Embracing Absurdity

Life on this earth is beautiful even if tragically temporary.

Hey everyone. I hope you’re doing well. I’ve been doing a good bit of writing lately, just not here in the newsletter. Though I do have a couple of pieces in progress for this place and hope to get them out to you in the next couple of weeks.

This past Sunday The Gospel Coalition posted an article I wrote for them earlier this summer. Below is a bit of an excerpt from it and an opportunity to read the rest at their place.

Have a great Wednesday.

-Chris

Embrace the World’s Miraculous Absurdity

This spring, my wife and I looked at the sky from our backyard. We marveled at ribbons of solar wind—launched by our sun more than 93 million miles away—that lit up as they smashed against the earth’s magnetosphere. The northern lights reached into the American South in a magnificent display of cosmic violence. In that moment, I was struck: life on this earth is beautiful even if tragically temporary.

Lounging in a cocoon of atmospheric serenity, we enjoy the simple joys of iced coffee and exact change while our planet sits amid the apocalyptic violence of black holes and exploding stars. How does that even make sense? That’s the beauty of it all: it doesn’t.

Nonsense Without the Creator

If we consider existence in the universe apart from the Creator, it feels beyond absurd. The number of coincidences that must combine to yield life on earth, let alone whatever else may be out there, is unfathomable. The only plausible alternative to the Creator one might adopt is an unlimited multiverse theory where every possible iteration of our universe from chaos to order exists somewhere out there like different books on a shelf; we just happen to be conscious in this one. Apart from such a theory, the odds of our universe organizing itself as it is are, pardon me, astronomical.

Think about the simple beauty of human life in comparison to the scale and timeline of our existence. That we care about a football team, or mow our lawns, seems ridiculous. Why should we bother making our beds when the fabric of the universe could (theoretically) unravel at any moment? To care so deeply about our speck of existence feels genuinely insane apart from eternity and its Author.

Consider Camus

I read French philosopher Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus in high school, and I recently revisited it. Though Camus was an absurdist atheist philosopher, I was struck by how much I agree with him. Camus’s thesis is, effectively: Life is meaningless apart from whatever meaning you give it, so give it meaning and do your best to enjoy it. This is all a farce anyway, so make the most of it. This probably sounds ridiculous to most Christians. But apart from hope in eternity, isn’t Camus’s perspective the sanest option?

Which is more foolish: Attempting to give absolute meaning to life apart from the opportunity for eternity, or embracing the utter pointlessness of life apart from eternity and doing your best to enjoy its absurdity?

The former is more foolish than the latter. Only the fool ascribes meaning to life when it’ll all fade to endless black with the shutdown of a vital organ or the swelling of our closest star. Given those two choices, it’s much wiser to recognize the absurdity of life and enjoy it anyway. But by God’s grace, those aren’t the only two options. In reality, there’s matchless meaning provided by the endlessness of eternity with God in Christ.

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Read the Rest at TGC.