Curious History

In a special documentary, a major television network investigated the beginnings of Christianity and the influence of the apostle Paul in spreading the message of Christ. The narrator noted his fascination with the historical figure, commenting that if not for the voice of Paul, it is “unlikely that the movement Jesus founded would have survived beyond the first century.” Yet of the resurrection of Christ he also noted, “Something must have happened, otherwise it’s hard to explain how Jesus’s story endured for so long.”

Why has the story of Christ endured? Has it survived through the centuries because of effective speakers in antiquity? Has it endured, as Sigmund Freud argued, because it is a story that fulfills wishes, or as Friedrich Nietzsche attested, because it masks and medicates our disgust of life? Has the story of Christ endured because something really happened after Jesus’s body was taken down from the Cross or was it only the clever marketing of ardent followers?

We live in an age where religion is examined with the goal of finding a religion, or a combination of religions, that best suits our lives and lifestyles. We are intrigued by characters in history like Jesus and Paul, Buddha and Gandhi. We look at their lives and rightly determine their influence in history—the radical life and message of Christ, the fervor with which Paul spread the story of Christianity, the passion of Buddha, the social awareness of Gandhi. But far too often, our fascination stops there, comfortably and confidently keeping the events of history at a distance or mingling them all together as one and the same.

C.S. Lewis wrote often of “the great cataract of nonsense” that blinds us to knowledge of earlier times and keeps us content with history in pieces. He was talking about the common tendency to treat the voices of history with a certain level of incredulity and inferiority—even if with a pleasant curiosity all the same. Elsewhere, he called it chronological snobbery, a tendency to concern oneself primarily with present sources while dissecting history as we please. Yet to do so, warned Lewis, is to walk unaware of the cataracts through which we see the world today. Far better is the mind that truly considers the past, allowing its lessons to interact with the army of voices that battle for our allegiance. For a person who has lived thoroughly in many eras is far less likely to be deceived by the errors of his or her own age.

We must be wary, then, among other things, of assuming the earliest followers of Christ thought resurrection a reasonable phenomenon or miracles a natural occurrence. They didn’t. Investigating the life of Paul, we might ask why a once fearful persecutor of Christ’s followers was suddenly willing to die for the story he carried around the world, testifying to this very event that split history. Investigating the enduring story of Christ, we might ask why the once timid and frightened disciples were abruptly transformed into bold witnesses. What happened that led countless Jews and many others to dramatically change directions in life and in lifestyle? That something incredible happened is not a difficult conclusion at which to arrive. It takes far greater faith to conclude otherwise.

A friend of mine is fond of saying that truth is something you can hang your hat on. Even as we struggle to see it today, her words communicate a reality Jesus’s disciples knew well. The resurrection was shocking in its real-ness; it was an event they found dependable and enduring. It was not for them like the latest scandal that grabs our curiosity and passes with the next big thing. It is solid and it is real. The disciples and the apostle Paul were transformed by seeing Jesus alive again—a phenomenon that would be just as unthinkable to ancient minds as it would be for us today. In fact, even the most hesitant among them, and the most unlikely of followers, found the resurrected Christ an irrefutable reality. Comfort was irrelevant, it went far beyond curiosity, and personal preference was not a consideration. They could not deny who stood in front of them. Jesus was alive. And they went to their deaths talking about it.

It seems to me that the story of Christ has endured for innumerable reasons: because in the fullness of time God indeed sent his Son; because knowingly Jesus walked to the Cross and into the hands of those who didn’t know what they were doing; because something really happened after his body was laid in the tomb; and because with great power and with God’s Spirit, the apostles continued to testify of the events they saw. What if the story of Christ remains today simply because it is true?

Dark Riddles

In 1952 philosopher Mortimer Adler co-edited a fifty-five volume series for Encyclopedia Britannica titled The Great Books of the Western World. Overseeing a staff of ninety, the editors created a diverse index of topics containing selections from many of the finest thinkers in the history of Western Civilization. Upon completion, Adler was asked why the work included more pages under the subject of God than any other topic. He replied matter-of-factly that it was because more consequences for life and action follow from the affirmation or denial of God than from any other basic question.

