On Ghosts And Roles

When ghosts are depicted in stories and film, they often continue to do in death the same thing they did in life.

For example, if you visit the Haunted Mansion at DisneyLand, the last thing you see as you go up the escalator is a dead bride standing in her wedding gown. "Hurry back!" She calls out, as if you might miss her wedding.

It's almost like finding a husband was her only identity in life. When eternity stripped her of this task (for certainly the dead become like angels and do not marry and they do not give in marriage) there was nothing else to her. So she continued to wear the gown waiting for an infinitely delayed wedding.

An hour north of where I live there's an excellent magic show my wife and I attended once. The magician was a living, breathing human being, but the pianist was (in the story) a female ghost.

We read about her life on the back of the brochure. Her fiance had hunted foxes, and before he left on what was to be his last expedition she had told him she would sit at her piano and would not stop playing it until he returned.

The fiance had a hunting accident and passed away before he could return home. The young woman continued to play the piano until one day she passed away and (the legend says) she continued her sorrowful songs even in death.

I'm not into ghost stories. They tend to creep me out.

The frightful thing to me is the way the ghosts do not give up their roles. It's almost like they don't know who they are anymore and so they cling tightly onto their job perhaps because that's all there is to them.

"Without the mask, where will you hide?"

There is something about these ghost stories I can relate to. At times I wonder to myself, "What if I lose my job?. What if I don't get accepted to grad school? What if I do something my parents strongly disapprove of?"

These are all questions I have worried about or been tempted to worry over. And they are all role questions. The role of a husband to keep a good job. The role of a student to be accepted into a good school. The role of being a son.

But what about the role of being oneself? Or is that a role?

At the hour when death comes for a person, will they be able to accept themself as they are? Or will they cling tightly to the rules of their role?

When Jesus cast the demons out of a man among the Garasenes, the demons asked to be sent into a herd of pigs.

One could speculate why they made this strange request. Perhaps they desperately wanted to dwell inside something so they won't have to be all alone in who they were. Or perhaps I am mistakenly reading human behavior into the realm of unclean spirits ...

The unclean spirits often use any pretext they can find to be in a person's life. Jesus, on the other hand, stands at the door and knocks. On the one hand we have restless desperation in pursuit of an earthly goal. The other option is to recognize the choice one has in his or her short time on earth.

Jesus described the generation at the time of Noah as people who were marrying and giving in marriage and knowing nothing of what was going to happen to them. They were following their roles in search of distractions -unaware of the judgment waiting for them.

Ghost stories are often based on the lives of people who lived their lives in the words: "If I could just...". And to accomplish their aim they employ calculation, shrewdness, and often times anxiety.

But however often they tell themselves, "If I could just ...", there is one thing the unhappy spirits avoid: accepting themselves as they are. Unlike the world with its fleeting desires eternity asks very little: to love God and to love thy neighbor as thyself.

However urgent a task may seem in this life, it is far better to remember the task eternity has prepared for every person.

The Element of Love

There is something to do, therefore. And what must be done in order to be in the debt of love to each other? When a fisherman has caught a fish in his net and wishes to keep it alive, what must he do?

He must immediately put it in water; otherwise it becomes exhausted and dies after a time. And why must he put it in water? Because water is the fish's element, and everything which shall be kept alive must be kept in its element.

But love's element is infinitude, inexhaustibility, immeasurability. If you will to keep your love, then, by the help of the debt's infinitude, imprisoned in freedom and life, you must take care that it continually remains in its element; otherwise, it droops and dies -not after a time, for it dies at once-which itself is a sign of its perfection, that it can live only in infinitude.

Soren Kierkegaard
Works of Love
pp. 175-176

The way Kierkegaard describes the infinitude of love stands out to me. Human love always seems to set conditions like: "As long as you stay out of my way, I love you," And, "Just don't say anything stupid and I will care about you."

The love God demands of us is blind in the sense that it is to our neighbor. As long as a person remains our neighbor, we are required to love that person.

This seems so different in comparison to the way I generally love people.

The Spinning World

Consider two aspects of the world.

First the world is continually spinning at a speed of four hundred sixty five miles per second at the equator. Every city travels entirely around the planet earth in a period of as little as twenty four hours.

