THE EVIL WE SEE IN OTHERS IS OFTEN WHAT WE HATE ABOUT OURSELVES.

 

The problem of evil.

Most religions of the world are fundamentally convinced of the existence of the principle or forces of good and evil.  History is filled with empirical evidence of the noble and adverse consequences of both, perhaps more of the adversity of evil than the nobility of good.  Human existence has overtly and covertly been under the constant harassment of evil in its different forms since the beginning of human history, and the many attempts to resolve the crisis have either proved fruitless or have not gone far enough.

It is clear that something is drastically wrong with the human being, how did we become so evil when we could become so good?  Jesus asked, ^{Luke 11:13 (NIV)} “If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”  Why do we honour the pain of wars with such fancy and lofty epaulettes?  How do we resolve the moral crisis of doing to others what we don’t want done to us?

Without evil and its consequences in many directions and on many levels media screens would practically be blank and printing presses would simply rust because there would virtually be no news to report. The United Nations would have no problems to solve, and our prisons would be empty.  There would have been no Pearl Harbour, Hiroshima or Nagasaki.  Apartheid’s prime assassins Eugene de Kock and Dr. Wouter Basson would be angels, and we would not be tiptoeing around the edges of World War 3.

In some mad sense evil makes the world go round, even if it robs us of the harmony we cry out for so badly.  If there is good, why does it seem like the forces of evil are winning?  In our human-best we all want an environment of good instead of evil, how then are we so inclined to evil more than we are to good? 

Naturally, there are more questions than answers, and sometimes our inability to provide answers to some of life’s most perplexing questions drives us to an unaesthetic acceptance and complacency of the situation around us. 

The irony of history is that whenever we do not have the answers to the questions that harass us we create solutions that become tomorrow’s problems.  In the end we find ourselves trapped in the middle of a perpetual and costly hurricane of confusion from which we cannot liberate ourselves.

Is there hope for the deliverance of humanity?

Niebuhr says (1941:167), “The Christian view of the goodness of creation is solidly anchored in a very simple word of scripture.”  And he quotes, ^{Genesis 1:31(NIV)} “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”  Augustine alludes to a similar notion (Handbook on Faith.  Chap III):

 

For the Christian, it is enough to believe that the cause of all created things, whether in heaven or on earth, whether visible or invisible, is nothing other than the goodness of the Creator, who is the one and the true God.

 If all that God created was good, what is the origin of evil?  That is the existential question that has anguished many inquisitive minds from all directions of philosophical and religious inquiry perhaps since shortly after the beginning of time.  In the Genesis narrative, both good and evil are part of the creation scheme in the Garden. 

We did not know evil until we were tempted to reach out for the forbidden.  In this narrative sin was introduced at humanity’s point of disobedience, our naughtiness was our insistence to test the validity of the serpent’s hypothesis.  Our challenge ever since is to unseat God and become God ourselves.  We introduced the death of humanity where we sought to introduce the death of God (Nietzsche). 

Evil is a condition of the human heart.

Evil was introduced at the point of the knowledge of the existence of good and evil.  It is therefore a condition of the human heart introduced at the point of human disobedience, ^{Jeremiah 17:9(NIV)} “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.  Who can understand it? “ Not only was the couple aware of their choice and its consequences, they proceeded to act on the negative suggestions of their new consciousness. 

It is this awareness that led to the action of disobedience, and it is the action that introduced evil into human society.  The root of human anxiety is the choice that the individual must make in the tension presented by his/her knowledge of good and evil.  This is the link between evil and human anxiety—evil is a choice we make. 

In the thought of Niebuhr the human heart is the source of all evil because it is constantly harassed by curiosity and greed.  We are constantly in search of ways to have more and to explore new territory, that desire when it is fully blown and perverted is the mother of all evil. 

Since our knowledge of good and evil, we are bent more to the side of evil than we are to the side of good, as recorded in scripture, ^{Ge 6:5} “The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.”

 Religion is agreed that evil exists alongside good, but why do we choose evil over good?  These are complex and perplexing questions in human existence and behaviour, we are evil even though we know good, that we are good means we know something of our evil, and yet we can never be good enough to choose good over evil.  Why are we so bad, when we can be so good?

Until we can confront these questions squarely and honestly, the recurrent existential cry of frustration will always echo in the corridors of human existence, ^{Romans 7:24} “Oh! What a miserable person I am!  Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death?”

Perhaps a deeper question is, can we confront these questions in any meaningful sense?  If history is authentic, then we have a problem, much like the merchant who tried to jump on a bulge on his oriental rug only to have it appear somewhere else.  Evil in one form or another is the slithering and slippery snake beneath the rug, just when we think the rug is straightened out the snake rears its ugly head in another corner.  This is typical of conflict resolution on every level, we resolve a crisis in one part of the world only to have it reincarnate in another.

Perspectives in philosophy and religion.

Religion and philosophy have tried to approach the question of evil from different directions, and largely based on three suppositions, (1) God is omnipotent, (2) God is perfectly good, and (3) evil exists.  From these three assumptions some have concluded that, if God is powerful, surely God can eradicate evil from the face of the earth, if not how can God be all-powerful (a negation of God’s omnipotence)?  Or, if God as creator is good, how did evil find its way into existence, which means God, is not altogether good because God created all things (a negation of God’s righteousness).  For the Christian the righteousness and omnipotence of God is established and beyond question as confirmed by Augustine (Handbook on Faith. Chap IV):

 

All of nature…is good, since the Creator of all nature is supremely good.  But nature is not supremely and immutably good as is the Creator of it.

The human being as part of and existing within nature is affected by what Augustine says; he/she is created good but is not supremely and immutably good as is his/her creator.  In a sense Augustine capitulates to the reality of the existence of evil in human nature, to be sure, evil is a consequence of corrupted good, which means in some sense; it existed within or alongside good.  God is the good that cannot be corrupted; yet the good that allows but does not cause created good to be corrupted, evil is a consequence of good that has allowed for and is responsible its own corruption.  Good chose to be evil because good could have chosen to remain good (free-will).  Where we chose evil over good is where we missed the mark, it is still where we miss mark.

