THERE HAS TO BE MORE

I went to a funeral recently. It was a sobering experience. He was a young man at 53, leaving a wife and two young children behind him.

There is something about funerals.

They seem to be able to blow everything out of your life apart from the bare essentials.

Living and dying.

It was January 8th. As I sat in the church the irony of having just started a new year full of hope and optimism to now being at the funeral of a 53 year old man was not lost on me. Life may start a new chapter but the script on the pages stays the same. Nobody puts going to a funeral on their to-do list at the start of a new year. Nobody forecasts that this could be the year of their own funeral.

No matter what we plan, our life may have other plans for us. I somehow sense that the thoughts going through my head at that funeral were not just confined to me. They would also have found a foothold in the minds of everybody else in the church.

Each one of us is an amazing complex creation of fingers, and lungs, and eyes, and blood flowing through our veins, and voices, and hearts, and minds. Every single incredible piece of us, no matter how small, is there to perform its own unique, extraordinary, essential function.

We are sustained on a planet that is way beyond anything we could even begin to contemplate, let alone create. A planet that just happens to rotate around a sun every day to give us light to live and darkness to rest. A planet on which we can grow food to eat and that provides water to drink. A planet that simply spellbinds all of us with the magnificence of its oceans, and rivers, and mountains, and birds and creatures of all kinds of unimaginable shapes and sizes. A planet that has clearly been created just for us. A planet that we could never be capable of creating for ourselves.

So why does somebody die at 53?

This man had lived a good life, in a good place, with a great wife and two beautiful children. But for all the magnificence and ingenuity of the creation, why for just 53 years. And worse still, why does somebody die at 3, or 13, or 23?

Why is somebody murdered at 25, or tortured and killed at 35, or in an accident at 45? Why in the world that was clearly designed to sustain us, do we have war, and famine, and terror, and disaster that destroys us.

Why, for those of us who are supposed to be doing well, are so few of us truly happy for any great length of time. Happiness just comes in little glimpses. Little bubbles and as soon as we try to hold on to them, they invariably disappear in our hands and we are searching for the next one.

But happiness is still the one true emotion that links us all equally. It is the universal aspiration that we all seek. Even the criminals want to be happy.

But as we rarely attain it for long periods, this planet may have been created to sustain us, but it has obviously not been designed to fulfill us.

We have a strong culture of going to funerals in Ireland. I think it stands to us as a race of people. It keeps us grounded. A funeral, in more ways than one, is a very grounding experience. In a busy world it suddenly puts our own demise in front of us.

And our own demise is in front of all of us.

At some point it must have crossed everybody’s mind that rather than a 53 year old man, it could have been my turn today. For all our advancement, and assumed control over what we do, this is life telling us that it is no more than the luck of the draw.

No matter what you have convinced yourself, a funeral forces you to see life as it really is. Short, mainly beyond your control and generally more uphill than down. There are wonderful moments of joy and achievement along the way of course, but these tend to be just sprinkled through a largely functional foundation. Life for most people, most days, is predominantly a stoic experience of work and deadlines and responsibilities and decisions and in many cases, survivorship. The greatest human attribute of all, is the ability to keep going.

So given the amazing complexities that were required to create both the human race and the planet it lives on, my thoughts as I look on at the coffin of a man who is a lot younger than me eventually subside to just one conclusion.

There simply has to be more.

I was in Auschwitz a few years ago and while there, I asked myself what would I have done if I was there at the time. What would I have done to stay strong. My money and my car and my big house weren't much use to me now. My life was obviously over and the world had abandoned me to this terrible place.

And when all the dust had settled all that was still standing was my faith.

A belief that there has to be a place for all of us that is better than this. One day a time must come when everything will be right. Good will replace evil. Love will banish hate. Justice must prevail.

We have come too far and know too much for that not to be the case.

The last will be first and the first will be last.

There has to be more.

As I grow older the leap of faith gets narrower and narrower. Too many things in this world just don't make sense. There has to be more than this. And the narrower it gets, the greater my belief becomes that the ‘more’, will be vastly superior to everything we currently know.?