What we do with the subject of God is a far-reaching choice, defining life, informing death, shaping everything. The one who lives as though there is no God lives quite differently than the one who lives confidently that there is a God. It is a subject of consequence because it reaches everything and everyone; whether mindfully or indifferently, a decision is always made.

Through avenues of every emotion known to humankind, the Psalms make the astounding claim that God not only exists, but that God is present and can be found. In victory and defeat, illness and poverty, health and prosperity, the psalmist maintains that it is God who gives all of life meaning, that God alone answers the deepest and darkest questions of life whether in the depths or from the highest vantage.

Calling to the multitudes, crossing lines of status and allegiance, the psalmist pleads for care regarding a subject that concerns all. Like Adler, the psalmist makes it clear that what is being communicating is of consequence. “Hear this, all you peoples; listen, all who live in this world, both low and high, rich and poor together… I will incline my ear to a proverb; I will solve my riddle to the music of the harp.”(1) This riddle the psalmist wants to bring to the attention of all is a riddle forever before humankind. It is a riddle to which all must diligently attend but many wholeheartedly ignore.  Fittingly, the Hebrew word for “riddle” has also been translated “dark saying” or “difficult question.”

The psalmist continues, “When we look at the wise, they die; fool and dolt perish together and leave their wealth to others. Their graves are their homes for ever, their dwelling-places to all generations, though they named lands their own. Mortals cannot abide in their pomp; they are like the animals that perish.”

Most of us go about life as if we know what we are doing, but what is the purpose of it all? Some accumulate wealth, others remain in poverty, some live well and others live wickedly, but all are destined for the grave. The one who claims there is no God in life, so claims emptiness in death. But then is life also empty? Again we return to the riddle of the psalmist: What, then, is the point of it all?

Solving the riddles of life and death, like religion and politics at a social gathering, means, for many, changing the subject. As Woody Allen once quipped, “It’s not that I am afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” But that our lives are fleeting awakens a sense of urgency, a sense of inquiry. That life is fleeting, though inarguably full of meaning, is either a peculiar contradiction or a hint that there is more to come.

Even so, for the Christian death remains something of a mystery. For we know that death is the last great door through which we must walk, the mark of a broken world. Yet we know also that through death God has declared the end of that broken hold on our lives, that the one who loses his life will save it, and that by Christ’s death the Spirit works Christ’s life in us. As C.S. Lewis once said of the Christian, “Of all men, we hope most of death; yet nothing will reconcile us to…its ‘unnaturalness.’ We know that we were not made for it; we know how it crept into our destiny as an intruder; and we know Who has defeated it.” In the riddle of life and death the psalmist expounds this certainty of God’s action. “But God will ransom my soul from the power of the grave, for he will receive me.”

Good People

An editorial from The Wall Street Journal some years ago still comes to mind as I occasionally watch the news. The writer was describing host Larry King’s unsettling interview of a father whose wife drowned each of their five children. Peering restlessly at the television before him, the writer believed he saw not only a disturbing interview, but a rare glimpse into the culture at large. As the father spoke of his unwavering support for his wife on national television, the mother who committed the crimes sat in a courtroom thousands of miles away receiving her sentence for the murders of their five children at that very moment. When asked how he thought his wife would do in prison, he replied that she’d do just fine, adding, “She’s a good woman.”

But the writer’s angst went deeper than his discomfort over the descriptor of the mother as good, a term to which many predictably objected the following day. He noted, rather, his discomfort over the fact that the interview itself was conducted with the same work principle of any another day in the life of modern television reporting: “Interview anyone, ask anything.” To him, that the father was even there, that Larry asked, and that we looked on, bordered a sick voyeurism. How could we call any of it good? He concluded powerfully, “There are moments when one wants to go out to the street, stare up at the stars in the dark sky and admit, I don’t get it anymore… People keep looking for reasons inside this case. I keep wondering what’s happening to all the rest of us, soaking up these recurring, weird events from our living rooms.”(1)

The writer makes an observation many of us are afraid to make when it comes to delving out goodness around us: Is there not something unsettling about our misuse of the definition of good? Indeed, what does it mean to be good? Who decides if a person is actually good? The courts? A television audience? Larry King? And when do those of us watching move from sincere concern to shameless curiosity?

