Reach for the Sky

My wife and I went to a funeral a few days ago. Funerals always get me thinking a little more deeply about life. We didn’t know the lady who died very well because she has been sick for so long, but we do know her husband. He has been a big influence in our lives. The funeral was in our home town.

.

While I was home I went down into my Dad’s basement and dug out a few books that I haven’t looked at in a while. One of them is a collection of writings called Pensees by a Christian philosopher named Blaise Pascal from the sixteen hundreds. I flipped through the book, stopping at pages that I had highlighted a few years ago when I first read it. I came across this quote.

“Man is obviously made to think. It is his whole dignity and his whole merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. Now, the order of thought is to begin with self, and with its Author and its end. Now, of what does the world think? Never of this, but of dancing, playing the lute, singing, making verses, running at the ring, etc., fighting, making oneself king, without thinking what it is to be a king and what to be a man.”

I realize that this quote sounds a little choppy. For one thing, it has been translated into English. But it is also just a fragment. Had Pascal finished his book it would have been a much smoother thought. But let’s think about it for a minute. Really, that is exactly what Pascal is prodding us to do; think. We’re made to think, says Pascal, but the problem is we don’t do it.

.

Instead of thinking about ourselves and our God and our purpose for existing, we write songs and play games and seek power. Oh sure, these things are not bad in and of themselves, but the problem is that we don’t even think about them. We are human beings, but we don’t stop to think about what that means. We want to be kings of the world, but we don’t stop to think about what being king means.

.

Thinking is a hard thing to do, and even harder to do well.

.

I came across another interesting passage that I had highlighted.

“As men are not able to defeat death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.”

Perhaps this is really why we don’t stop to think. Because our thinking leads to the realization that we are doomed to die. This is enough to make anybody miserable. Not to mention the fact that when you start thinking about the situation of the world you quickly come to realize the horrible evils that happen everywhere. The other frustrating part about thinking is that as soon as you start doing it you realize that you know very little at all. Now, we have to understand that Pascal is making generalizations about his culture. Some people do like to think.

.

But doesn’t this kind of ring true about our culture too? People don’t spend a lot of time in thought. Instead, we obsess over the latest bands, movies and sitcoms. We crave the latest fashions and the highest paying jobs. But we don’t stop to think seriously about the world that we live in. We don’t think about our own nature. And we don’t think about God.

.

Well, maybe this will get you thinking. Let’s not let a 17th century philosopher put us to shame.

.

Here is a video from a band called Social Distortion. The song is called Reach for the Sky. Give the lyrics some thought too. I’m not sure that I understand everything that he is singing about but there are some lines that show he wants to take a deeper look at life.