Some regard this response as the weakness of monotheism, especially in Judaism, Islam and Christianity.  They opt for a polytheistic approach because it offers more options in the attempt to resolve the crisis of evil.  Polytheism sees the problem of evil as emanating from a possible conflict of interest among deities and thus absolves human involvement.  From a monotheistic perspective, this absolution of human involvement in the problem of evil is the precise weakness of polytheism, for how does one fix what one does not acknowledge?  To be sure, the polytheistic approach to the problem of evil is shifting blame and holds its deities responsible for evil in human existence.

Shifting blame or pointing fingers is typical where evil rears its head.  Adam blamed Eve and she blamed the serpent.  That pattern of behaviour has been repeated throughout human history and is characteristic of the human desire to be absolved from taking responsibility.  And yet that desire fails to explain why human beings have introduced evil into human society at many and different levels, and why even the most righteous of us are evil.  Niebuhr observed (1941:96):

The inclination of modern men to find the source of evil in his life in some particular event in history or some specific historical corruption is a natural consequence of his view of himself in a simple one-dimensional history.  But this modern error merely accentuates a perennial tendency of the human heart to attribute wrongdoing to temptation and thus escape responsibility for it.

 The monotheistic approach to the problem of evil assumes a good God whose good creation violated its goodness through disobedience.  God stands above God’s creation and therefore creation must return to the good that sustains the harmony of all creation.  This “return” forms the basis of prophecy in biblical religion, in both the Old and the New Testament God is calling humanity to repentance.  Repentance is always a prelude to an acknowledgement of sin that leads to a restoration of the disrupted harmony between humanity and God.

In a sense repentance is an admission by the individual of his/her sin, that recognition means that in some way the individual admits that a form of virtue has been violated.  Sometimes that recognition and admission is not easily arrived at especially where a person seeks to apportion blame to something beyond him/herself.  This attribute is unique to the human being, to be sure he/she is the only one who can stand above and pronounce judgement on the virtue or vice of his/her situation.  The question of evil however still remains unresolved, as Niebuhr says (1941:2):

If a man takes his uniqueness for granted he is immediately involved in questions and contradictions on the problem of his virtue.  If he believes himself to be essentially good and attributes the admitted evils of human history to specific social and historical causes he involves himself in begging the question; for these specific historical causes of evil are revealed, upon close analysis, to be no more than particular consequences and historical configurations of evil tendencies in man himself.  They cannot be understood at all if a capacity for, and inclination toward, evil in man himself is not presupposed.

Pointing fingers does not explain the existence of evil it merely confirms it.  And for Niebuhr the symptom is not the sickness, it is an indication of a deeper problem.  To be sure, evil cannot be rooted out by pointing the speck in a brother/sister’s eye without due consideration of the beam in one’s own eye.  But then human nature is not so good-natured or morally generous with itself; it will always portray an image of righteousness in the midst of its own unrighteousness, and right there is the root of its sinfulness. 

How do we deal with the ogre in our midst?

Every religion and cultural folklore has a myth of creation, good and evil.  However, we may have become evil, every attempt or approach to understand the problem of evil must finally arrive at the conclusion that evil is a verifiable phenomenon within the scope of human existence.  The more urgent question therefore is not where evil comes from, but how do we deal with the ogre in our midst?

From a Christian perspective, the three basic propositions of philosophy and/or religion have a relational problem with God or the existence of God; they do not acknowledge that God is not accountable to God’s creation.  In a sense they do not accept God as standing above God’s creation, but they stand in judgement of God.  Perhaps at the bottom of it all is the voracious and clandestine Nietzschean desire of scientific inquiry to kill God.  Nietzsche’s Nihilism sought to explain human existence without God (The God is dead theory); he argued that without God there is no answer to the question of purpose and meaning in life.  In Nietzsche's view, the death of God frees humanity to fulfil itself and find its own essence.  Not all Nihilists though subscribed to the “Death of God theory,” Martin Buber saw a very strong connection between the “I” and the eternal “Thou.”

When scientific inquiry seeks to understand human existence without God it yields to the temptation that confronted Adam and Eve in the Garden.  The serpent suggested that Adam and Eve could exist without God if they partook of the forbidden tree (or suggested that they could be God); they were kept away from the tree because God wanted to be God alone, to be sure, they did not really need God to exist. 

In this type of thinking, Nietzsche stood in the tradition of many others who sought to understand human existence within the limits of reason and sense experience.  Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) for instance, put forward the argument that God is a projection of man's ideals.  Others like Sigmund Freud have followed in the similar thinking albeit in different disciplines.  In the 20th century Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others continued the Nietzsche’s premise.  According to Sartre, human freedom entails the denial of God, for God's existence would threaten our freedom to create our own values through free ethical choice.

For the Christian (and other related monotheistic religions) the Genesis narrative seems to suggest that greed and curiosity have always been part of the human heart.  The suggestions made by this line of thinking and questioning may be credible to the extent that they are honest, yet they are misinformed, ill informed or deliberately seek to sway from the reality of an existing truth.  God created us good and we chose evil, thus evil is good violated and diminished.  Evil was introduced by the human being’s act of disobedience, and therefore his/her denial and rejection of God.  Niebuhr states repeatedly and in different forms (1941:168):

The fragmentary character of human life is not regarded as evil in Biblical faith because it is seen from the perspective of a centre of life and meaning in which each fragment is related to the plan of the whole, to the will of God.  The evil arises when the fragment seeks by its own wisdom to comprehend the whole or attempts by its own power to realise it.

 

Evil in the cloak of righteousness.

Niebuhr believes that “Man is his own vexing problem” (1941:1).  We are where we are not because God put us there, but because we landed ourselves in the swamp.  An authentic philosophical and/or religious question therefore should rather honestly seek to understand, “How did we get to be where we are?”

Human philosophies in the bid to blame or to negate the existence of God reveal the same ignorance of the implications of the notion of evil as is demonstrated by the dreamy homilies in an average church service on any given Sunday morning.  Evil in its guilt and arrogance seeks to justify and defend its own self-righteousness by shifting to others the blame it qualifiedly deserves, and in its hypocrisy, it covers its imperial greed with the pious shroud of defending humanity from endangering humanity.

For Niebuhr sin is the spiritual condition of our position at the confluence of the contradiction of our finitude and freedom.  We are finite because our freedom is defined within divine perimeters; we are free because those perimeters are infinite.  According to Niebuhr that contradiction is the root cause of human anxiety, and yet it is not our problem; our problem is that we are anxious in the first place, because right there, the sin of our pride is introduced. 

