When you can no longer tell your own story without telling his, that’s when you have become a Christian.
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From the Big Bang…
Our world is now understood to be a world where something really happens; the whole story of the world need not have been written down in the first quantum like a song on the disk of a phonograph. The whole matter of the world must have been present at the beginning, but the story it has to tell may be written step by step.
The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
…to ask whether God or evolution created life is like asking whether Shakespeare or Hamlet killed Polonius. If there is no Shakespeare, Hamlet’s act is meaningless. It is merely the accidental arrangement of ink on a page. If there is a Shakespeare, however, his existence as the creator of the literary Denmark does not obviate the drama of the play. It is rather a necessary prerequisite for it. Shakespeare, as a playwright, is not a competitor with the drama of the play.
If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up somewhere else.
Don’t you believe that there is in man a deep so profound as to be hidden even to him in whom it is?
The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is really worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It’s okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.
No God, No Meaning
…our reason naturally aspires to encompass the totality of being; and our will for order and our need to make sense of existence lead us instinctively to seek that which is both the root and the keystone of existence, and gives it its meaning. Even atheists, Nietzsche among them, knew this: order and meaning come from God, and if God really is dead, then we delude ourselves in thinking that meaning can be saved. If God is dead, nothing remains but an indifferent void which engulfs and annihilates us. No trace remains of our lives and our labours, there is only the meaningless dance of protons and electrons. The universe wants nothing and cares for nothing; it strives toward no goal; it neither rewards nor punishes. Whoever says that there is no God and all is well deceives himself.
— Leszek Kolakowski, Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal: Essays on Everyday Life (via) <link>
The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms.
Don’t think of them as “Customers” or “Patrons”, think of them as “Users”. Whatever thing you’re selling, it’s not what it does that’s interesting; it’s how people use it that’s interesting. “People Matter. Objects Don’t.” Exactly.
Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.