A Life

I am a worrier, which is perhaps another way of saying that I think a lot and that my glass is generally half empty while doing so. A typical style of worry for me is of the "should" type: What should I do? What should we all do? I mean that both in the particular and the general. In my mind the shoulds are very different depending on what you think is true of the world, and even when you have some basic tenets nailed down (let's say, for example, that "truth" is a person and not a concept) other things still do not become entirely clear (like whether Christ would have you move to an affluent suburb for increased personal security and a better school system).

For me, the questions are often very philosophical/theological. Supposing I take Christ as a given (which is not always easy in the first place... I am subject to the blackest of moods), then what does that mean about all the interactions I have with the rest of the world? How should I live? As a scientist in a university (serving to educate others and generate knowledge)? As a subsistence farmer (because the surplus of the western world may actually be built on exploitation... I mean the Church Fathers claim that loans made with interest, !any interest!, between Christians are sinful. Ahem, stock market, banks, etc. Granted these were all before "economies" were recognized as mechanistic structures of exchange subject to, so the economists claim, predictable and thus manipulable, for the common good of course, behavior. But we have to think hard about how that really changes the debate.)? Anyway, how should we then live?

Now, I'm open to the proposal that the shoulds lead us to a mess of compromises and hypocrisy. We choose our battles. But HOW do we choose those battles?

Before this goes on forever, I want to get to my point. Much of this is dependent on the notion of leading a "good life". How do we live a life of virtue and meaning? How do we ensure by our present actions that we have not wasted our short time here? Those questions, I think, pop up in nearly everyone's mind even if, looking around, we see a great diversity of answers. It seems to me though that in asking about the "good life" there is always this implicit image of watching one's life run by as if on a DVD. There's this atemporal notion of "a life" that exists as an object to be judged good or bad. And this is precisely the question that I wanted broach. Where do we get this notion of the life-object and is it helpful? For you Christians, is it Biblical? There may be a perfectaly easy answer, but it seems interesting to me at the moment.

So, give it some thought. Are ethical questions about creating a finished tapestry that can be judged in its whole-objectness... that is, perhaps, objectively. I don't know, but it also does not quite seem as intuitive as we treat it in our casual thoughts about the shoulds in life.

Enough.