The consequences of evil will always be physical, but the source is spiritual because it is influenced by sin as a spiritual force, to be sure, evil is the good in us corrupted and revealed in the viciousness of human situations.  The consequences of sin and its cost is the one question that occupies international and national forums of conflict resolution, and yet we are unable to get it right because the context in which it is confronted is not related to its root cause.  We intend to resolve a spiritual crisis through physical or natural means. 

Every effort to live life is an acknowledgement of how far we have deviated from the original scheme intended for the harmony of all creation.  We are not only victims of our own anxiety, but all creation is affected by the imperial nature of our anxiety expressed in various forms.  Over and above the pain we cause each other, we bleed the earth, we invade the heavens, we destroy natural habitations, we deplete ozone layers; and then come back to discuss how we can reverse the consequences of our own madness.

This is the irony of anxiety gone wild in human history; it demands peace through violence, and ensures its own security and survival through the oppression of others.  The terms of world peace are always calculated and determined by the most violent among us, and exploitation and servitude are always imposed on the weakest by the strongest.  In a strange twist of evil guised as good, we want to eat our cake and have it too.

When the pot calls the kettle black.

According to Niebuhr, it is impossible to understand or to account for, or to hold someone responsible for human atrocities without assuming that there is some malevolence hidden in human benevolence (1941:2).  This is a condition of condemnation and not of creation, Paul taught a similar trend of thought, ^{Romans 3:23} “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  To be sure, every pot is just as black as every kettle, even though some are blacker than others.  For Niebuhr, evil is not the action, it is the force behind the action, and the action is an indication of the existence of the force.  The consequence is usually connected to a system of cause, process, and effect.  He wrote (p.180):

 

The story of the Fall is innocent of a fully developed Satanology; yet Christian theology has not been wrong in identifying the serpent with, or regarding it as an instrument or symbol of the devil.  To believe that there is a devil is to believe that there is a principle or force of evil antecedent to any human action.

This notion of an evil force behind human atrocities, or the “devil made me do it syndrome!” is one that has and will continue to meet with spite and derision from rational quarters that consider it religious nonsense and sheer human irresponsibility.  Yet, no other theory has been advanced whose plausibility has influenced human thinking and behaviour more.  People on every level of human existence continue to do things they regret on large and small scales because the good in us will always return to rebuke the evil.  As Niebuhr says, while there is no need to be betrayed into capitulating to the suggestions of the forces of evil, it cannot be denied that the twist of truth they propose presents us with the occasion to sin (1941:178).  It is equally true that with every opportunity to sin another is presented to do good, but our hearts are inclined more to evil than good.

The human being therefore is good and evil in some great or small sense, whether or not his/her actions affirm it.  The action is an indication of the force or principle to which he/she has chosen to capitulate.  To be sure, the human being is at any given point in time presented with the opportunity to choose for better or worse.  And that is the unique attribute that makes him/her to stand shoulder above the rest of God’s creation.

The human situation is haunted not so much by the possibility to sin, as it is by the denial of the existence of that possibility, as John said, ^{1Jonn 1:8(NIV)} “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”  We are constantly confronted by the evil in others that we identify in ourselves, and in our self-righteousness and hypocrisy we appease our own evil by exposing or even inflicting evil on others.  The denial of our own evil is the connection between injustice and self-righteousness.  Often people inflict injury on others not because they are perfect, but to stop their own evil from being exposed, or to avenge their evil from having being exposed.  That is a basic Christological teaching, ^{Matthew 7:3-4 (TNIV)}  “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in someone else’s eye, and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?  How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?”

'THE ANXIETY OF GUILT AND CONDEMNATION': OUR LIBERTY IS LIMITED; NO FISH CAN SWIM OUT OF WATER.

 

The anxiety of guilt and condemnation responds to the question, “What have you made of yourself?”  The individual is both the questioner and the questioned.  Tillich says this situation (1952, 51-52), “produces the anxiety which, in relative terms is an anxiety of guilt; in absolute terms, the anxiety of self-rejection or condemnation.”

In some sense you are like one standing or approaching the peripheries of the end of a journey and taking stock.  To this question, one either responds, “Nothing” or “Something.”  And the “Something/Nothing” dichotomy is often determined relative to the norms of the environmental context in which it is made.  In the corporate world all I ever heard was production, tons, bottom-line, objectives and many other measurements of success.  You have achieved something if you measure up to the icons established and determined by your environment.  Everybody heard those voices, and they determined your remuneration in a bottomless pit that never filled.  It was not what most people wanted to do but it was the only voices we heard and measured by.  Nobody said you would never join the ‘Billionaires Club’ if you kept listening to those voices.  Nobody said anything about intuition; that voice that guides you to do what you want to do and are passionate about.

That question is determined in the context of our finitude.  We do not have forever to actualize.  Being human also implies accepting the reality of our finiteness.  We are free to actualize to our highest possible and yet that freedom can only be pursued within the limitations of our liberty.  If we act in accordance with what we believe to be the demands of destiny we are affirmed but nonbeing continues to undermine every action every step of the way, even the best of our performance.

As in ontic and spiritual self-affirmation, death ultimately stands in the background of whether we succeed in making something or nothing of ourselves (moral self-affirmation).

In the Genesis narrative, Adam and Eve were given authority over all creation but their liberty was limited.  They were not to eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”  Anxiety is introduced when we choose to explore beyond the liberties we are given in the divine scheme of things.

There is a problem!

Tillich’s (1952, 54-57) categories of anxiety reach their zenith in despair.  Despair is the dynamic confluence of the ontic, spiritual, and moral ways in which nonbeing seeks to disaffirm being.  There is no hope beyond despair.  However, there is enough being left in us to recognize our state of hopelessness.  Research on human anxiety can only reveal that there are more questions than answers.  The dark corridors of the human soul grow darker with every dawn of new understanding on the subject.  As Frankl (1984, 126-127) said; 'an existential homeostasis is not possible.' 

Despair suggest the surrender of being to nonbeing.  The awareness of that suggestion adds another element to despair which Tillich calls “despair within despair.”  It is one’s awareness of surrender and the inevitable and ultimate prospects of absolute surrender (Tillich 1952, 21-22).

Despair hits the ceiling, and it cannot see its way into the future.  What do you do if you cannot see your way into the future?  A lot of people have been there; like the financier who jumps off the highest skyscraper because his/her investments were wiped out overnight.  Joseph Goebbels and his wife poisoned their six children and committed suicide because they could not imagine life without the Fuhrer (Patin 2009).