Is there an inherent determiner for naming something good? Can it really arise from no where? And if we use it broadly enough will we get to the point when the word itself is void of meaning? Perhaps we already have.

A strikingly similar question was voiced thousands of years ago in a conversation between two men—one, a rich young person; the other, a rabbi from Nazareth known for his strange stories and gossip-worthy surprises. The young man approached Jesus with a pressing question, unthinkingly addressing him as “Good teacher” before muttering out the inquiry. But Jesus didn’t get past the title. “Why do you call me good?” he asked. “Isn’t no one good but God alone?”(2)

Perhaps as unthinkingly as the rich young ruler, countless minds have observed for years that Jesus was a good man. We would in fact be hard-pressed to find people today who would be comfortable calling Jesus a bad man or anything less than a good person. But indeed, what do we mean by good?

In a world where ideas creep slowly, making subtle changes that go unnoticed until havoc has been wreaked and we are left like this author wondering what is happening, we do well to ask ourselves what we mean and where it comes from.  G.K. Chesterton warned us several decades ago that we were tearing fences down before inquiring as to why they were up in the first place. And Jesus more than two thousand years ago inquired as to our very use of the word good: If this world is little more than a happy accident, why do you call me good? Why do you call anything good? No one is good except God alone. His statement was not meant to make us all feel like bad people. In fact it is interesting that we so strongly desire to call people good and believe that a generic, groundless goodness will suffice. But Jesus powerfully probes the worldview that assigns goodness without a foundation. What does it mean to be good? Who decides? And does a worldview without a moral God have any basis for speaking of goodness in the first place? Jesus suggests it does not. For God gives us the very meaning of goodness. God alone is the cause and source of all that is good.

How Can I Believe in God and Pain?

“How do you expect me to believe in God,” asked Woody Allen, “when only last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of my electric type-writer?”

For a while now, at least in the Western world, the existence of any form of pain, suffering, or evil has been regarded as evidence for the non-existence of God. If a good God existed, people reason, these things would not. But they do and, therefore, God does not.

My job takes me around many different parts of the world in order to answer people’s questions about the Christian faith. I find it fascinating that I have never been asked this question in India, a country that certainly knows a lot more about suffering than many of us in the West. I find it even more intriguing that Christians who write books in situations where they have known unspeakable torment because of the gospel do not normally raise this as an issue for themselves either. Why?

There are so many ways in which questions concerning pain can be raised. It can be raised because of personal loss and suffering or because of a personal interest in the issue of theodicy, to name but two. However, regardless of the way the question is raised, it normally comes down to a moral complaint against God. “How could you allow this to happen?” The complaint is against God’s moral character. “Can I really trust God if I see this happen?” But if you are sure that you can trust God, regardless of the pain you find yourself in, there is no temptation to turn you away, as you realize God is the only one who can help.

Firstly, let’s deal with the argument against God’s existence. Ravi Zacharias has dealt with this thoroughly in his book Can Man Live Without God. If you argue from the existence of evil to the non-existence of God, you are assuming the existence of an absolute moral law in order for your argument to work. But if there is such a law this would also mean that there is such a God, since God is the only one who could give us such a law. And if there is such a God to give us this law, then the argument itself is flawed, since you have had to assume the existence of God in order to argue that God doesn’t exist. It is an attempt to invoke the existence of an absolute moral law without invoking the existence of an absolute moral law giver, and it cannot be done.

Secondly, we must also ask the question: What would it take to create a loving world void of evil? A world in which love is capable of meaningful expression and experience would also imply a world in which there is choice. If someone tells you that they love you, those words mean something because they are freely given. If you learned that someone had told you they loved you but that they had been forced to say it, their words would not mean very much. Thus, if we want to speak of a loving world, we must also speak of a world in which choices are exercised. And in such a world, there is also the possibility of choosing a course of action that is not loving, i.e. evil.

