Facing Reality

Then Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. Genesis 32:24 NASB

Alone – Consider these:

“Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.  This is what makes us human.  But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality.  Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.”[1]

“Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.  We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.”[2]

“Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, . . .”[3]

“Because no activity can satisfy our craving for eternal life, all activities are intrinsically unrewarding.”[4]

Might we not say that this insatiable desire to live, and to go on living forever, is the reason nothing in life can ever really fulfill us.  Whatever we do now will end, and it is the fact that it will end, and that we will end with it, that drives our belief that there is another life.  Imagine, if you can, what Abraham thought about living when there was no other existence, when death was the end.  Could you be Abraham, or are you so infected with the religious vaccine that you simply find the end impossible?

What does “eternal life” mean in the context of Abraham?  Is this what Yeshua had in mind, the “here and now” eternality of present existence, the inexhaustible reality of the moment?  Or was he also preaching an alternative vaccine?

Topical Index: eternal life, death, alone, the end, religion, Genesis 32:24

[1] Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Being at peace with your own mortality, p. 1.

[2] Ibid., p. 5.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., p. 78.