A psychiatric observation to this effect was made by Frankl when writing about the situation in the Nazi death camps (1984, 95):

'The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—his faith was doomed.  With his loss of belief in the future, he lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.'

Tillich’s analysis of anxiety leaves us with a feeling of doom and gloom.  That is typical of all existentialism and that mood has been decried from philosophical, psychological, and theological directions.  Yet Tillich is presenting two sides of the same coin.  The one side (nonbeing) is perennially feeding on the other (being).  In the thought of Tillich being has a priority over nonbeing yet nonbeing relentlessly seeks to undermine being.  Nonbeing has no life of its own because it feeds on the life of being.  If being did not exist, then nonbeing would be a hollow misnomer.  Being is something and nonbeing is nothing.

How is this priority of being over nonbeing a leverage in dealing with human anxiety?  Tillich argues that whole point convincingly in his comparison of existential and pathological anxiety.  The fact that there is a dark side to human existence means that there is a bright side.  Self-affirmation is not a denial of nonbeing, in it being takes the parasitical nature of the nothingness of nonbeing into itself.  Nonbeing would be nothing if being was not something.  The courage of being to withstand the forces of nonbeing must take that reality into consideration.  Unlike some panaceas to pathological anxiety which seem to suggest the possibility of an emotional or existential equilibrium or elimination (Tillich 1952, 64-70).

For the pathological neurotic, self-affirmation is available but only in a limited sense.  The neurotic is affirmed but is surrendered to the things they fear.  A reappearance of their fears—if they have been removed—may drive them into despair. The neurotic is partially affirmed because he/she finds affirmation in the denial of being’s relation to nonbeing (Tillich 1952, 70-78).

For Tillich, these pathological attempts in the medical and social sciences do not go far enough.  The solutions are often shallow because they ignore the ontic structure of anxiety.  They treat the symptoms and leave the sickness intact. In this way the problem is not solved because it usually will resurface in another form and another place and will finally result in emotional exhaustion and finally despair.

'THE EMPTY TOMB AS A SYMBOL OF THE RESSURRECTION' Matt 28:1-8pp; Mk16:1-8; Lk 24:1-10; John 20:1-8

 

The anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness

Nonbeing threatens our spiritual self-affirmation of being in two ways, “relatively in emptiness and absolutely in meaninglessness.” In the thought of Tillich, one is “Empty” if one is unable to participate meaningfully in the expressions of one’s cultural symbols; it is that emptiness that ultimately becomes meaninglessness.  Spiritual affirmation is the meaning drawn from the connection and correlation that one attaches to the symbols, whether they are created by him/her or by others. A poem or music lyrics for instance may articulate in language and sound a person’s unfathomable spiritual deep.  Art is indeed one way in which these expressions are made.  The best-selling song on the market touches a nerve that may have been dormant otherwise.  The creator of a poem or song is spiritually fulfilled with his/her work but so are the rest of us who participate in it in different ways.

Meaninglessness is introduced when the symbol loses its original meaning.  If someone would hoist a flag of the old apartheid regime in South Africa today, I am sure it would invite a lot of criticism, even violence in some quarters.  For many the piece of cloth has lost its meaning, while for others it provokes memories. 

If a symbol loses its historical meaning it is rendered obsolete unless it is reinterpreted.  

The teacher in Ecclesiastes observed that when symbols lose meaning they become miserable business, one begins the futile adventure of chasing the wind.  Ecclesiastes is a journey of reflection.  King Solomon had tried everything and discovered its hollowness, much like the Easter egg.  He had possessions, experience, wisdom, power, and pleasure but in the end he cried out, “Meaningless!”  As Tillich says, ‘Everything is tried but nothing satisfies.’  These symbols of success in human culture still attract much attention; the travesty is not in the symbol itself but the spiritual meaning we attach to it.  We stand or fall, not with the symbol, but with the meaning we attach to the symbol.

“Spiritual” in the context of Tillich is not the schizophrenic and dogmatic sense it is often presented by religious fundamentalism.  It is a way the human spirit progressively and creatively participates in the various spheres of meaning in human and cosmic experience (1952, 46).  Einstein (2010) was religious in this sense, he did not believe in a personal God, but his formulas convinced him of something or someone greater and beyond what he called the “the arts and the impenetrable objective.”  To that extent he had a sense of the eternal.

The human spirit is religious; it is on the “Augustinian” perpetual search for God (Augustine 1960, 43).  Anthropologists agree that this is a universal phenomenon, it may be expressed differently in different contexts, but it is as universal as hunger and the myriad of ways in which people respond to the challenge.  “Religion is the way in which the human spirit must express itself,” says Tillich (1959, 3-9).

In Africa there is empirical evidence everywhere, from the majestic organs in cathedrals of ebony and ivory to the beat of cowhide drums and blowing of horns under the trees in indigenous religion.  The human spirit will always device and design ways to express itself in religious ways.  Even the atheist is religious because he/she must believe there is no God.

Mandela’s well known closing statement during the Rivonia Trial implied that he was consumed by the “Ideal” with religious tenacity (Mandela 1990).  Everything else had to have some implications for the “Ideal” otherwise it was contemptuously dismissed.  In Tillich’s words the “Ideal” was his “ultimate concern.”

For Martin Buber (1937), God is the irreplaceable “Thou.”  The crisis is when the ‘It’ becomes a ‘Thou.’  The “Augustinian” restlessness is neither an event nor a project but a spiritual evolution in perpetual process.  Our tragedy is seeking to express that process in events and projects.  That partly accounts for our busyness, we are on a frantic chase for spiritual fulfilment, but our emptiness is resurfaced at the zenith of every symbolic achievement.

Teilhard de Chardin (1959, 292-294) in his “omega point” espoused an evolutionary notion of “spiritual.”  Meaning is not static but is dynamic and derived in the formation and continuous transformation of that which is spiritually meaningful.  “Spiritual” is a journey in and into a universe in process.  “The human spirit” de Chardin said (1964, 6), “is still in process of evolution”.

If Augustine and de Chardin are right, then the rigidity of religious dogma is the worst crisis of the human spirit.  This is precisely the point—as many have lamented— where religion in the name of religion renders religion empty.  Religious absolutes or dogmas—like symbols of culture—stifle the ability of the human spirit to progressively actualize into the “omega point” where God is finally “all and in all” (Ibid, pp. 1-15).