While these observations are helpful in getting at the heart of contradictions often behind the questions of God and suffering, I do not think they get at the heart of the questions as people most commonly ask, namely: Can I trust God even when faced with great evil? Is God morally trustworthy? Can I trust God even if I don’t understand what is happening?

These are profound questions, and whole books could be written about them. But I will offer one more thought. Maybe the reason we question God’s moral character when bad things happen is that we live our lives largely independent from God on a daily basis. In other words, we struggle to trust God in times of trouble because we do not really trust God when things are going well. Maybe we struggle with suffering so much in the West because we are so comfortable most of the time that we feel we don’t need God. We do not rely on God on a daily basis, and so we do not really know God. When suffering comes along, therefore, it is not so much that it takes us away from God, but that it reveals to us that we have not really been close to God in the first place.

As I said earlier, I have never been asked questions about God and suffering when I am travelling in countries riddled with the realities of it. In fact, when I visit churches in parts of the world where they are faced daily with horrific affliction, I normally leave inspired. They trust God in everything, even when things are going well. When times are hard, they cling to God because they have already learned to trust. They have learned that God does not change, even when our circumstances have.

Judge and Jury

Over a period of several weeks of precious elementary school recesses, my circle of fellow fourth-grade friends set aside dodge-ball matches and swing-sets in order to go to court. There had been a rather serious disagreement between two of the girls in our larger group of friends and sides were being drawn as quickly as notes could be passed between desks. Before things got any worse, the humanitarian among us reasoned that we had to intervene. It was decided that we would create a makeshift courtroom to get to the bottom of the mess. One of my friends was appointed judge; others were chosen to be witnesses or note-takers, prosecutor, defendant, or bailiff. I don’t think we thought any of it was half as silly as it sounds now. In our minds we were doing what adults did to get at the truth. In the end, however, it became one of those defining moments where one wakes from the innocence of childhood to find the world not as simple as first thought and the human heart capable of horrific things. The experience is strangely reminiscent of William Golding’s stranded children in The Lord of the Flies.

In our courtroom I was called to be a witness. I was to tell the judge what I saw and what I knew to be true. I did so, and it felt like we were getting somewhere. But then another witness was called who insisted that she saw something completely different, and that I, in fact, was lying. I was heartbroken and confused. Sides were drawn, cases sharpened. As the days went by we became increasingly frustrated and vindictive. What we thought would be a simple solution that would lead us to truth and resolution became a hurtful, tangled mess of motive and slander and manipulation—so much so, that a teacher intervened and our courtroom was forever adjourned. Among other things, I decided I could not go into law.

I was reminded of this childish scene recently while reading the eyewitness Mark’s account of the trial of Christ before the council of religious leaders. Seized from the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was taken to the courtyard. Peter followed from a distance and watched among the guards as the trial unraveled. Mark imparts, “The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death, but they did not find any. Many testified falsely against him, but their statements did not agree. Then some stood up and gave this false testimony against him: We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this man-made temple and in three days will build another, not made by man.’ Yet even then their testimony did not agree.”(1)

What kind of a courtroom would this make? The expert witnesses from the same side are contradicting each other. The only thing they seem to agree on is that Jesus should be on trial. And yet, like a prosecuting attorney with an airtight case, the high priest exclaims: “Answer these charges!” In the middle of the chaos of conflicting words and motives, the high priest stood up and faced Jesus: “Have you no answer to make? What is it that these men testify against you?” Jesus was kind for not replying: “If you don’t even know, why should I have to make sense of all of that?” But Jesus remained silent and made no answer.

In the midst of courtrooms such as these, it seems appropriate to pause in that silence. For though accusing crowds put him to death more than two thousand years ago, he has been on trial ever since. Like the court scene I was a part of as a child, we continue to place him before our makeshift gavels and make a mockery of truth and testimony. I know many moments when armed with fiery questions I have forced God to take the stand. My words likely made as little sense as Jesus’s accusers that day.

