The theology of sin is one theology that is attempting to reduce and irreducible thing. It relinquishes us from the search, it bans us from our existentialism into a false sense of peace and acceptance.
Sometimes, to understand is to truly know nothing.
In terms of our pain and agony, I think it is better not to know, and I don’t mean not to know the reasons or seek ways to find healing (in and out) but to know the pen-ultimate reason, I think it would cheapen our experience. I think it would force us to forget that we need one another. It would be a sort of amnesia.
This struggle of knowing and not knowing shows up in the movie ‘I Heart Huckabees’ with Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin and Mark Wahlberg. The movie follows different people who are looking for reasons to their existence. Some even hire existential detectives to follow them around and discover their purpose for being alive. At the end of the movie, there is no conventional answer given, but we’re only left with the nihilist hitting himself.
The nihilist who believes that we exist for nothing is still finding purpose in hitting himself.
This is the conundrum, in the middle of saying there isn’t an answer, the nihilist ignorantly participates in an answer. The perverse gesture of attempting to find an answer to why we go through what we go through will impede us from the growth that is inherent in not knowing why we go through what we go through. However, my offering which is but one offering, isn’t an answer in the conventional sense, this isn’t ‘gospel’, this is merely an attempt to understand and find merit in our ontological angst. I don’t propose this with the intention of givinng an answer, but rather offering a personal perspective, to me,
one of the many reasons why we experience pain is to remind us we need each other and that we are not alone.
What this does anticipate is that we begin looking to the person next to us, not merely looking at them, but willingly and creatively participate in their existence, and this also presupposes the opposite should be true.
That we don’t necessarily need to offer answers, but by being present in each other’s world we are claiming that we don’t understand with them, but that being together in our unknowing is a lot more healing than going through it alone. That the most healing thing we can participate in is a naive embrace of the fallibility of humanity as a good thing, rather than a bad thing. That when we fully embrace our lives with all the scars, pimples and spots we save them from being scars, pimples and spots and re-interpret them as rainbows, skies and oceans. Things that brings us into new horizons and into a new kind of inter-connected hope that leads us into a new kind of fallible divine humanity…
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