Despite our coping mechanisms of choice, fear and weariness are often common sentiments across much of the globe, laden with a sense of uncertainty. People deal en masse with losses of all kinds and the turbulent emotions that come with losing ground. For many in the affluent West who have lived with mindsets of comfort and feasts of resources, economic downturn is a sudden and disorienting shift. For others, hard times simply get much harder, more worrisome, more lonely. Picking up the pieces of a community destroyed by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake, aid workers in Nepal note that many Napalis are afraid to go back inside their homes, fatigued from being up at night anxious and in fear.
Writing in a century with its own fears and famines, Blaise Pascal took note of the human capacity for a dangerous kind of escapism when fears loom large and hope remains distant. He saw a general disassociation with the present, a perpetual anticipation of the future or recollection of the past, which kept life itself at bay. “So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours and do not think of the only one which belongs to us,” he wrote. “And so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us. We conceal it from our sight, because it troubles us… So we never live, but we hope to live.”(1)
Of course, whether in times of scarcity or in times of plenty, in tragic or ordinary days, the temptation to mentally dismiss ourselves from the present moment is quite real. It is always possible to live with eyes intent on something better in the future or with a nostalgic gaze on the past and all that once was. But in times of discomfort, crisis, or shortage, the choice to wander in times other than the present strikes us more as self-preservation or necessity than temptation, an essential coping mechanism in the midst of pain—and so we dismiss ourselves from the present all the more freely. Whether to daydream of better times or to look fearfully into the future, we leave the harrowing realities of the present to escape from the weariness of now, to hope for something more, to remember something better. But no matter our reason, when the future alone is our end and life is preoccupied with what once was or what might be, it is something less than living.
In a community shaped by the story of a crucified leader, opportunities to comfort a fearful world in the midst of instability and loss are filled with images of a human savior without affluence, a Son who embraced anguish, God among us without the glory and prosperity he might have had if he stayed away. The church remembers one who prayed alert through agony, not abandoning the present though he was more able than you or me to do so, while sweating drops of blood alone as his friends laid exhausted from sorrow.
The gift of a broken Christ to an anxious culture is that the brokenhearted are not alone.
Moreover, his is a bigger history marked by expressions, prophecies, stories, and assurances uttered in the very midst of famines, warfare, plagues, exile, and losses of every kind. These voices join his to remind us that the antidote to fear is love, the perfect love which casts out despair and weariness. The stories of scripture and the history of Jesus Christ from birth to death to resurrection give image after image of remnants of life in the midst of fear and trial and despair, strength to set aside self-preserving instincts to love neighbors abundantly and to risk bringing the whole of life under the lordship of Christ now. This vicariously human Son is among us today; neither death, nor life, nor things present, nor things to come, can separate us from the perfect love of God in Jesus Christ.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) Blaise Pascal, Pensees (Charleston: Biblio Bazaar, 2007), 87-88.
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