Page 15 - ProvidenceChristianCollege_Magazine_Spring2018

In an autobiographical moment in his last published work, the Pale King, Wallace describes the struggle of a person who knows the difference between right and wrong and cares about the world he lives in, yet cannot face an existence he finds meaningless in the context of a “capital-T truth” that accounts for life both before and after death; the haunting feeling in Wallace’s words:
“That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can bring ourselves to even try to imagine.”
Here Wallace gives us a picture of water [or existence] that is a living hell.
While Wallace bravely tried to encourage others in his literary career to account for their existence, perhaps he showed that the increasingly greatest challenge in life in the modern world is not overcoming one’s self-centeredness, or loving one’s neighbor, but struggling with doubt about why we’re here and whether we matter.
In other words, contemporary living is often like inhabiting a house divided against itself as we’ve been so trained to think of our existence in material terms that we doubt whether anything other than our material existence matters. And all along our soul longs for an eternal reality that seems beyond our reach.
This may not be you today. But you will have days like this in the future when you thirst for more than what this world with all of its material enjoyments has to offer you; when no matter how hard you try to be cognizant about your own shortcomings or forgive the shortcomings of others, life will feel like a dry and desolate wilderness.
Feeling divided and getting lost in such a wilderness begs an answer to the map of history Lincoln famously introduces in his “House Divided” speech. “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.”
“Where we are?” is a matter of knowing who God is and who we are. Consider the parable of the Samaritan woman in John’s gospel in our scripture reading for this morning:
When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into town to buy food.)
The Samaritan woman said to him “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he
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Deeper Learning for Greater Wisdom
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