We the People . . .

The obtuse Populist of our day is likely to cling to false ideas of the actuality of “what is” and attempt to create a fantasy world that will provide a feeling of certainty.  Many of these Fundamentalists detest “Liberals” and would like to claim the United States Constitution as a Christian document. The following three question true / false examination brings out these misconceptions.

    1)The Founding Fathers were Enlightenment Liberals who got the ideas related to natural rights found in the United States Constitution from John Locke, an English philosopher.

    2)The word “God” is contained in the United States Constitution a number of times.

    3)No person except a practicing Christian shall be eligible to the office of President of the United States.

The answer to the first question is “true” and the Fundamentalist is loath to admit that it is. The idea of a “Liberal” creating the constitution is anathema for her / him.

The answer to number (2) is, of course, false. The word God is not in the constitution. Nothing galls an Evangelical more than being told that the Constitution is “Godless.”

The answer to number (3) is also false. Article Six of the United States Constitution expressly “forbids a religious test as a requirement for holding a governmental position.”

The United States Constitution was erected on a foundation of “Reason.” Its secular nature has made it work and it has made it endure.

The Parable of the Mustard Seed

Death comes for each of us; we are born and we shall die. The Buddhist parable below shows how frenetic grief must finally give way to acceptance. We all go from house to house begging for mustard seeds; there are no mustard seeds in any house. Yesterday a woman about seventy years of age offered condolences to me for my loss and then tears came to her eyes and her voice choked when she told me her husband died when he was thirty-eight years old.  She buried her husband. Her feelings of grief found their place and she raised their three sons. 

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"During Buddha’s time, there lived a woman named Kisa Gotami. She married young and gave birth to a son. One day, the baby fell sick and died soon after. Kisa Gotami loved her son greatly and refused to believe that her son was dead. She carried the body of her son around her village, asking if there was anyone who can bring her son back to life.

The villagers all saw that the son was already dead and there was nothing that could be done. They advised her to accept his death and make arrangements for the funeral.

In great grief, she fell upon her knees and clutched her son’s body close to her body. She kept uttering for her son to wake up.

A village elder took pity on her and suggested to her to consult the Buddha.

“Kisa Gotami. We cannot help you. But you should go to the Buddha. Maybe he can bring your son back to life!”

Kisa Gotami was extremely excited upon hearing the elder’s words. She immediately went to the Buddha’s residence and pleaded for him to bring her son back to life.

“Kisa Gotami, I have a way to bring your son back to life.”

“My Lord, I will do anything to bring my son back”

“If that is the case, then I need you to find me something. Bring me a mustard seed but it must be taken from a house where no one residing in the house has ever lost a family member. Bring this seed back to me and your son will come back to life.”

Having great faith in the Buddha’s promise, Kisa Gotami went from house to house, trying to find the mustard seed.

At the first house, a young woman offered to give her some mustard seeds. But when Kisa Gotami asked if she had ever lost a family member to death, the young women said her grandmother died a few months ago.

Kisa Gotami thanked the young woman and explained why the mustard seeds did not fulfill the Buddha’s requirements.

She moved on to the 2^nd house. A husband died a few years. The 3^rd house lost an uncle and the 4^th house lost an aunt. She kept moving from house to house but the answer was all the same – every house had lost a family member to death.

Kisa Gotami finally came to realise that there is no one in the world who had never lost a family member to death. She now understood that death is inevitable and a natural part of life.

Putting aside her grief, she buried her son in the forest. 

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“Life: a mystery to be lived.”

“Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.”
                                                             
                                                             Gabriel Marcel

"For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts."
                                                             Thomas Mann

Why is acknowledging that the source of existence is a mystery such a dilemma? The answer: fear of death. Sadly death is the sovereign in our lives.  

The omnipresence of death as the sovereign diminishes the fullness of our being.  If only we would embrace the mystery of existence and the awe it can inspire then, and only then, will we be free to discover authentic meaning in the limited time we have to live.  


Words of Sartre are instructive. Sartre believed that you create your own essence through the choices you make and the consequent actions you take. He held since “being” has no preordained meaning then existence is the stage on which the individual is totally free to create meaning.  Sartre believed that if the individual does not acknowledge and exercise this responsibility she / he lives in “bad faith.”

Binx Bolling, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s the “Moviegoer,” introduces the reader to the “the search.”  He says, “What is the nature of the search?  You ask.  Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me, so simple that it is easily overlooked.  The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. . . . To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” 

The following Onetti passage captures the fundamentals of Existentialism and ironically the words are uttered by a character who is a clerical Bishop. What he calls the “laws of the game” represent the conditions of existence; “eternity is now” represents the temporal grounds for action by the individual, and, most importantly, the “strive to be himself” represents the commitment to the authentic self that is so significant and that must be in effect “at all times and against all opposition.”  His words represent how each human being should confront life and confront death.

“I will kiss the feet of he who may comprehend that eternity is now, that he himself is the only end, that he must accept and strive to be himself, simply that, without need of reasons, at all times and against all opposition . . . I applaud the courage of he who accepts each and every one of the laws of the game he did not invent and was not asked if he wanted to play (198).”