My treaty with reality

CS Lewis was said to have made a pact with life, a treaty with reality. It was a necessary treaty for his sanity during the First World War in 1914, and compounded by the early death of his mother to cancer. When he was enlisted to fight on the battlefields of France (in 1917/18), many of his Oxford buddies died, in particular, one close friend, Paddy Moore, whose mother, Mrs Moore, was like a mother to him.

In Surprised by Joy, he wrote, "I put the war on one side to a degree which some people will think shameful and some incredible. Others will call it a flight from reality. I maintain that it was rather a treaty with reality, the fixing of a frontier."

This treaty with reality sets the buffer for Lewis against the carnage of war, the random deaths and the inordinate pain and suffering of life. More importantly, it was a treaty that guarded him against the indiscriminate gravitational blackhole of the meaninglessness of life.  It was a frontier that separated him from living while living and dying while living. A liminality from the fiefdom of bondage to the freedom to live.

Borrowing his analogy, I personally have my own treaty with reality, my pact with life. It is a treaty representing everything that is against the denying of everything that is good about life. It is a treaty that refuses to believe that we are the blind, random and mindless result of evolution; that we evolved from some serendipitous accident on a grand cosmogony scale. 

It is a treaty that chooses to embrace the best of mankind, to see the silver lining in the worst of us, and to uphold the hope that nothing is as bad as it seems; even death. Because if you think about it, death is but the continuation of a life in another way. For we can bury the body but not the memory. We can cremate the shell lifeless but not the love enduring. We can miss the physical company of our loved ones but not the unbreakable spiritual connection that their living years have so diligently sown in our lives. 

This treaty is necessary. It is crucial. Breach it and my borders of aliveness become blurred, diluted, even contaminated. Imagine radiation poison that dissolves into the bloodstream of life and destroys it gradually, surely, and with blind abandon. E.M Forster once wrote about his characters that “wandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin.” That is to me the violation of this treaty. We wander soulless into a world without wonders like clockwork machines punching around the clock, meeting deadlines, making money, and making a name for ourselves, without end. A life is to be loved and not exploited. A soul is to be redeemed and not driven. And a spirit is to be set free, not imprisoned.

So, I choose to preserve and protect this pact with life. I elect to make it real, this treaty with reality. It is a covenant that makes sense of the senseless. It is the only way my life can fully live, and in death, fully come alive in the hearts of others. It is like the defining hole in the donut. Although unseen, it is what makes a donut a donut. Denying the unseen in my life is to deny what it means to be me.

There is much more to this world than is revealed to me. And I do not want to live my life in pure abstractions. I do not want to live my life confined within a world made up of complex theories, however grand and unifying they can be. I do not want my world to be ringfenced in a neat formula, expressed in numerical terms, and reduced into a college text. There is undoubtedly more to it, much much more, and I don't want to view life from a kaleidoscope of scattered scenes. I want to view it from the summit of eternal perspectives.

My life has to defy the physical laws of this world because it was created to defy the physical bounderies of reality. My life is a countless series of uncharted spiritual rendezvous and not a blind matchmake with materialism.This is to me what conversion really means, a Christian conversion that is. CS Lewis once wrote, “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere.” I guess I have fallen into one of those life’s traps planted by my creator. Like a hunter, he had planned it all along; and like a lost sheep, I was meant to detour into it.

Alas, some make a pack with the devil. I however choose to make a pact with God. It is to me a pact with the hunter of life, a treaty with eternity.

Let me end with the words of Evelyn Waugh, “Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.” 

My conversion ends my life in the world where plain sight ruled and starts it on a journey where sublime faith takes flight. Cheerz.

Conversion is funny business

 A talk by the late Dr Richard Teo, a cosmetic surgeon, led me to write my thoughts below. 

If there were anyone who lived the archetypical jet-set lifestyle, it had to be him. Earning millions annually, he had got it all. Fast cars. Hot chicks. And bungalows. 

Then, in march 2011, while he was in his gym exercising, doing the full stretch, he felt some back pain. He then took a scan the next day and was diagnosed with stage 4 terminal lung cancer! The cancer has spread to his brain and other vital organs. 

Imagine that, gym one day and death knell the next. That diagnosis changed Dr Teo's life completely. He became serious with God, denounced the reckless living, and adopted a new set of belief based on faith, hope and all things eternal. 

Although he lost the fight late this year, he left a powerful legacy behind. Riding on this, I wrote about how I felt and here goes.

"Conversion is a funny business. I know funny is not the best of words to use. But it's funny not in a comical sense. It is in fact more ironic than comedic. I think many people like Dr Teo who converts (or in his case, is convicted) because the realness of his mortality came down upon him like a ton of bricks. 

Imagine how different his "champagne wishes and caviar dreams" of a life would be if not for the diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer? Would he have come to his senses without cancer? I know I am skating on the "thin ice" of insensitivity here but I'm just thinking out loud, befuddling through.

Often, it takes something like cancer to put an emergency brake to our break-neck materialism ride on the highway of insatiable desires. Nothing short of imminent death to wake us up from our dream-state reality of personal excesses and self indulgences.

