Ellen Wilson Fielding makes a very good point about the irreplaceable part every human life has in God’s work. A Confirmation candidate and I were just discussing the relationship between “the problem of evil” and God’s decision to create humans in a universe that takes our decisions seriously, a universe where we have the potential to grow into authentic friendship with God.
She says it well:
It is natural for human beings to tell stories that testify to the meaning in their own and others’ lives. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when we jump from not being able to perceive the meaning in a given life to concluding that there is none.
Then we roam near the territory of the mad astronomer in Samuel Johnson’s novel Rasselas. After years of closely studying the sky and the heavenly bodies, he fell into the insane belief that he actually determined their movements and operations: “The sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds at my call have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command.”
No death is senseless in God’s sight. Because we are not God, that is not true of us. That doesn’t mean we don’t praise – and delight in – heroism and self-sacrifice, and direct our abilities to battle accident, disease, and other evils of the fallen condition. But in doing so, humility – one of whose definitions is self-knowledge accompanied by acceptance – is perhaps the most practical and productive virtue we can aspire to.
(source: Understanding “Senseless” Deaths)
How much more true, then, that we cannot decide for the living what their lives may be worth!
