Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site pur-ee.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!iuvax!dsaker From: dsaker@iuvax.UUCP Newsgroups: net.religion Subject: Re: Orphaned Response - (nf) Message-ID: <1525@pur-ee.UUCP> Date: Fri, 3-Feb-84 08:17:03 EST Article-I.D.: pur-ee.1525 Posted: Fri Feb 3 08:17:03 1984 Date-Received: Wed, 8-Feb-84 04:31:48 EST Sender: notes@pur-ee.UUCP Organization: Electrical Engineering Department , Purdue University Lines: 40 #R:unc:-648300:iuvax:1700003:37777777600:1816 iuvax!dsaker Feb 2 17:55:00 1984 Alan, There are a few problems with your HOPED FOR truths: If the experiences of this life are as nothing in the long run, then how can the lessons learnt in this life themselves be other than as nothing. Can you really embrace the idea that all of your thoughts, hopes, dreams, loves, longings and aspirations should eventually come to be as nothing - even to you? Remember your mother fussing around you some time when you were young and ill (it was years later that you realised how tired she must have been that night)? Remember your first heavy infatuation and how your heart was broken? Remember your child and the pang of love and pain you felt at its vulnerability? Can you really embrace the idea that these things (and countless other tendernesses) will come to seem as nothing? To my mind, the loss of these things into the blackness of time is one of the (if not THE) hardest things to bear in life. The failure of my memory in regard to such things is an additional horror. What I feel the need for is something to give "meaning" (oh vague word) to human passions and values - not the promise of their "meaninglessness". As for spiritual growth as the reward for suffering, does your spiritual growth warrant the tears of even one small child? (This is Dmitri Karamazov's argument.) And it is hard to see just what lesson a 3 months old child screaming with meningitis is learning. The problem is that we cannot imagine any adequate compensation for the pain of this world, we cannot envisage a SOLUTION to the PROBLEM - other than to be hit on the head until our sense of distress dissolves. We are stuck longing for something which we cannot ever imagine having. (By the way, Mahler's "Resurrection" is a magnificent evocation of that longing.) Daryel Akerlind iuvax!dsaker