“The easy thing is just to stop bothering about the sticky, prickly, puzzling
question of life’s meaning. The easy thing is to take up permanent
residence in borderland, a place chaotically and mindlessly busy, the hectic
trading house of the trivial. The easy thing is to adopt some hybrid
philosophy that crossbreeds stoicism (“just grit your teeth and take it like a
man”) with hedonism (“you only go around this way once, so you’d better
get while the getting’s hot”) with epicureanism (“leave me to my patch of
sunlight, I’ll leave you to yours”) with nihilism (“nothing matters anyway, so
just do what you want”)…If you live that way, after a while you notice that
your life has nothing at its core. It has no center. There is activity. There is
opinion. There is busyness. But there’s nothing to give real pleasure or
deep meaning to the activity, nothing to ground opinions in truth and
shape them into convictions, nothing to translate busyness into fruitfulness,
nothing to convert selfish ambition into holy purpose. You realize you’re
stuck slow hearted on borderland. And you start to wonder if this is it, or
were you made and called for something else? If we are ever to get
beyond mere busyness—which is mostly self-contrived camouflage, a way
we keep ourselves from seeing our own life’s hollowness—we need a
center out of which to live. We need a deeply Christian philosophy: ‘For to
me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.’”
-Mark Buchanan, Your God is Too Safe