Carnett: We may be specks in the cosmos but are never alone
We Christians view Holy Week as a time for self-examination and contemplation.
We consider Christ’s suffering on our behalf. We also ponder our own personal battle with pain.
Many of us are convinced we’ve got things under control. We don’t.
The 150 unsuspecting souls who boarded an Airbus 320 in Barcelona last week had every expectation of eating lunch in Düsseldorf. They ended up on the side of an unforgiving French mountain.
Live long enough, and you’ll suffer pain.
“If the cries of the heart in any community were to be cumulatively sounded, the noise would be … deafening,’’ writes Christian author Ravi Zacharias.
The fact that humans are fated to encounter brokenness on a massive scale didn’t hit me in the face until my fourth decade of life or so. I was on a fool’s errand when reality struck.
People I loved — I mean really, really loved — died. My 25-year-old son, tragically, was among them. His untimely death brought bitter tears.
“(Man) knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes,” Voltaire observed. “Tormented atoms in a bed of mud, devoured by death, a mockery of fate.”
Don’t go to Voltaire for a charming Easter basket! His medium of exchange is effluvium from a basin of despair.
I mean no disrespect to Monsieur de Voltaire, but my conclusions as I view the evidence are opposite his. I choose to believe that a being of inestimable capacity created the cosmos and, with internationality, formed human beings from its mud and muck.
Ancient Scriptures refer to him as “the great God, mighty and awesome.”
This colossus placed us on a “perfect 10” planet, orbiting a perfect 10 star, embedded in a perfect 10 galaxy, set among a hundred billion galaxies in a perfect 10 universe. No accident this.
“Our existence is an outrageous and astonishing miracle,” writes Eric Metaxas in his book, “Miracles.” “[It’s] so startlingly and perhaps so disturbingly miraculous that it makes any miracle like the parting of the Red Sea pale in such insignificance that it almost becomes unworthy of our consideration, as though it were something done easily by a small child, half asleep.”
Great minds like Voltaire and Metaxas travel similar paths only to arrive at different destinations. Their conclusions represent opposite ends of a spectrum: muck to magnificence. Death to resurrection.
When I was 6, my favorite book in our family library explored the solar system. Its drawings and descriptions held me spellbound.
I was so enthralled, in fact, that I created a mini-solar system in our backyard tool shed. The dank 6-by-8-foot structure was virtually empty, except for a rake and shovel and a black widow or two. It contained numerous barren shelves.
I placed a volleyball in one corner to represent the sun. I pilfered a roll of toilet paper (perhaps two) and tore off chunks that I moistened and rolled into “spit wads.” I placed the wads on shelves at various intervals from the volleyball.
The biggest wad represented Jupiter. The tiny one in the corner was Pluto. The Earth, which I pretended to be inhabited, had a minuscule moon by its side.
My solar system remained intact for weeks, carefully tended to by me, its maker.
We live in a magnificent system maintained by a transcendent being of unfathomable dimensions. Turns out, we humans — microbes on a spit wad — are his special project.
What’s that even mean?
While struggling to survive in a chaotic and turbulent world, we sometimes lose sight of him. He never forgets us.
“We are not living in a prison-universe,” writes Michael O’Brien in his book “Sophia House.” “We live in a cosmos that has open doors and windows. Messages from the infinite enter here from time to time. Perhaps all the time, and we are blind to them.”
The life, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most explicit message humanity could possibly receive. In it, the Infinite One has declared his love for his creation.
He stands at our door this Easter and knocks.
JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.