Is Life a Tale Told by an Idiot?

Faced with the Director of Public Prosecutions’ consultation on assisted suicide – in other words, on when is it permissible to end a life deemed not worthwhile – we ask ourselves: what is life, who am I, is there anything that makes this life worthwhile? Some say life is no longer life when an individual depends too much on someone else. But all life is dependence, structural dependence. We do not decide to be born. In order to remain alive we depend on eating, drinking, breathing, on the climate. All existence is dependence: the only possibility for it not to become slavery is that the giver of life makes himself our companion, someone we can encounter, a human presence who starts answering our heart’s desire for infinite love, for goodness, and for eternity.

Everyone needs to discover who is behind this gift that I am and that reality is. Otherwise, life becomes, as Shakespeare says, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, and so ultimately, a lie. Our whole being cries out with the desire that life be forever, that relationships last, that the joy aroused by reality before our eyes stay with us forever. The simple existence of things, including the self, as “given” casts a promise of goodness, meaning and eternity on the horizon of life.

How is it possible for a man to stay in front of pain, toil, and the apparent contradiction that a life of sorrow and suffering presents?

The claim of Christianity is that the Giver of life, the Creator, became flesh, like one of us; that he grew into a child, a youth, an adult; that he was not spared suffering, even death on a cross, but rose from the dead; and that he is present here and now.

This presence becomes someone we can meet through a human reality that contains something so exceptional that it can only be explained by introducing the word ‘divine’. Only this can introduce the possibility of not despairing in front of death – the ultimate contradiction – into human history. “Woman do not cry” (Lk 7:13), as Jesus said to the widow who had lost her only child.

Let’s be sincere and let’s answer what our heart is structurally looking for; but is it a human pity, somebody who is ready to terminate our sufferings at any moment should we so request, or is it somebody who loves us with a love so true that it can conquer time and space?

Communion and Liberation UK
30 November 2009