Questions of Meaning and Existence

For centuries, humanity has wrestled with the questions of meaning and existence. The need to answer these questions is acute today than it was a century ago. With technological evolution of our time, news of death of a young child brutally murdered travel fast and wide. We receive instantaneous news through television and the internet of calamities such as the Tsunami in Asia, Katrina or Ike in America or Famine in parts of Africa leaving families and nations totally devastated. Our confidence in capitalism is put into question when we watch as years of hard work and savings disappear before our very eyes because of individual or corporate greed such as recently witnessed on Wall Street. Faith in protection of basic human rights is as well shaken when we witness such atrocities happening as in Rwanda and Darfur without any meaningful intervention. Such events do not only reveal our vulnerability but have also left many to live in anguish and hopelessness. "What for? what is it worth?", so we ask. Are some people destined to flourish while others perennially suffer? Or is the “graph” already drawn, as one of the gifted Gĩkũyũ writers of Gĩchandĩ and Marebeta once sung? Are there such things as blessings and curses, so that some will forever journey on the highway of blessings and happiness, while others trod on the hard and stony foot path of curses and drudgery?

These questions are not idle or empty. The disciples of Jesus struggled with the same kind of questions. In John 9 we have an example of the disciples raising a similar question when they came across a man who had been born blind. They asked Jesus “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus’ answer satisfies, at least for a spiritual moment. But why would God delight in someone’s suffering in order to make a pedagogical point? Preachers of the so-called prosperity gospel are quick (of course quoting from scriptures, and I cannot argue with that – I mean, who can argue with God’s Book) to show that there is a way of life that can either lead to blessings and happiness or to curses and suffering. According to this group of preachers, we can make God bless us through some magical manipulations. My pragmatic Presbyterian on the other side will scrap his intellect to gather some philosophical sayings that God calls us to faithfulness and not to success or blessings. Whether my Pentecostal or Presbyterian friend is right, I cannot tell. Perhaps I should not even be raising any of these questions? May be I should resign to Fate as the Greeks or Africans did. Pretend that all is well and that experience of suffering and death is nothing else but the conditioning of the mind. As a matter of fact, who is even qualified to talk about these issues, the victim, the pastor, the “objective” philosopher, or the religious? Or is it the triumphalist, the positivists, the defeatists, the cynic or the centrists? Some days to come, I might have a revelation and adequately give an answer. But as of now, I will keep seeking.