Friday, April 10, 1998
Cornerstone of life expressed in many forms
PHILOSOPHY: Cornerstone of lif expressed in many forms
By Damian Bacich
Everything in our lives poses a question to us, and the more
serious and involved with life we are, the more urgent these
questions become. How can I truly love someone? Is it possible to
be happy? What does my head have to do with my heart? What is the
meaning of everything? Each of these questions arises from an
involvement with reality – with work, with studies and with our
human relationships. Our religious sense is that need we all
recognize for a total answer to the great question of life in all
its concreteness. So much of art, literature and music that moves
us is an expression of this religious sense.
Yet we are incapable of giving an exhaustive solution to these
questions: Every time we think we have an answer, life throws
something utterly unexpected at us. From this we can understand
that there is something to reality we cannot grasp, cannot fit into
a category or box: There is a Mystery. The various ways through
which people endeavor to express this aspect of mystery are what we
tend to group under the heading of "spirituality." The problem is
that often what is categorized as "spirituality" seems to have
little to do with daily, real life, and almost nothing to do with
reason.
However, this relationship to the Mystery has plenty to do with
reason. In Plato’s "Phaedo," Socrates counsels his friends that in
order to live well, one should adopt the best of human theories and
live by it – unless of course some word from the divine should
reveal itself. At the beginning of this century, Franz Kafka
expressed a similar desire when he said, "I don’t know if
revelation exists, but I want to be worthy of it if it comes." At
various times in history, certain people have claimed to receive a
revelation like the one Plato and Kafka hinted at, and religion is
the attempt to comprehend the relationship with the Mystery and
therefore to build something around it, a system for living life,
usually based on such a "revelation" from that Mystery (whether it
be called "God" or "the gods"). This has always been our greatest,
most diverse, most noble expression, because it has to do with the
infinite, therefore with every aspect of life. The religious sense,
and hence religion, are essential dimensions of what it is to be
human, and thus essential dimensions of society.
Christianity, nevertheless, does not conceive of itself as a
religion in the above sense, as simply the fruit of a revelation
from God, but rather claims that the Mystery has become a human
presence and can be encountered today, in the same "material" way
that the apostles and others did almost 2,000 years ago. Such a
claim, when lived sincerely, is not in contradiction to a
pluralistic society, but quite the contrary: It stakes everything
on the freedom of each person, the freedom such a such society must
protect if it is to be truly pluralistic.Bacich is president of the
UCLA Catholic Students’ Association.