If religious dogma insists on its static state, then it loses the role it ought to play in the dynamic evolution of the human spirit.[1]  Meaninglessness is a natural consequence of an empty spirit.  Tillich called it the “loss of a spiritual center.” (Tillich 1952, 47). 

Some prisoners in the Nazi death camps developed an “intensification of inner life” which helped the prisoner find refuge from the emptiness, desolation and the spiritual poverty of his existence” (Frankl 1984, 54-59).  While the spiritual connection may not have averted impending death, the prisoners “were able to retreat from their surroundings to a life of inner riches and freedom.”  In this way a dynamic spiritual center offered sustenance in difficult times.

Religion in the dogmatic sense loses this dimension, it becomes the futile effort to be innovative, determine or adapt divine revelation to the human situation (Tillich 1955, 2).  While the effort may be good and even relevant for its generation, it becomes a widow in the next.  Those who derived ontic, spiritual, and moral meaning from it are thrown into an abyss of emptiness and ultimately meaninglessness.

God as “ultimate concern” is a perpetual and dynamic journey of exploration.  We try to capture the divine in structures and institutions more for cerebral convenience; not that it is possible, but it serves a purpose in time.  When these structures and institutions take the place of God, the God who is God breaks through in fresh beginnings.  In that way symbols of religion and culture must keep up with God and not God with symbols.  Thus, Tillich spoke of a ‘God beyond God.’

Essentially the spiritual journey is a permanent tug-of-war between the divine and the demonic, the struggle between being and nonbeing.  The human spirit as an exploring spirit in search of a home is homeless until it finds meaning in God who stands within and above the human situation.  This sentiment is expressed in the Confessions of St Augustine (Augustine 1960, 43): 

'Yet man, this part of your creation wishes to praise you.  You arouse him to take joy in praising you, for you have made him for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.'

The call of biblical scripture is none other than a call back to God.  It is a reconnection of the “Estranged” to God as the ground of all being.  The word “Repent” is not so much religious as it is pedagogical; it is the beginning of a journey with God because God is a journey.  As we explore, we learn, and new meanings of spiritual affirmation perpetually unfold and we understand God in new and dynamic ways.

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[1] Evolution here is used in the spiritual sense employed in the context of Teilhard de Chardin, and not the biological sense in Charles Darwin.  A correlation between the two may be valid, but that dialogue is the subject of another paper, and I suspect another discipline.

''TO BE OR NOT TO BE,' THAT IS STILL THE QUESTION.

 

The anatomy of fear and anxiety

Fear and anxiety deliver us at the juncture of courage and choice.  What is the nature of this curse or blessing we are dealing with?  That question comes naturally in an environment pegged on the five senses.  Can we see it, touch it, smell it, hear it coming or even taste it?  Do fear and anxiety have a form?  Something we can work with or a target we can hit?  Biblical Israel’s greatest anxiety was fearing the unseen.  They were repeatedly often reminded to, “Fear the Lord your God.”[1]

There is a general agreement in the human sciences that fear, and anxiety are two heads of the same dragon.  While they are independent, they co-exist and feed into each other.  Tillich affirms the clinical analysis of fear and anxiety (Tillich 1952, 36).  While anxiety has no face, fear is usually represented in some physical form.  Fear allows participation because it can be confronted but anxiety is faceless.  In anxiety we fear the unidentifiable and unknowable unknown.  We sense the threat, but we cannot identify the source.  Even worse the threat or source may be nothing.

It is this inability to confront the formless and faceless in anxiety that makes it dreadful.  Paul the apostle spoke to something similar when he wrote, ^{Eph 6:12} “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

This is the apprehension that characterizes our persistent efforts to give anxiety a face.  If I can identify my enemy, I can also call up the courage to confront it.  Those efforts give rise to two problems; on the one hand, the problem in giving anxiety a face is that it may be a wrong face and that is the basis for cruelty in human history.  We see that all the time when weapons of mass destruction hit the wrong targets.  On the other if I don’t know my enemy then everybody is a suspect.  Even my closest associations become my enemy if I can relate them to my anxiety.

I may be right, but I may be wrong too and my problem is not solved.  Hitting the right target is a surface solution to the problem of fear, not anxiety.  I may hit the angel of death, but death still stands at the horizon, all I did was remove the messenger.

Tillich discussed three types of anxiety “according to the three ways in which nonbeing threatens being.”  These are three ways in which our ability to affirm ourselves is threatened. Whether these ways are the only ones is not clear, but his analysis does offer a three-dimensional framework in which the structural design of fear and anxiety may be understood.

He wrote:

Nonbeing threatens man’s ontic self-affirmation, relatively in terms of fate, and absolutely in terms of death.  It threatens man’s spiritual affirmation, relatively in terms of emptiness, and absolutely in terms of meaninglessness.  It threatens man’s moral self-affirmation, relatively in terms of guilt, and absolutely in terms of condemnation (Tillich 1952, 41).

The anxiety of fate and death

Nonbeing threatens man’s ontic (real as opposed to phenomenal existence) self-affirmation relatively in terms of fate and absolutely in terms of death.  If fate and death pursue our being how real are we?  If we follow Tillich’s definition of fate it means there is something about fate that we cannot control.  The Encarta English Dictionary defines fate as a “force predetermining events.”  There is very little about what is coming that we know or have control over.  The choice to drop good or bad on us is not ours, it belongs to fate.

There is something of “doom and chance” that is connected to these dictionary definitions.  In fate we are anxious about tomorrow because are afraid.  Biblical scripture says, ‘Don’t worry about tomorrow;’ but how could we not?  In some way we wish we could gain some insight into the unknown, to see the unseen and unknowable.  Many people resort to astrology, fortune-telling, psychics, traditional seers, or present day ‘charismatic’ prophecy just to get an optimistic word about tomorrow.  That in fact has become a serious goldmine in Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches around the world simply because it is our ‘Fear and anxiety.’  People will travel the furthest distance or give till they drop to the last dime if a situation promises to resolve for them the anxiety of ‘fate and death.’ 

Religious ‘prophets’ and Seers everywhere, especially in Africa, tap into people’s anxieties and fears for financial profit and personal aggrandizement because they claim to have the ability to know something about fate or destiny.  Their promises are as misleading as the promises of the pharmaceuticals who are in it for the same reasons as the prophets.

