Living Contradiction

Have you ever felt like you were made for something more than just the temporal? Either there was a deep longing in you for something in the future? Hope for something greater or that you could be something greater? Or the deep yearning for things to be restored to working condition?

Writers, philosophers, poets, singers have all expressed this in some way. Here are a few voices:
Solomon, who was the wisest man on earth wrote, "God has also set eternity in their hearts…" Thoreau wrote, "In eternity there is something true and sublime." He goes on to write, "Time is a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink in it but when I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. It's thin current slides away but eternity remains." Bob Dylan poetically wrote these lyrics, "Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while"
The song, "VIsions of Johanna" is Dylan's heartfelt expression of the human longing for the eternal. The fact that there is nothing finite that can fill us or give us a sense of substantial sense of well-being. This should be a reminder that we were created for the eternal. Only something (or someone eternal) can fill the eternal longings of the heart. And yet we find ourselves living in the finite. That is the tension or pull between the two is incredibly strong.

I like reading Blaise Pascal, a French scientist/philosopher/theologian who lived from 1623-1662. I agree with Doug Groothius and consider Pascal the original Christian existentialist! In one of Pascal's Pensees (French for "thoughts" or "musings") he observes that the human condition brings with it a sense of deposed royalty. That is, people sense in their life that they have lost something grand or eternal, which he calls it a faint memory of royalty. The human condition seems to be "caught" in between eternality and temporality. What i mean by that is we sense that there is something eternal to us and yet we find ourselves living as if the temporal were all there was. If we are honest, in our every day lives we have touch points with the eternal - we sense that we were made for something greater, we hope to become something more... we sense that our bodies are important but there is something else to "me", something immaterial, we long for justice, for redemption, for healing.

Soren Kierkegaard put it like this - humans have the capacity for great things, great plans, nobility and virtue, expressing beauty, and gaining knowledge about the real world. Yet they also behave in incredibly boorish and even hurtful ways. It leaves us with a natural sense that something about us is broken. There is the faint memory of the infinite, eternal, and freedom while at the same time acting in ways that are contradictory, what he labels as "finite", "temporal", and "necessity". Kierkegaard's point is that existence is to synthesize that which appears to be contradictory. It is, in the power of your freedom, to take that which desires the eternal and to bring it to the concreteness of everyday experience.

I have often thought about the lengths people must go to resolve the conflict between the temporal and eternal and to defend the living contradiction they are. How do you resolve the conflict in your own mind? How do you live with this sense of eternity while at the same time, live in the ordinary? How do you resolve the contradiction? As a point of discussion, what do you think? I'll add a few more thoughts in the days to come.... Shalom!