And so a person wakes up in the morning, goes to work, goes to sleep at night, and then wakes up again in the morning. A man hungers so he eats, and when he is full he stops eating.

Is it a wonder that no one feels dizzy? Or perhaps they do in a sense.

A woman feels inclined to be with a man and they begin a relationship. She feels disinclined to be with that same man, and the relationship ends. A man finds a woman youthful, interesting, and beautiful and he initiates a relationship with her. Then the same woman no longer appears this way and the relationship is soon over.

This is the way of the world. One side of the earth is warmed by the sun while the dark side cools. Nothing in the world lasts, and it has two sides to everything.


The second thing about the world is the high speed it travels in an elliptical path around the sun. It travels one hundred and eight thousand kilometers per hour.

That means when the forward side of the earth reaches a certain point in space, the distance part of the earth is already there after seven minutes.

So-called enlightened thinking has gone so far as to claim that as time passes we are getting somewhere because of the great speed we are travelling.

Let us suppose a benevolent dictator decrees women may not be physically beaten by men. So much for the better for women.

There is however the question that lingers (even after no woman has been physically abused for centuries). The question asks, "Does anyone care about a particular woman any more as a result of this law?".

If not, the law may still be helpful, but can we really call that progress? In the same way, the world travels at great speed and always returns to the same place in its path around the sun.

And as Solomon writes, nothing is new under the sun.

The Bible says we are to be like Jesus: we should live in the world, but we are not to live of the world. John the apostle tells us everything of the world -the cravings of sinful man, the lust of the eyes, the boasting of what a man has and does- come not from God.

The physical world spins and is always changing temperature, but we are not to be this way in spirit. We are not to be tossed around by our circumstances -blessing those who bless us and cursing those who curse us.

Love is eternal and has all it needs to love in itself. Love is not a passing fancy changing with the tides, but a commitment that lasts through the changing world and its hardships.

The physical world travels at great speed but always ends up where it started. In the same way people invent new fashions and new rules all the time, but they're just as corrupt on the inside as when they began.

Obedience to God means a total life commitment from the beginning. Jesus tells us that if we seek first the kingdom of God the other things will be given to us as well.

"In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world."
John 16:33

The True Problem

Politics ... politics ...

Just when I think every concern has been solved - or at least addressed - new ones pop up and old ones develop new sub-concerns.

The accessibility of medicine for the elderly
The effects of global warming on remote jungle species
The broad ignorance about AIDS
The prevalence of war and military aggression in video games

But the truth is there is a sickness killing far more people than poor health care, global warming, AIDS, or war. Whatever your view on Iraq is, this disease has killed more people than all the wars in history combined. It has killed more people than all the murders combined. It has killed more people than global warming ever will. This sickness is far more serious than any issue I see touted in the news, and yet no one ever talks about it.

The sickness I am referring to is suicide. So far, the statistics I have mentioned are uncontested and not difficult to verify, but they are merely the tip of the iceberg. Camus once noted that people often put on masks, but suicide is a confession: a confession that their life was not worth living. Yet there are many who hate their lives silently without making such a confession.

And, of course, these people cannot be counted, recorded, or estimated in any statistic. It is hard enough for a person to be honest with another, let alone the task of being honest with oneself. For this reason a poll cannot convey even a glimpse of the magnitude of this problem.

Growing numbers of people are conscious of their despair, but how can this compare to the number of people who are unconscious of their despair?

Politicians often tell us what a burden it is to be poor, to breath dirty air, and to live in a high-crime area. And these things are burdens. But what a burden to hate one's own life!

Unfortunately no politician has offered any consolation to solve or even approach this problem.

As an example of the inability of politics to address this issue, I submit that the biggest governments are the ones with the highest suicide rates. The socialist governments of Europe have much higher suicide rates than the countries with smaller governments.

There is almost nothing the government can do to make a person's life worth living. Yet when the individual looks at his or her choices and decides to make changes, all things can become new.

The solution is this: to stop living to have a valuable life in the eyes of the public, to stop longing to be other people, to stop controlling other people as a substitute for controlling oneself.