But the culminating events of Jesus’s life on earth depict a very surprising turn of judge and jury. From the waving of palm branches to waving fists demanding crucifixion, our trials of God are fickle. But what if we discover, as did many within these crowds, that it is we who live our lives before the courts? Like Peter, we might follow Jesus at a distance, looking in on a great trial, sometimes participating, sometimes denying him, sometimes seeing our role and with a shock of recognition, falling on our knees, and finding ourselves in a court reversed: the Judge before us, and our advocate—the one we’ve accused—entering our plea. Might it be in such a position that we make our verdict.

Pilgrimage

In the early fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer penned The Canterbury Tales, a sometimes bawdy, often hilarious, and always sharply critical satire on the religious folk of his day. The “tales” of the pilgrims make up the content of the story. Despite their common path of pilgrimage to Canterbury, Chaucer’s Christian characters are largely examples of the corruption and dissolute living that had overtaken virtue in the church of his time. However, in the case of “The Parson’s Tale,” Chaucer gives us an extended prose narrative intended to instruct the pilgrims in Christian morality. This tale, by contrast, represented the kind of Christianity Chaucer espoused, and so he gives the Parson the last word.(1)

The Parson’s Tale presents a theological treatise on repentance and how to overcome the “seven deadly sins” with the virtues of the spiritual life. In particular, the parson offers magnanimity as the virtue to combat the vice of acedia. Acedia was considered one of the most serious of sins. It manifested itself in spiritual despair, and more significantly embodied the temptation to give up caring about anything truly important. The early Christian monastics believed that acedia led to spiritual impotence and smallness of heart. Spiritual impotence would allow vice to flourish and virtue to languish, not because vice was purposely chosen or intentionally entered into, but because spiritual lassitude desiccated one’s concern to be virtuous.

Is it any different in our own day? Despair distracts many spiritual pilgrims from finding their way, and maybe even some Christian pilgrims from following the way of Jesus. Author Kathleen Norris warns that acedia “is known to foster excessive self-justification, as well as a casual yet implacable judgmentalism toward others,” and readily lends itself to this process of spiritual apathy.(2)

Magnanimity, by contrast, is found in a person who is generous of spirit, caring, and gracious in forgiveness. Chaucer, through the voice of the Parson, warns that “a great heart is needed against acedia, lest it swallow up the soul.” A great heart is a magnanimous heart full of generosity and graciousness, eager to forgive. Acedia, on the other hand, makes hearts small, consumed not with care for the things God cares for, but devoured by things that do not matter at all.

Acedia further makes it easy for me to pluck the speck out of my sister’s eye while I ignore the log in my own. This propensity to see others as the primary problem, while elevating one’s own self is a clear sign that acedia has taken root in one’s life. On the contrary, magnanimity, as Norris notes, “requires creativity to recognize our faults, and to discern virtues in those we would rather disdain. Forgiveness demands close attention, flexibility, and stringent self-assessment, faculties that are hard to come by as we careen blindly into the twenty-first century, and are increasingly asked to choose information over knowledge, theory over experience, and certainty over ambiguity.”(3)

Like the Parson’s Tale, Jesus shared many tales; parables regarding the virtuous life. Jesus was inviting those who heard his story to respond by living a kingdom-life here and now. When invited to the house of a Pharisee one evening, a woman who was known to be a sinner entered the house and wept at Jesus’s feet, anointing them with her tears and perfume, and wiping his feet with her hair. But in Jesus’s day, a man would not allow a woman to touch him, let alone a woman who was a known sinner. The Pharisee who invited Jesus knew this, and he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet he would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching him” (Luke 7:39). Jesus then tells the tale of two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii and the other fifty. Which of them, Jesus asks, when forgiven their debt, would love the moneylender more? The Pharisee replies that the one who owed more would love more. Jesus then delivers the last line of the tale: “For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little” (Luke 7:47).

Jesus understood how magnanimity pushed beyond a small, acedic heart. There will always be idle pilgrims on the way to vacant Canterburys missing the true heart of the pilgrimage. But those who respond to the tale as told by Jesus find their hearts opened and enlarged, discovering on the way that the pilgrimage of magnanimity has pointed toward home in the Kingdom.