The feeling was prevalent even in the times of Christ.  He warned the crowds, ^{Mt 6:34} “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”   The exegesis and hermeneutic of that passage will be taken up later; suffice it for now to say fate often drives us to search for a higher power with the ability not only to see through fate but to change the cause of a negative destiny. 

That feeling, Tillich says, threatens our “ontic self-affirmation.”  For every “I can” there is a deep sense of “I cannot.”  Your ability to achieve is threatened by your fear to fail.  The courage to be always stands in juxtaposition to the doubt to be.

Maslow (1999) has argued the point of “Self-actualization” at length; beyond the “lower needs” we all have the desire to reach out—not for more—for higher.  More is quantity but higher is quality.  When we have reached all there is to achieve fate says there is more beyond where we now stand.  Fate threatens the reality of our being because it keeps reminding us that the future is open and inviting, worst of all it is fleeting.  In our desire to be all we were intended to be, death says you will never be all that you were intended to be.  For each one of us, death stands summoning on the horizon.

In the wider scheme of things, we have been given to a ‘force’ beyond our control.  We live but we shall surely die; alternately, it is in living that we ultimately embrace the reality of death.  Our finitude is ultimately defined, not in the fleeting nature of things but in the infinitude of the Divine. We are the finitude that participates in the infinitude we are denied.

Even the bravest person among us is afraid to die.  Tyrants of history know that and that is why the best way to preserve themselves is to attack their fears by eliminating others.  But fear, because it is anxiety with a face we put on it will always surface elsewhere in another form.

If pushed far enough, we all have a tyrant latent in us.  We are afraid of death because we know it is the fate of all humanity.  Biblical scripture speaks more to the question of ‘Fear’ than it does of ‘Sin.’  We are often reminded, ‘Don’t be afraid…’  Not because there is nothing to be afraid of but because there is nothing we can do about it; it is decreed in the greater scheme of things.

We know we are going to die but we do not want to die.  That explains why millions of money worth is spent in research in the attempt to delay—not eliminate—death.  Death is the one thing we cannot undo even with the ingenious of scientific resources and research at our disposal.  We are more innovative in the invention of gruesome killing machines and sicknesses than eliminating death.

How then do we affirm ourselves in the face of fate and death?  Tillich argued that the anxiety of our finiteness cannot be eliminated because it belongs to human existence itself (Tillich 1952, 39).  We may shorten or prolong it, but it cannot be eliminated; thus, biblical scripture is right, ‘Just as people are destined to die once and after that to face judgement.’ ^{Hebrews 9:27}   That dreadful feeling is not going away it is given to us with life itself.  We have been thrown into the ocean already, and we either swim or drown.  Perhaps that moth-eaten cliché is right, “You either sink or swim,” but you will ultimately sink.

Self-affirmation in the face of fate and death is like the Salmon fish swimming against the fierce flow of a river, always in the opposite direction.  There are many dangers upstream, but the death-defying journey must be taken.  The fish, if it survives the hazards upstream, will ultimately return, go with the flow downstream to the point where it started, lay many eggs, and die.  Every fish is assigned only one swim upstream and downstream.

That is a cause for anxiety.  Those incompatibilities are on a parallel and perpetual journey that cannot be separated.  They are going in different directions but forever coiled.  We affirm ourselves despite the ambiguities of nonbeing’s perennial attempts to deny us this affirmation.  Affirmation assumes a negation of what is affirmed.  We affirm life because death stands at the horizon.

‘To be or not to be?’ That is still the question, and it is the source of our anxiety.

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[1] Dt 10:12 ^(NIV) “And now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God ask of you but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.”

 

The relentless search for a meaningful life

Dt 28:65-68: Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the LORD will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart.  You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life.  In the morning you will say, “If only it were evening!” and in the evening, “If only it were morning!”—because of the terror that will fill your hearts and the sights that your eyes will see.  The LORD will send you back in ships to Egypt on a journey I said you should never make again. There you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you.^NIV

That scripture is an eerie description of anxiety and despair.  Words like longing, suspense, dread, and lack of assurance for one’s life all describe the tensions and contradictions brewing in an anxious mind.  When you ultimately reach a point where nobody wants to buy you even as a slave then you know you are at the end of your tether.  When you are there you ask the question, “What is the meaning of my life?”  That question was made popular by Viktor Frankl (1984) after his excruciating experiences in the Nazi death camps.  There was nothing left off him except his literal naked self.

Of course, we are not all going to go through a Nazi holocaust experience but every one of us will from time to time be confronted with the question of meaning; for better or for worse; it stays with us till the end.  As I write almost all eight billion people on earth are under some form of lockdown for the fear of an invisible pandemic with many variants called COVID-19.  German cars are parked in the garages, cosy offices are empty as people work from home, conference centers are suddenly not useful as meetings go virtual, airports stand empty with no one to fly or be flown in the gigantic Boeing machines, economic systems around the world are almost brought to a screeching halt and squeezed for subsistence.  Pharmaceutical companies are stretched and competing beyond capacity and competence in the race to manufacture a vaccine or vaccines to combat the deadly virus or bring it under control at least.

Almost everyone on earth is walking around with a mask on their faces, a privilege once enjoyed by thieves.   Many people have lost one or more of their loved ones to an adversary we can identify yet cannot identify.  Practically thousands have died due to the plague and still counting…Death stands summoning at the horizon, and once more we are forced to ask, is there more to human existence than the necessary yet fleeting icons we build it on?

Frankl asked that question repeatedly as he stood underneath a shower, never too sure whether he would be sprayed with water or a poisonous gas in the Nazi death camps.  He was pushed to conclude that there must be as he finally wrote Man’s Search for Meaning.’[1]    He was a psychiatrist but that did not count for much now, he was just a number as he dug railroads with his bare fingers in the icy European winters along with millions of Jews in Hitler’s concentration camps.  But then, the story of six million Jews dying in Nazi Germany has been told in various ways and countless times even as we conveniently forget Leopold II’s killing of more than ten million Africans in the Congo Free State and the Nama and Herero in present day Namibia.  Genocides have been part of human history so much so that ‘an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation [has become] normal behavior’ (Frankl 1984, 38).

As Reinhold Niebuhr said, ‘We are anxious below and anxious beyond.’