Well, you can say that it is much better than dying as an unrepentant hedonist, right? Better late than never, so they say.

Alas, I think a wasted life is not so much dying as an unrepentant hedonist but living as one. Considering Dr Teo's life, I began to ask myself: How do you wake people like him up in the absence of a life-threatening illness? Why is it that the Grim Reaper does the job more thoroughly than a Rick Warren or a John Maxwell? 

The truth is, our own mortality brings out a reality that scares us to death. And because death is a stone's throw away, we reorganize and we re-prioritize with missionary zeal. So, seen in this angle, I think time is either our greatest ally or our greatest enemy. 

Without sounding too simplistic, the equation I see is a strange one: The less time we have, the more meaning we make out of our life. Conversely, the more time we have, the less meaning we make out of it. Shouldn't time be a tool rather than a threat? Quite ironic and sad?

So, is this how we "wake" some people up? Deceiving them into believing, with convincing medical support, that they have one year to live? And then, like a wound-up energizer rabbit, we stand back and watch them frantically making life-defining U-turns, amending their past wrongs, giving to the poor, and most likely, becoming a God-fearing believer.

After one year, when the well intended joke is exposed, and when they finally experienced a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction in life, will they thank us for the irony of the joke or sue us for the tyranny of it?

Steve jobs once gave a speech to the graduates of Stanford U and said that he lives his life as if he's going to die tomorrow. In other words, he lived on the fringes of mortality, milking everyday for all it's worth as if it was his last. 

Wow, I guess that accounts for all his accomplishments. I guess that also accounts for all his moodiness. While he was veritably a great innovator, he was also a crusher of the many spirit who worked under him. 

Herein lies our horned dilemma: How do we ensure that we value life by making meaningful connection without devaluing it by seeking self-recognition? 

Honestly, I have no answer to that question. I only know that the greatest enemy to living a meaningful life is to embody a self-deluded sense of "longevity". This applies to the young and the young at heart, especially the opulent. This delusion breaks the levee of facts-based reality and sends a floodgate of self-invincibility and self-worship. 

Awashed in self-importance, we readily lose sight of what is truly important in life. In other words, we get drowned in our own accomplishments. Sadly, we immortalized our achievements and neutralized our existence. Or, is such trade-off unavoidable?

Maybe the solution is to have a sharpened sense of mortality. To have a sense of how fragile life can be and how death is just a whisper away. To not take our loved ones for granted. To take things less seriously. To give more than we take. To love more than we hate. And lastly, and this is close to my heart, to be less moody and more "honky dory" (that is, to not see the glass as full half or half empty but to always look out for the "jug" that faithfully fills the glass up to its desired level).

It's difficult to end here because it feels like a feel-good, cliched-ish screed by me. But I guess every life is unique because it has its unique start and unique end. Like the body that finds its own level of homeostasis (balance), we too must find our own. 

For me, I am still searching, exploring, and sometimes even experimenting; but never giving up. Because the last thing I want to do is to live my life heavy on one side and light on the other and then to discover at my death bed that I have been heavy on myself and light on others. Cheers out."

Death's greatest regret

“The recent Dr Richard Teo video has gone viral. If he is NOT a millionaire or a doctor, will the message be that popular? Probably not. The truth remains to be seen how many people who are wowed by Richard Teo's life, applies the lessons to their own lives.” (From Facebook, Dr Yap).

A wise rejoinder was this: “I think the lesson most learn is, you can always regret on your dying bed.”

And here is my “tediously” longer rejoinder:

I agree, "you can always regret on your dying bed." There is no better wake up call than having one's foot in the casket and one's mind on intestate. The final nail in one's coffin is also the last sail of one's life adventure. Imminent mortality makes for eminent reality. One author mused, "Death is like a rumble of distant thunder at a picnic."

The dying are the best realists and they are also the best counselors. It is as if they had crossed over and saw a better world, which makes this world pales in comparison. They are usually unusually calm, generally unhurried and perfectly balanced. You can tell them the worst of materialistic news like a pending financial downfall or that the creditors are coming to garnish and they will take it all it with unruffled relish. Go figure.

If happiness is about living with a calm measure of contentment and a realistic overview of life, then I guess the depressed are the happiest people in the world, aren't they? They are level headed. They do not overrate their abilities. They keep their feet firmly on the ground. And they are contented with what they have. In other words, they treasure and enjoy what they possess instead of losing sleep over that which they are obsessed about.

As such, maybe it is the relentless optimist that one should be wary of. The buoyancy of spirit is often an exaggerated one - more hot air than is realistically fair. At some point, what gives way to a positive mindset is self-arrogance. The enemy of a realist's goals is therefore an overinflated ego.

So, maybe the value of mortality is inversely proportional to the delusion of self-invincibility. I think the paradox here is clear: To be happy, we are to be reminded of what generally makes us unhappy. To be joyful, we must not forget the apparent joyless things of life, especially the end of it all.

I always ask myself, "What makes for a good life?" Now I realize that it may be a wrong question. I should instead ask: "What makes for a good death?" Changing our life's perspective always changes our mental introspective. If an unexamined life is not worth living for, then I guess it is also not worth dying for.

