When man fell, the world fell with us. Or perhaps, armed with science, we can say that the reverse is true: evolution could only produce beings like ourselves — self-serving creatures that survive through murderous violence. Life subsists by dealing death and consuming the dead.
The unstoppable spirit of life, its refusal to die, to stop, is the same spirit that kills, that destroys, that dooms.
So what do we do? Wretched creatures that we are? The same power that gives us life also undermines life. To preserve life we must take life. Can we live without death?
Is it too much to ask, that my life should not be made possible by the death of others? Is it too much to ask, that I can chase my dreams of a fully alive existence, without sacrificing the lives of those around me?
And Christ shakes his head. You live by dying. You live not off the sacrifice of others, but by the sacrifice of yourself. You don’t wait for them to kill and enslave you. You enslave yourself. You kill yourself. You present yourself as an offering to Life.
What kind of being sacrifices its life and autonomy to become the mitochondria that fuels every single human cell?
A being that chooses death in order that it might serve Life itself.
This kind of life, while refusing to kill, also refuses to rule except by becoming indispensable to its masters.
Have we become indispensable to the ungrateful, to the violent, to the cruel masters of power? They will hate you. They will drag you before courts and judges. They will kill you. And then, will we still serve?
The Church, for all its failures, has continued to serve, and it remains indispensable to life on earth.
The more we as the Church allow ourselves to be slapped on our cheeks, to be deprived of the necessities of life, to be forced into servitude, the more we will ingrain ourselves into the fabric of humanity. The more they kill us, the more indispensable, and thus, the greater, we become.
The greatest man who ever lived died as a failed messiah and criminal. He gave everything he had, including the most important thing one person can ever give to another — total and irrevocable forgiveness.
I don’t know how to become like Christ. I dont know how to turn the other cheek, how to give my last shirt, how to give the extra mile. I dont know how to die with grace.
Or maybe . . . maybe I just don’t want to die yet.
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