Our anxiety, believe it or not, is not death but the knowledge that death; even as we pour billions and trillions of money-worth into shifting the ultimate reality; cannot be done away with.  We know we will die; but what for?  Alternately, for what?  Paul Tillich, that astute theologian, participating and nurtured by observations in World Wars I and II made the acute observation:

The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself (Tillich 1952, 39).

This book is about meaning; the meaning of one’s life.  It proceeds from the assumption that no one is an accident of creation.  We are all here for a reason and our earthly assignment—between birth and death—is to discover, explore and actualize that reason for being.  In the greater scheme of things, no gift is ever too big or small.  Everything is working together towards the ultimate in God’s purpose for the universe. 

The stars were created to shine, fish to swim and birds to fly; there is no competition just being what they were created to be.  The point is each one of us was created for a purpose, an exclusive and tailor-made Raison d’être.  Some people call it passion.  Paul Tillich repeatedly called it ‘ultimate concern.’  That concern in which every other concern is consumed (Aldwinckle 1966).

Nelson Mandela articulated his “ideal” for which he was willing to live or die.[2]  Martin Luther King’s dream answered deep questions he raised in the heat of racism in the deep American South.[3]  He did not live to see it realized, but in his last speech he declared, ‘I have seen the promised land, I may not get there with you…’  But deep down the ‘Not yet’ was forming in the ‘Now.’  Not too long after that speech he was assassinated. 

Purpose is not vision; it is the bigger picture in which vision is achieved.  We pursue purpose but we achieve vision.  Purpose is the spirit and vision is the action.  In purpose we are released to act and in vision we measure how far we have come.  Vision says, “I have arrived,” and purpose responds, “There’s more beyond where you now stand.” Purpose therefore is like an ocean and vision is taking a sip of the vast waters of the ocean one cup at a time; it is the creative atmosphere in which innovation continues to be born.

This tapestry called human existence is made dynamic and exciting by the contributions that each one of us can make in our uniqueness.  Thus, in the question, “What is the meaning of my life,” the individual asks and is asked, and ultimately is the only one who must give the answer.  Meaning is derived, not so much in the achievement as it is in the existential processes.  The challenge is not whether you arrive where destiny calls, it is what you become in the continuous transforming furnace of how you get there.  What makes you is the journey not the destination.

The question of purpose must ultimately be asked in the bleeding jungles of East, West and North Africa.  When you watch every single member of your family being butchered by merciless rebels or mercenaries and their skulls and headless bodies scattered like rubbish all over the streets and countryside; there you are pushed to ask, “What is the meaning of my life?”  If things can turn out to be so bad, what am I living for?

Einstein (2010, 3)—probably in response to the philosophers of his time—did not think that was a very clever question to ask.  He wrote:

To inquire after the meaning of life or object of one’s own existence or creation generally has always seemed to me absurd from an objective point of view.

In fact, he thought anyone who asked that question was not fit to live.  Yet, he obviously was wrestling with the question when he wrote:

Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty (Ibid.)

The question of meaning fills life with determination, focus and expectancy.  You wake up every morning filled with the spirit of pursuit.  Nothing is guaranteed in terms of achievement, but the attitude is what makes it all meaningful.  Mandela lived to see his ideal, but Martin King’s dream materialised long after he was murdered.  Purpose is ultimately determined in what Reinhold Niebuhr called the “greater scheme of things.”  Nietzsche was right, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how” (Frankl 1984, 94).

The person who has achieved all there is to achieve probably has not achieved much that is meaningful.  That is why ‘Retirement’ is such an existential misleading term beyond which most people disintegrate when they have done all they knew how to do and beyond which they can do nothing more.

God, purpose, and human anxiety

In 1952 Paul Tillich wrote an all-time blockbuster in Christian existentialism titled The Courage to Be.  He wrote vigorously and intelligently about the tensions and contradictions that exist in the challenge to become all that God has created us to be.  Of course, existentialists like Nietzsche (1967) and Schopenhauer (2004) did not think God had anything to do with it.  Erich Fromm (1941) wrote of it as an ‘Escape from Freedom.’  In existential psychology we shape our own destiny.

Tillich was a Chaplain and stretch-bearer in World War 1.  He witnessed first-hand how life can be snuffed faster than the twinkling of an eye.  He survived the bombs that destroyed everything around him.  In a letter to his father he wrote, ‘Hell rages around us. It’s unimaginable,’ and in the end, he had to ask that soul-searching question of meaning.  Many others came out of World War 1 & II asking similar a question.  In that context Viktor Frankl (1984) finally came up with his theory of Logotherapy and Jurgen Moltmann (1993) chiseled his “Theology of Hope.”

In The Courage to Be, Tillich takes a plunge into these vast and complex waters of meaning from a combination of philosophical, psycho-medical and theological perspectives.  That multi-dimensional approach must be commended because there is no single discipline in the social or theological sciences that can fully claim to understand the intricacies and complexities of human nature and its search for ‘meaning.’  Human existence is not a mathematical formula or a project but a dynamic process not an event.  In the vast waters, the more you push the wider the scope before you.  There, according to Tillich, lies the anxiety that we often seek to deny.  We must push till the end or be delivered to boredom.  According to Frankl, how we respond to these tensions and contradictions is what gives life meaning; it is the ‘Freedom’ between ‘Stimulus’ and ‘Response.’

The question of ‘meaning’ is not given to us on a silver platter; it comes with a lot of anxiety.  As we shall see later, Tillich (1952, 40-54) provides three categories in which the question of anxiety can be understood.  There is the anxiety of fate and death, emptiness and meaninglessness and guilt and condemnation.  He uses biblical metaphors—or what he calls myths—as a way of understanding our relationship with God and our world.  In other writings (Tillich 1957, 66-72) he takes us back to the Garden of Eden where it all began.  For him paradise can only be regained, if at all, where paradise was lost; thus, he speaks of “Estrangement.” 

The human predicament or the problem in the human situation is our alienation from God.  Our problem is vertical before it is horizontal.  The destructiveness we see demonstrated on the landscape of human history is often a sick drama of how far we have drifted from God and that gulf is the cause of our anxiety. 

