Osler's Razor

There is one crisis of the spirit that many people I know go through. It is this: Does my life matter? It is an existential crisis in four words.

There are few stock answers to that.

One is that "God loves you," and that this means that your love matters-- you are loved. I think that is true, but I understand how for many people it doesn't offer much solace. "After all," they say, "If God loves everyone and everything, that still means I don't matter much." And on top of that, if they have been hurt and are in pain, they don't feel very loved by an omniscient, omnipresent God that apparently chose not to help them.

Another answer, for people inside and outside of a belief in God, is that meaning comes from helping other people. I think that is true, too. But, again, I can see how that can seem insufficient to those who are the ones needing help, or whose efforts to help others have been unrewarding.

My own answer to that question does not deny either of those truths. But I do have a different way of thinking about it.

When I lived in Texas, I found myself at least once a year driving down I-35 in Kansas, and often spent the night in a little town called Cottonwood Falls. It is in the middle of an area called the Flint Hills, covered with tallgrass prairie.

I found that prairie stunningly beautiful. It is almost treeless. Instead, there are endless fields of grass on the rolling hills. The prairie exists by a cycle: the grass grows up and then burns off, to start the next generation.  Sometimes, I saw those fires, which were a part of the whole.

What is it to be one of those blades of grass, a tiny part of that larger picture, one in billions of nearly identical blades of grass? Is any one blade insignificant?

No. Of course not. Each blade of grass, every one, is part of that remarkable creation of God, a brushstroke of the divine. What glory there is to be that blade of grass, thrusting up to the sun, living, dying, perfectly in tune with the creation of something extraordinary beyond our imaginations?

It isn't bad, to be a blade of grass in that glorious field, or a single thread in a beautiful tapestry, or a drop of water in a big, blue ocean. "But," some might say, "without that blade of grass or that thread or that drop of water, the field and the tapestry and the ocean would be almost the same."

True. But... almost? Almost is not the same as whole. If there is a God, it is not an "almost" God who creates "almost" everything with care. And this, this is not an "almost" world.

It is good to be.