Living

There are two extremes of living. At one end we are too ecstatic about our success, businesses, and people we love with utmost passion. Essentially, the rhythm of inhaling and exhaling is in chorus with this high state of existence. The other end? There are people who are unaware of what living life truly is. They exist. People in different kinds of poverty — financial, cultural, environmental, social, economic, physiological, psychological, and spiritual.

People living in consistent violent environments have near-zero experiences of the non-reactive state of living. What it is to live a life of many choices in terms of social surroundings? Or, what it is to choose so-called a goal, a vocation, a path and struggle through the ebbs and flows of this experience? Yet, in that stifling state of living, people make the astounding choice to go on. Sometimes mindlessly, often out of the awareness of their state of poverty.

Truth is that we are all poor in some way or the other. Though the consequences of different states of poverty are different! For example; in a capitalist world, financial and economic poverty would surely make living life difficult. Then there are the irreversible poverties like physiological, psychological, and social. One can only respond to these in a partial capacity. (But should this be the case? )

Spiritual poverty, however, is the most difficult one to comment on. It involves dimensions beyond us and the Person of God not of similar tangibility as our world. Yet, the consequences of this poverty are so apparent. Most of our problems are a result of our reactions to all the situations that interfere with our ideas of an ideal life. The only way we can not react is when our idea of life is an indelible one. This is a paradox though. We cannot comprehend an indelible idea as we are perishable. That’s where we need each other! It cannot be emphasized enough that how much we need each other to share those narratives in our lives that are intact, with people who have them broken or missing. In turn, we receive the ones that are broken in us. To be fathers to fatherless yet discover what it is to be a child. For those narratives that none of us have answers to, we need the grand narrative of a perfect life that faced similar struggles. In history, One from Nazareth made such claims and lived them out.