The Meaninglessness of Life and the Impact of FAITH

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Life is all about beginnings-- starting all over again, taking life as it is and taking whatever it has to offer-- sorrow and joy, pain and healing, marrying and divorcing, anything under the sun.

Ecclesiastes of the Bible tells us that, yes, everything has its own time. Yet everything can become meaningless.

Even faith becomes meaningless.

How does it happen? How CAN it happen?

One Christian philosopher said that meaninglessness could come out of pain but often we forget that meaningless could come out of being weary of pleasure! (I am paraphrasing Ravi Zacharias)

Sitting in a lecture class today, I found simple things in life where I could draw inspiration from. 

A smile that sparked friendships.

Kindness shown to each other by each other.

Honesty here and there.

A little faith that accumulates to BIG FAITH...

I believe the reason why we tend to think everything under the sun is meaningless is because we are not grateful for the little miracles that happen in our lives. We dismiss the very reason that we exist is God. We readily exclude Jesus in our small and big thoughts; our God-inspired beliefs, we shun in favor of so-called intellectual pursuits both in secular and religious fields. We abandon the reality of our Orthodoxy: that our bodies, hearts, and souls belong to God; that no matter what we do, we must consecrate it to the Lord and ask Him constantly for guidance and light.

Our attempts to "enlarge" or to "simplify" faith without God's bidding can weaken us and ultimately bring us to the feeling of meaninglessness. When we boost our energies only to find in the end that everything is for naught, it is distressing... We undoubtedly sin that leads to "losing definition of our selves" (R. Zacharias). Because utter meaninglessness or emptiness, without God's filling, is a vacuum ready to be occupied by Satan! And as the life of the Ecclesiastes author suggests, he lived a life of intellectual, spiritual, mental, and physical ecstasy that the moral decay was so intense he had no choice but to cry out to God!

Now what do we do when we are in the throes of ecstatic energies that lead to sin when we have no God? What happens to the soul so enraptured in pleasure when there is no reality such as God? 

The soul dies a thousand Kafkaesque deaths.

So if there's no faith, everything's meaningless, if there's no God, our wanton desires would break loose that it would be impossible for us to contain it and that the end result would be the Dorian Gray moment-- we'd fall down looking at the bloodstained portraits of ourselves...