Competition for my Soul

A knock at my door.  Two cherubic-faced young men neatly dressed; each with a white short-sleeved shirt, tie and trousers.  And of course each with his ID pinned over his  heart with white lettering on a black background “The Church of / Jesus Christ / of Latter Day Saints.”  In my imagination I heard a chorus of angels singing “hosanna to the highest” which may have come from the accumulated guilt of my apostate years or these ingenious young lads may have had a concealed device with a recording by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir with this sacred selection.

With “Jesus Christ” as their lead off conversation I countered with, “the unexamined life is not worth living” (forgive me Socrates for not attributing those words to you.)

More Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior and then one of the acolytes believed he was delivering the coup de grace when he said, “What about your purpose in life?” For an Existentialist this is the perfect question to which the answer is “life has no preordained purpose, I must create my meaning through the choices I make and the actions I take.”

Their approach was singular as they again brought up this fellow Jesus Christ who presumably had through his crucifixion and through his subsequent resurrection created a path on which I could gain eternal life.

As you can imagine our conversation was an exercise in futility; it reminded me of my high school Geometry class and the theorem of parallel lines. As you will recall parallel lines can continue on and on, but they never meet.

A character in Juan Carlos Onetti's, in “A Brief Life” said:

I saw the methodical, the jovial, the resolute, the resigned, the incredulous, I saw the sad; I saw all those who will die without knowing themselves(129).

Certainly rigidly held beliefs about abstract entities outside human experience based on no evidence are delusional.  Unfortunately tradition preserves this delusion originally manifested by fear of death.   These two young men share this delusion including their own denominational feature. They are likely to cling to this delusion for a lifetime and thus die without knowing themselves.