Mortality, and death, are as much a part of life as growing up. We often forget, with death and sickness hidden so effectively from us, allowing us to live in a world of our own comfortable pleasures and pursuits and securities, how high and desperate the stakes really are. So much of how we live is based around either avoiding that truth (the modern method) or finding meaning in it (the ancient method). How we face death is as important as how we face life. And every worldview and rubric of meaning is staggered momentarily by its arrival. How well a belief system holds up to the reality of life as seen in its ending, without trying to deny it, looking it full in the face, is a measure of how well it truly addresses the human reality. Denying the need for tears is as pointless as denying the value of hope.

As for myself, what do I hope for? I don’t know. We all have to go into that final passageway alone, without the comfort of companions or a way to send word back. We can only bring two things. Our belief, based I on our lives, of what sort of place the world is and what sort of things humans are. And your own final relationship to that belief. If we are to find something awaiting us or not, it will not because reality was some nice little thing convenient to us and amenable to our desires and preferences and prejudices. It will be because it was something great and terrible and far beyond our scope, whatever the outcome. Little philosophies that make God our pet and the subject of our study and criticism will hardly stand at such a day. Only appropriate objects of either worship or hatred will be sufficient to survive such a day or produce such results.

Eradication or salvation will not be produced by such milquetoast philosophies and theologies as much of the modern world pursues. The old faiths had, at least, real blood in them, because they had to sustain humanity through the inescapable reality of the human condition, which I think the ancients may have appreciated far better than we do, rather than less. The demands placed on them and on their philosophies were far greater, whereas the comfort of our environment today makes us consider all such great differences of belief and meaning and strategy for confronting life moot, a trifle, a quibbling over extraneous and interchangable follies.

Somewhere in my own writings I have explored the problem of faith. I think the fundamental questions facing humans are, what do you make of life, is there any transcendent ideal, is there any sense to it, and what is your reaction to it if there is? I don’t think there really is any way out of that dilemma. If there had been, if there was a clear path to a definite answer either way I flatter myself that I would have found and taken it. I dug deep into the underpinnings of science, philosophy, and the human heart. And I could not find any way to prove or force one conclusion or another.

You simply have to choose which you will believe, and then choose how you will live in light of your choice. I don’t think that Bertrand Russell’s response to God, that if he ever meets him he will say there wasn’t enough evidence, will fly. For a while I thought it might, but now I don’t think it can. Because that’s the point. There are two equally valid (and I truly mean that) interpretations. And neither can leave you fully comfortable with your view of the human experience. Both require a decision of faith. I don’t mean of irrationality. But a point of investment where you have to trust your weight to something by choice and not because you are compelled. What sort of universe would demand that of you, if it is not theistic? What sort of God would demand that of you, if the universe is not random material meaninglessness? Both are very good questions.

The problem is, once you’ve accepted an answer, that answer has a call on you. You have to submit yourself to something bigger than yourself and try to learn from it and live within it. And that’s not easily done. We would much rather God or the universe be something smaller that fits our scale and preferences more. Having considered the options in depth, and I mean seriously in depth, I think the best conclusion for belief I can come to is traditional Christian belief. And if it is indeed true about the underlying fabric of reality, then the world is indeed a strange and astounding place. But I think that holds true, whatever position you take. I simply don’t find much worth believing, since my belief matters little and means less in the chance materialist universe, in that conception of reality.

But I also don’t find any belief system other than Christianity that is big enough or contains enough of the fabric of human experience in all its terrible complexity, and the world and life in it in all its complexity, that can stand up to materialism. I think materialism is so strong, so powerful, that its gravity swallows up almost every other philosophical and theological position you could take, especially the majority of the modern half-baked conceptions of religion and faith that build themselves on such a weak approach to the true terror and immensity of materialism. Their gods are so small they could fit in your pocket, because they’re hardly ever larger than me, myself.

I know from experience and will prove by the experience of death that I am far too small a thing to stand up to the crushing weight of reality and its burdens. Only a God greater and more wonderful and terrible than all the things we find in the world could be big enough to contain it. Christians are meant to be little Christs, but more often make of Christ a little them. A Jesus who is a little you will never make enough out of you to save you from the crashing weight of finitude and mortality and brokenness and vulnerability that the material world is going to bring down on you.

That is why all evolved and modernised and sanitized and improved versions of the Christian faith have always seemed so reprehensible to me, so inadequate. They carve down God and the faith to contain only what is acceptable to them and what fits neatly into their current personal or cultural preferences. And so they preclude the possibility of ever having to learn and grow beyond their own time and personality and preferences and popular opinions.

Not that I’ve ever been a traditionalist or a follower or joiner. I have a hatred of assumed agreement and authority. But the containment and confinement of Christianity is, I deem, a fault of every age and every personality and approach. Conservative or liberal. One side seeks to preserve meaning and so confines it, the other seeks to discover meaning and so breaks down its walls, letting it spill all over the place and be contaminated by our own desires for what shape we wish it to take.

I think the best test of how close you are to actual wisdom, how close you are to the terrible intersection of truths, is when it isn’t easy to predict merely from your tribe what your ideas about a matter will be. My wife picked me partly because I had my own ideas about things. I have a personality that provides, perhaps, some extra insulation against ideological possession. I’m too open, as well as too conflicted, to sit comfortably in any position without desiring in some way to advocate for its opposite. I can’t fit in with conservatives without constantly seeing problems, and I do much the same among the liberals. And I don’t t

Sadly it seems the majority of this letter was lost when my phone began to malfunction, just before I had to replace it. Advice and wisdom for my children were included, my guesses about what the greatest challenges they as people would face, what challenges in themselves most stood in the way of their happiness and what their best qualities to strengthen them were. I included a great deal more about my personal outlook on faith and life and my own person conclusions about life and how to navigate it. My own best pitch for what I actually, at my deepest core that I am loathe to reveal, believe. Sadly, all that seems to have gone. There should have been four separate entries, but only two survived. Hours of my most difficult and honest work that is not easily revived. Maybe someday I’ll come back to it again. Unfortunately, it’s the personal stuff that seems to be completely gone. All my words to my children. That grieves me. But maybe, when I have it in me, I’ll try again.