An uncomfortable truth

If this gospel it true, it is not simply "true for me" - it is true for all or it is not true at all.  Here Christians have to bite the bullet and dare to go against the cultural grain.  In our culture, the one truth imposed upon almost everybody is that you must never impose your truth on others.  Most particularly, you must not impose your religious or moral truth on others . . . Who are we to say that our truth is superior to the truths by which others live?  That is an excellent question, if it is a question of "our" truth.  But the claim is that the gospel is, quite simply, the truth.  It is the true story about the world and everybody in the world.  That is an unsufferably arrogant assertion, unless it is true. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


Comparatively speaking, I'm not so certain how unsufferably arrogant this assertion is.  I find the assertion that there is no absolute truth far more insufferable.  Here's an absolute truth to which we pay scant attention: each one of us is less than a mere speck in the vast universe.  Considered to scale, if my kitchen were the universe, I wonder whether we could view a chunk of it as massive as our sun, let alone our planet, with an electron microscope.  Being conscious specks makes us long to be more significant than we are, and some attribute our faith to a longing for significance.  There may be some validity to that, for if this gospel is fantasy, we are simply specks of matter too small to matter.  Only if we've been created by a loving God do we have any significance at all.

I am incapable of caring for an individual quark.  I think that maybe the scientists at CERN who are trying to detect a Higgs boson may be the closest to grasping the scale about which we're speaking.  But there's a universe full of bosons they don't care about at all, and they certainly don't care about them as individuals.  Only an infinite God could possibly care in the slightest for each one of us, let alone know and love us as we propose our heavenly Father does.

I can't help but wonder if our difficulty in conceiving of such a God isn't related to our prideful longing to be more than insignificant conscious sub-specks of the universe.  We'd like to be bigger than we are, for our consciousness to be what really matters.  The thing is, if the gospel is false, there is probably no point in worrying about whether I'm being arrogant in claiming that Jesus Christ is truth.  There'll be no lasting meaning for my speck life anyway.  On the other hand, if the gospel is true, it is true for every last speck of us, and we all find immeasurable value, significance, and worth far beyond our physical puniness, in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the coeternal Son who deigned to become a speck like us to deliver us into the eternity of God's love.

This post, by the way, is an example of how something positive can come from a negative thought.  This "conscious speck of universe" thought was a pretty depressing one for me two weeks ago.  But there is no darkness which the light of Christ does not overcome, if we simply allow it to shine.