For Tillich, existentialism is the good luck of theology.  Existentialists have succeeded in showing us the dark side of life and theology—if rightly appropriated—shows us the bright side.  It is the existential analysis of the human situation that makes the theology of a “God above God,” and ‘The Right to Hope’ necessary.  The human situation demands something beyond the ‘God of theism,’ a universal rallying point of the divine around which the questions thrown at us by the uncertainties of human existence must be answered.

Thus Frankl (1984, 127) concludes, “There is no emotional homeostasis.”  This is a contradiction to humanist theories that suggest that life at some point can be free of anxiety.  ‘Homeostasis’ is not the absence of anxiety but the competence and ability to swim through the unpredictable waters.  The neurotic suffers because life for them is how they think it should be not how it really is.

Rollo May, a Tillich friend, and student spoke about religion and anxiety and how religionists ignore the neurotic dimension of anxiety and psychologists ignore the religious aspect of anxiety (May 1950).  It was Tillich who probably made the first attempt to reconcile those two extremes (1952, 64-78).

Tillich was Lutheran so he obviously wrote from a Christian perspective, but he was never trapped by the dogmatic perimeters of religion or science.  Thus, he wrote about the “God above God” (Tillich 1952, 186-190).  He embraced Socialism and criticized the possibility of its demonic eruptions.  Meaning in religion is found only when God appears where the God of traditional theism has disappeared.  If you can find God beyond doubt and despair, then you have found God.

In Tillichian terms, “Before sin is an act it is a state.”  That condition is the state of individuals and nations; indeed, it is the state of all creation.  In our finite freedom we have been excluded from the infinite destiny to which we belong.  That exclusion is the “tragic element” of the human situation (Taylor 1987, 191).  We belong to that from which we have been excluded and the tensions and contradictions of that paradox is the source of our anxiety.

If one asks, “What is the meaning of my life” in a real sense one, consciously or otherwise, seeks to reconnect with one’s spiritual deep.  In the final analysis that question is spiritual, and it is precisely at this point where Tillich states, “The human spirit presents itself to us as religious.”  We are a religious species and that is the difference between us and the rest of the animal world.  It is Teilhard de Chardin who said (Egan 2004), ‘We are not human beings on a spiritual journey but spiritual beings on a human journey.’

The question of purpose or meaning is not as innocent as it is asked because it brings with it a whole baggage of anxiety.  Ironically, it does not only come with a collapsing world around us; some ask it at the summit of ground-breaking achievements, what Maslow later called “Peak Experiences” (1999).  What do you do when you have become the richest person on earth; or you have done what you best know how to do? 

The search for meaning is anxious and permanent and sometimes we feel as if we are racing against time.  There are more questions than answers.  When we cease to ask the question, we are immediately delivered to boredom.  As Schopenhauer observed (2004, 42):

Not the least of the torments that plaque our existence is the pressure of time, which never lets us, so much as draw breath, but pursues us all like the taskmaster with a whip.  It ceases to persecute only him it has delivered to boredom.

The question is both creative and frustrating.  It can prompt us in the direction of innovation or lethargy.  That explains the human rat race of economic high speeds and the extremes of sensual indulgence.  Frankl said, ‘When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.’  We are overdriven by what Martin Luther King called the “Drum Major Instinct.”  The best among us wants to be the “winner takes all.”  Having done all to achieve, or not, we find the question still stands before us.  “What is the meaning of my life?”

The irony of the human situation.

As mentioned earlier, the irony of the human situation is that we are anxious below and curious beyond.  Looking into the abyss of nothingness, as Nietzsche said, the abyss looks back on us (Rodden 2000).  Looking beyond the horizon we are invited towards life’s’ endless possibilities as we fear we could fall into the abyss.  Ours is the perilous position to be pretend otherwise painted so vividly by Reinhold Niebuhr:

We are like the sailor climbing the mast…with the abyss of the waves beneath him, and the crow’s nest above him.  He is anxious about both the end toward which he strives, and the abyss of nothingness into which he may fall” (Niebuhr 1988, 18).

That “perilous position” is the source of our anxiety.  The possibility to become is threatened by the possibility not to become.  Tillich calls it the tension between “Being” and “Nonbeing” (1952, 32).  In religious terms, ‘to be’ is to achieve the divine and ‘not to be’ is to be thrown into the depth of the demonic.  To achieve the divine, we must forever push through the demonic.  The anxiety of being is the awareness of the perennial presence of the demonic where the divine must be achieved.  African philosophy has always been aware of the principle at least, of the tensions between the divine and the demonic. The Batswana say, “Though an eagle may catch its prey high in the sky, it must land to consume it on the ground.  There it will meet its demise.”[4]

In the unfolding processes of life, we discover that in strange and precarious ways, so richly portrayed in the centres of human history, evil is always good’s weird bedfellow.  Every victory is harassed by the possibility of failure.  Being on every turn is threatened by nonbeing.

How then should we understand the problem of anxiety?  Tillich makes the submission,

The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing cannot be eliminated.  It belongs to human existence itself (Tillich 1952, 39).

He repeats what philosophers and religionists have said in different ways.  Life is anxious.  There is a lot of empirical evidence around us even with casual observation.  The challenge therefore is not to change the situation but to embrace it.  If we deny the sickness it makes it impossible to find a reprieve.

We need to embrace the possibility of losing where we win and winning where we lose.  If I know I can win where I lose it prompts me to try again.  If I can lose where I win it gives me the courage to confront the situation and to push for higher and better.  That recognition is a call for courage and innovation.

Sin is what introduces the pessimistic; yet we are not sacrificed at the altar of that hazardous moment because we have a choice.  Choice is that space between stimulus and response.  As Frankl (1984) argues, we may not always choose the conditions around us, but we can choose our attitude and response towards those conditions.

Each one of us in different ways must respond to Hamlet’s soliloquy (Shakespeare 1992), “To be or not to be, that is the question.”  So, what do we do?  Do we reach out into the inviting heights and seeming endless possibilities of human existence, or do we plunge into the doldrums of its exigencies?  That unrelenting and ever-present juncture of courage and choice is not only anxious, but also frightening.

As Marianne Williamson wrote (1992, 190-191):[5]

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

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[1] (Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning 1984).

[2] See article, http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/mandela.htm.

[3] See article, https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/11/mlk-recording-speech-found/31470821/.

[4] My own paraphrase of the Setswana proverb, “O se bone nong go ralala godimo, go tla fatshe ke ga yone.”

[5] That quote is usually wrongly attributed to Nelson Mandela.