PILATE'S QUESTION

PILATE'S QUESTION

Life is a question mark. When we're taken from our mother's womb, the question is: Why am I here? As we move through our days, the question is: What am I doing? As we age, the question is: Where am I heading?

There are all shapes of answers out there. Plenty to choose from. Especially with today's 24/7 media pounding against our sensorium with talk-radio, cable pundits, editorials, great uncles, and Oprah. But like Pilate asked Jesus: "What is truth?"

Today's existentialist thinkers tend to say -- in their books and plays and comedy -- truth is situational. It's pretty much what we believe to be true for us. They are the there's-no-answerbook-to-the-test folks who find it terribly cool to dismiss absolutes in life. In fact, they are absolutely sure there are no absolutes. Those of us who believe in absolutes are usually dismissed as "medieval."

However, when some of us recall the medieval world, we remember more than the ignorance and poverty of the masses. We also remember the cathedrals and monasteries and seminaries and pilgrimages in which millions looked to something bigger and better than just themselves. Something (someone) beyond their own genes and brains circuits, and whatever else secularist scientists have begun to define us with.

Here's the scene!

It's a warm summer night...you're out in the countryside...under a billion blinking stars...with only the hush of the black silence and the hint of the fragrant fields. Totally alone. And yet, not really alone. Because you feel and sense and experience some kind of "otherness" out here. That profound, deep-rooted experience that there is an otherness present which has neither voice nor face. But you're sure it's here!

This otherness is what most people call God. The cosmically huge yet intimately close sensation that you all by yourself are simply too small to be the alpha and omega of all this. So, yes, that's Medieval to the extent that it means feeling slightly smaller, slightly inadequate, slightly less than the proud, self-help hubris which Moderns insist upon.

And yet, today's so-called medievalists don't feel diminished by this sense of subordination. No more than good soldiers feel about generals, students about teachers, and children about parents. What we have here is the very crux of the crucifixion. Can we once more feel comfortable inside a kind of medieval subordination...? Or must we fight divine subordination in the name of human superiority...?

Pilate's question is still around 2000 years later. "Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails..." [Proverbs 19:21]