Something Understood

In an essay titled “Meditation in a Toolshed,” C.S. Lewis describes a scene from within a darkened shed. The sun was brilliantly shining outside, yet from the inside only a small sunbeam could be seen through a crack at the top of the door. Everything was pitch-black except for the prominent beam of light, by which he could see flecks of dust floating about.  Writes Lewis:

“I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it. Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes.  Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving in the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.”(1)

Each time I come to the gospel accounts of the woman with the alabaster jar, I notice something similar. “Do you see this woman?” Jesus asks, as if he is speaking as much to me as the guests around the table. With a jar of costly perfume, she had anointed the feet of Christ with fragrance and tears. She then endured the criticism of those around her because she alone saw the one in front of them. While the dinner crowd was sitting in the dark about Jesus, the woman was peering in the light of understanding. What she saw invoked tears of recognition, sacrifice, and much love. Gazing along the beam and at the beam are quite different ways of seeing.

The late seventeenth century poet George Herbert once described prayer as “the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage.” At those words I picture the woman with her broken alabaster jar, wiping the dusty, fragrant feet of Christ with her hair. Pouring out the expensive nard, she seemed to pour out her soul. Fittingly, Herbert concludes his grand description of prayer as “something understood.”

The woman with the alabaster jar not only saw the Christ when others did not, Christ saw her when others could not see past her reputation. “Do you see this woman?” Jesus asked while the others were questioning her actions past and present. “I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she loved much.”(2) Her soul’s cry was heard; she herself was understood.

There are many ways of looking at Jesus: good man, historical character, interesting teacher, one who sees, one who hears, one who loves. At any point, we could easily walk away feeling like we have seen everything we need to see. When in fact, we may have seen very little. The risk of looking again may well change everything.

 

“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”

I’m at an age in life when enough of it has passed that I can make some comparisons. The last five to ten years have been strange. I recently read some essays by Timothy Garton Ash about the period he calls the decade with “no name”—the turn of the millennium to the present. It is indeed a decade in which we have seen some extraordinary events, some dreadful acts of violence, an ongoing range of catastrophes, and some of the worst economic and moral failures that burst the bubble of unending prosperity and further shuttered confidence in many of our institutions.

Many years ago, the Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote of “the unbearable lightness of being.” Like many others, he sensed the hollowing out of existence, the thinning out of life, the emptying of meaning that seems to occur under modern conditions. One friend of mine calls this “cultural vaporization.” The thing is, this is not some vague idea or esoteric notion. It is a description of how life is really being perceived.

Many people today seem convinced that the point of life is that there is no point. We face what Nietzsche call “Das Nichte”—or, the nothing. Our public philosophy tells us that we are the result of blind force plus chance and/or necessity. Yet our movies are filled with romantic longings, visions of other worlds, the hunger for transcendence, and love stories between vampires or other worlds where there is a greater unity of life and being. In other words, we face a massive contradiction between what one set of experts tells us is real and what many artists compel us to hope for and reflect on. And somewhere in the middle are our own, normal, day-to-day lives.

Chance and choice: is that it? Does all of life come down to this? A roll of the dice, the power of freedom, and the lottery of life? Many centuries ago, an honest voice cried, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). Why? He was reflecting on life. He was seeking happiness. He sought justice, he sought satisfaction, he sought the meaning of it all. And his journey was conducted under the sun—in other words, he looked at life from within life. It was as Derek Kidner called it “a world without windows.”

However, his observations do not end there. This book opens us to another perspective, one in which there is a God, and a God that sees, knows, and acts. The book does not descend into some simple resolution of life’s hard problems nor its on-going ambiguities. But what it does do is add something. It adds a presence, it includes a perspective, it invites reflection: If there is more to life than meets the eye, more than can be measured or managed by the senses, then this indeed makes a big difference today.

With such a difference, weight or weightiness would be restored. Absence would be filled, space would be occupied, and meaninglessness confronted. As Nietzsche wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” This is a far cry from the new atheists who invite us to shed the childish and wicked delusions of whys and hows and accept emptiness. But what if when the God who is there and is not silent is a God of grace, a God of love, and a God of justice? To those empty, confused, or seeking, the unbearable lightness of being can be met in the abundance of his fullness, a gift by the way of grace, not effort!