squarely in the eye and say nonetheless. We can say: World, you suck! You are full of violence, hatred, oppression, and injustice. Yet nonetheless. Nonetheless, I will live. I will make of my life what I am able to make of it. It will care about other people’s suffering as much as I am able and can tolerate, but I won’t let it overwhelm me. I won’t let it stop me from living. I won’t let it stop me from finding meaning in my life. I will live knowing that I will die. I will live knowing that everyone I love who hasn’t died already will die some day. I will know that the world lives by its own ways, which are definitely not God’s ways. I will know that suffering will not end on earth.

And I will live nonetheless. It’s the only way I know to live. I know that doing it isn’t easy, but I also know that it is my only choice. So I’ll do. I just hope I can actually do it well.