He saw too much hardship. He died too young. He was 7 years old, far too young for a
funeral. How can those he left behind
process such a tragedy?
It is customary at funerals to give
a eulogy, a recounting of the life of the dearly departed. The design of such a speech is to celebrate the
deceased by memorializing the events if his time on earth. Through this
narrative, we hope to illuminate the meaning of the loved one’s life. But what if the deceased has felt so much
pain and experienced so much evil, that it is hard to see the meaning through
the suffering? How do we see the good
when it is wrapped in darkness? Perhaps this is the true purpose of a eulogy. By
recounting the good despite the bad, perhaps we will find meaning of the young
boy’s life:
“You were born into poverty and
grew up in a broken home. You spent your early years lonely and afraid. While you could not care for yourself, you
had no one else to care for you. You were separated from your family and sent
to a children’s home to find a better life.
As stability was within your grasp, cancer ripped it away. You fought hard, enduring years of treatment,
and you won many battles. You even
thought you had it beat, you thought it was gone, the doctors told you so, and
yet the cancer returned, more vicious and deadly than before. As the hopelessness grew, you soon found an
army of friends, family, doctors, and nurses beside you. The struggle was fierce;
you fought to the point of breaking. You
endured many things that kids your age should never have to endure. Good news and the promise of victory again gave
way to defeat. The cancer again
returned, and this time there was nothing we could do. The cancer slowly took you from us, and now
you are gone.
Despite these trials, the good that
we can recount about your life is plentiful.
I knew you briefly, but I quickly learned your smile could light up a
room and your joy, when it shined through the pain, was as infectious as it was
evident. You were resilient, able to endure
treatments designed to push your body to the brink of collapse. You were obedient to your foster parents,
always trusting in their guidance and ever respectful of their wishes. You loved well and loved much, always
thinking of the wellbeing of your friends and family. You were imaginative, playful, and free
spirited; it was very clear the cage your body had become could not adequately
contain your lively soul. Moreover, you had a community around you that loved
you dearly. You meant the world to your brothers and sisters, caretakers, and
foster parents at the Home. You were
also always faithful to your God, believing in him to the very end for hope,
strength, and salvation. All of these
examples illustrate the undeniable fact that while your body slowly
deteriorated, your soul and your spirit were beautifully alive. Those of us you left behind will forever
cherish these memories of how you have impacted our lives…”
…Is this
where the eulogy ends? I have recounted the good of his life and assured him I
will forever hold fond memories. Is the
meaning of his life the memories we shared? Yet I cannot keep the immense pain
he have experienced from seeping into the spaces between the memories,
dampening their color and obscuring their light. I find myself, despite these good things,
pressing my questions: Why so much suffering? What is the meaning of it all?
There are
those who see only the material world and declare there is no ultimate meaning. Richard Dawkins expresses this sentiment when
he says, “the universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should
expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing
but pitiless indifference” (River Out of Eden, 1996). He believed that the
material world is all there is to existence, so there was no more meaning than
that which we can create within ourselves.
Such a view can offer someone nothing more than a recounting of a life’s
events yielding a subjective assessment of its significance. The value of a life is in the eye of the
observer as he decides what the historical data of a life means. As the French existentialist philosopher
Jean-Paul Sartre declares, “One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet,
life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are
nothing other than your life” (No Exit, 1944).
So is my dear friend truly nothing
other than the sum of the events of his life? What if it’s characterized by so
much suffering as his was? Was it still worth living? There exist no scales on
which I could begin to weigh such values, yet confined to the pitiless,
indifferent world, this is exactly what we must do. So bounded by naturalism,
significance cannot extend beyond an observer’s ability to evaluate a life. As the remembrance of his existence passes,
then so does his significance. We can exalt our finite importance as high as
humanly possible, and yet in the end it cannot escape the gravitational pull of
meaningless oblivion. Surely there is more to life than this.
For those
of us who claim a relationship with a transcendental God, there is more. For if God exists beyond the
natural world, and if he is a personal being with values and preferences, then
anything that God values is imbued with a transcendental significance. Because
of the nature of God, this significance is eternal, immutable, and infinite. It is incomparable to any that we know in the
natural world. While there is certainly some significance in human
accomplishments and relationships, it is a finite, fluctuant, and temporally
limited sort. If you look for this type of human significance juxtaposed
against God’s infinity, it will be hard to see.
From this it follows that if God
values us, then we have such a transcendental
significance. But how are we to know if God values us? Earlier, I said that a
eulogy is a speech of praise meant to articulate a person’s value. The word “eulogy” comes from the Greek “eulogia”, which can mean either
“praise; good or fine language” or “blessing”. Note that our modern word for eulogy comes
from the Greek word for blessing. So a
euology can be thought of as a final blessing for the dead. In the New
Testament we find that God’s blessing, his eulogia,
is directed towards us.
Land that drinks in
the rain often falling on it and that produces a crop useful to those for whom
it is farmed receives the blessing of God.
Hebrews 6:7
Much can be said of this verse about the nature of suffering
and its relationship to a benevolent, omnipotent God, but I haven’t the space
for adequate treatment in this meditation.
For our purposes, let us note that our lives are described as “land that
drinks the rain”. Now rain can either be good or evil, nourishing
or destructive, depending on the context.
These rains are the events of our life.
As land cannot control the location or amount of rain that falls on it,
so we too cannot control most of what comes to pass for us. Thus exposed to the tumult of nature, we must
endure the experience of reality as it comes, with the hope that something
redemptive exists beyond the horizon of this land with its erosive forces.
Beyond the
horizon, we find God. He promises to
bless us, to articulate our significance through his own eulogia of us. What he asks of us is to produce a crop, in this
context meaning knowledge, faith, and joy in Christ Jesus. Here we see our
lives can have a transcendental significance to him. The rain that falls may be an overwhelming flood. Someone may experience only suffering in his
life, and yet through God, he has eternal significance. Regardless of our
subjective evaluation of our lives, we are
significant because God has declared it to be so through his eternal,
unchanging, and ultimate evaluation of us.
There is
one final component of how God values us that must be mentioned. He does not see us as though he were watching
a comedic movie or a tragic play. God is
not a mere spectator of our lives. He
intimately understands us through Jesus Christ, who has experienced the full
breadth of evil, pain, and suffering.
Christ himself drank the rain through his life, death and resurrection. So
we can be confident that whatever our suffering, be it from pain, loneliness,
cancer, rape, or torture, He who declares us eternally significant understands
its cost because he paid it himself.
So for my
young friend who suffered so much, who died, and who was faithful to his God to
the end, let us see the significance of his life through God’s eulogia for him:
“He knows the overwhelming pain of your life because He was
there. Through the sleepless nights, the
loneliness, the abandonment, He was there.
Through the diagnosis, the breaking of your body, the poisonous
treatments, He was there. Through the
love of your family, the support of your friends, the joys of your life, He was
there. Through all of it, He was there
because you are infinitely valuable to Him.
You are so much more than the sum of the events of your life. Your
significance to Him extends beyond life, death or time and into eternity. You have drunk the rain and now you may
forever rest in His eternal delight.”
