Sick

Yesterday I noticed that I had a cold. I probably caught it working at the soup kitchen on tuesday; I often catch little infections there. It doesn't bother me too much; in fact sometimes I think these little illnesses can be blessings that help me to come back to basic mindfulness. We notice ourselves when something is wrong!

Sickness, death, misfortune, all of these are the daily intrusion of un-meaning into our existence. They remind us of the starting point of all existential theological reflection: there is something wrong with the world; things don't seem to be the way they are supposed to be.

Somehow, mysteriously, we perceive the givens and obvious things of life as wrong and unfair; it's somehow not right that people are born into suffering, that "bad things happen to good people," that they abandon us by dying. But this only goes to show that our human consciousness is somehow geared to something beyond the given and the obvious, to a perfection and eternity that we desire. And this is the root of eros and the beginning of what we mean by "God."