Ask, Ask, Ask

 

We're in the tomb before we're in the tomb, and that's a fact. Human beings are the giants of the earth - we have reason, sensibility, pride, anger, vengeance and all the feelings under the sun - but with all that power and strength at our fingertips we are unable to prise open the lid and discover the secrets within. In a sense we are obliged to seal our last hope, like a pressed flower, in that cavernous space. We may search the world through for precious gems to line the lid, to let it sparkle and shine, but really nothing can alter the doom it contains. Everything made of earth has to go that way. I may stare my giant's stare at the tomb or try to break its stone with force of mind, but in the end I have to laugh at the fact that what its chamber hides is greater than the greatest of my kind. And what does it hide? My own body.

And this fact tumbles quite naturally into another. Why are there no answers? We live in an answerless universe with death all around us and can only peel one question after another from  our minds. Why is this? Is knowledge not the answer? Apparently, in the Garden of Eden, fruit from the Tree of Knowledge was forbidden. Surely, if the fruit was tasted, answers would come? Something did come: child-bearing, scratching in the earth for existence, death. What kind of question gives that for the answer? But it wasn't a question, it was innocence. Therefore, the answer to innocence is life. Here's a proposition then: if answers were consistent with human freedom, God would have had them hanging on every tree. But they're not - life is consistent with freedom. No one had to eat the apple.

Is there anything in this parable that deals with the question of suffering now, that sheds light on the big issue: death? No. Well, that's a pity. But I'm still asking. And I don't intend to ever stop. And the questions are going to become furnaces. They're going to burn like suns until, one day, the tomb is going to light up, and in my freedom I will see if there is anything - anything at all - that is capable of raising that body. That is my birthright as a human being - not to force my giant strength on the world, but to ask, ask, ask.

Landar

©landar 2011. All rights reserved