William Blake once said, "To see the world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower. To hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour."  How's that for a complete reversal of our busy world? How many of us have forgotten the pleasure of a soft peck, the warmth of a hug, the vibrant colors of solitude, the fun in a whistle, and the awe of a sunset? Alas, we spend our life chasing our dreams and make a living nightmare out of it.

Let me end with this puzzle. They say, "Ignorance is bliss." If so, why aren't there more happy people in the world? Maybe it is because this ignorance involves the willful distancing of our fragile life from our unavoidable death. That's why many of us are stressed out nervous wreck. The way I see it is this. I think the opposite of life is not death, it is thinking that we never have to die. Cheers out.

Conversion Contortion

 This title "conversion contortion" is catchy and appropriate. It hints to the reality that conversion to a faith or vice versa can be a painful and difficult experience.

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   The numerous testimonies of theist-turned-atheists are good examples of late. Just as Saul's road to Damascus was difficult, the conversion of fundamentalist pastors like John Luftus, Dan Barker and Jerry Dewitt to humanists and atheists can be equally arduous.

 I believe that the conversion experience is a complicated one. Very often, an atheist can become a theist for the same reason that a theist can become an atheist. And I think the most common reason is the paradox of suffering: If God is all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing, why is there suffering of the most gratuitous kind? This question has plagued many for centuries and books have been written about it for centuries and still there's no satisfying answer to that question.

   Take for example, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel. He lost his faith in the death camps of Birkenau and Auschwitz.

   In his memoir, he narrated a heartbreaking incident where a child and two other men were accused and tortured to death for sabotaging the prison camp. The focus is on the young boy. If you have the stomach for it, here is what he wrote:-

  "One day, as we returned from work, we saw three gallows...Roll call. The SS surrounding us, machine guns aimed at us: the usual ritual. Three prisoners in chains - among there, the little pipel (boy). The SS seemed more preoccupied, more worried, than usual. To hang a child in front of thousands of onlookers was not a small matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was pale, almost calm, but he was biting his lips as he stood in his shadow of the gallows...

  The three condemned prisoners together stepped onto the chair. In unison, the nooses were placed around their necks.

  "Long live liberty!" shouted the two men. But the boy was silent.

 "Where is merciful God, where he He?" someone behind me was asking.

   At the signal, the three chairs were tipped over...

   Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing.

  And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.

   Behind me, I heard the same man asking: "For God's sake, where is God?"

  And from within me (Elie Wiesel), I heard a voice answer: "Where is HE? There is where - hanging here from this gallows...""

  Of course, most theist-turned-atheists would not have experienced such raw, painful and visceral event as did Wiesel, but they do have their own personal trials that gradually eroded their faith like drops of water slowly chipping off a huge rock.

  But I am just bringing up the inexpressible and sometimes insoluble conflict in the hearts of men who either affirm or denounce their faith. It is something that most will not fully understand because life and suffering and faith always pull us in unexpected directions.

    But, having said all that, it is pertinent to bear in your heart that the cross, the archetype of all brutal suffering, is the foundational reason many came to the faith. Here's just a few: Martin Luther, Simone Weil, CS Lewis, John Stott, and Alister McGrath.

   Quite puzzlingly, Martin Luther once said that "Living, even dying and being damned, makes a theologian, not understanding, reading or speculating."

  Alister McGrath latched on to Luther's terse statement and wrote this in his book Mere Theology: "The cross alone is our theology...The cross puts everything to the test."

   McGrath understood the cross as this: "the issue is not primarily how can we explain suffering - which is there, whether we like it or not - but how can we cope with it, and how can God use it to enable us to grow into stronger, better people."

  I guess that's why Simone Weil once said, "The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it."

   McGrath wrote that:" Luther reminds us that many aspects of that landscape remains shrouded in darkness, and that many find themselves called to walk in those shadowlands."

   He also distilled CS Lewis' conversion experience by adding: "Lewis is right: theology gives us a lens through which we can interpret the world, making sense of its ordering and its enigmas. Luther is also right: theology enables us to journey through darkness and despair. Its lens may sometimes yield a picture that appears quite out of focus, but not being able to view a picture clearly does not mean there is no picture to see."

  At this juncture, this question is timely: Have you journeyed through your own shadowland? Is your picture of faith a tad out of focus? Incomplete? Blurry? That's the blindsight of faith. It is also the dark-side of disbelief.

   Many took the same journey and did an about-turn when confronted by it. Somehow, I can understand why.

   But, by saying I understand the why does not mean I do not question the why not? That is, Why not suffering? Is a life devoid of sufferings a life of guaranteed faith and growth? The coin indeed has two sides: doubt and faith. Sometimes, it is simply the preponderance of one over another, just that slight tilt, that determines which face the coin eventually lands.

   The irony is not in the abandonment of faith, I think, it is the abandonment of the quest (in our own shadowland). One friend of mine once said: "An unexamined faith is not worth having."

   Let me end with this: there is a saying that is going around in my head recently and it is this: "NOW we see through a glass darkly. THEN, face to face." I recall a Biblical equivalent to that and it is this: "Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning." (Ps. 30:5). Cheers out!