Posted by
Mike Silverman on Sunday, July 12, 2009 10:00:45 PM
What is the significance of life? Is it to be useful in some way? To plow fields, to feed the hungry, to bring happiness to others, to invent, to heal, or in some way be of value to the world? what if a man is paralyzed, immobile, his arms and legs frozen forever? Perhaps he can hear and see and speak, but lets rob him even of his eyes and his voice. He is paralyzed and blind and mute. He can hear and he can breathe. All other senses fail him utterly. Perhaps he has been this way for as long as he has been alive. Does his life have any vaule? What is the significance of the life within him?
Perhaps there are those who would seek to help him. They would learn how to care for such a man, to provide him with what he needs to survive, and how to communicate with such a man who is so shut off from manners of expressing himself. Perhaps there are those who would love him for the life within him, for its own sake. Perhaps by caring for him, they would learn to care for others and to respect life in a deeper way. But then, is he merely significant as a tool to teach others something? Does he have to be something to someone else, or can his life mean something important even if no one cares for him?
Let's move to the end of his life, he dies, and no one has noticed. His lifeless body stiffens and grows cold in his bed and days pass before anyone discovers him. He is then taken away and laid to rest in the earth. what can we say about the time during which life inhabited his body?
He did not choose to be born, birth comes absent of the knowledge of the one being born. And certainly he did not choose to come into the world with such a condition afflicting him. Yet, into the world he came. The earth was solid under him, the sun shone on him as on everyone else, and the wind touched him no less or more than it touched anyone else. Creation did not judge him. So what man can say he knows better than all of creation? If the world and the universe and all of existence was willing to accept his birth, is a man better able to judge if his life is acceptable?
- Mike Silverman