With the presidential election in the U.S. apparently settled, our attention can now be given to other, more important personal matters—such as the meaning of life and how to live.
Life
as a Brief Candle
Contending
with Romeo and Juliet as well as Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Macbeth
is regularly ranked as one of his bests plays. Consider this oft-quoted passage
in that tragedy: In Act V, Scene V, King Macbeth exclaims,
Out, out, brief
candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
What
a negative, even cynical, view of life!
While
unlikely to express themselves so eloquently, I’m afraid Macbeth’s words,
sadly, characterize the way many contemporaries see life.
Life
as a Splendid Torch
Regularly
rated among British dramatists as second only to Shakespeare, George Bernard
Shaw was an interesting and complex character about whom I have mixed feelings.
There
is much that is objectionable in Shaw, who was born in 1856 and died 75 years
ago, in November 1950. For example, he promoted eugenics and opposed organized
religion.
But
I have been impressed by these words of Shaw:
In
the sentence before those notable words, Shaw declared, “I want to be
thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live.”
Perhaps
the impact of that statement is lessened somewhat when we realize that he wrote
them in 1907, the year he turned 51. But he did live a long and productive
life, writing his last full-length play in 1948, at the age of 92, and a short
play the year of his death.
Life
as Both a Brief Candle and a Splendid Torch
In
numerous sermons through the years, I have cited James 4:14 (in the New Testament):
“What is your
life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes”
(NRSV).
That verse resonates
with Macbeth’s view of life as a brief candle, although in context it certainly
doesn’t see life as signifying nothing.
J. Mike Minnix is
a Baptist pastor in North Carolina, and in a 2012 sermon based on James
4:14, he stated, “You will never live your life as you should unless you
recognize how quickly your life is passing.”
Pastor Minnix then
quoted Psalm 90:12 – “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a
heart of wisdom.” Following his example, I calculated how many days I have already
lived.
The number of my
days is now 30,039. That is a lot of days! And I might even live another 4,000
more days, which would take me to a couple of months past my 93rd birthday.
Or maybe not.
Even the biggest
candles eventually burn up. Accordingly, although I have lived more than 30,000
days, I do recognize that, indeed, that life is short.
Regardless of how
many, or how few, days I have left, though, I want to be like Shaw and to “burn
as brightly as possible” for as long as possible.
Rather than
spending most of my time thinking and talking about the past, as we oldsters
are inclined to do, I want to keep thinking about the future and about what
(little) I can do to help create a better world for my grandchildren.
In that regard I want to keep taking seriously the words of Shaw that were slightly paraphrased and made widely known by Bobby Kennedy in the years before his untimely death (brief candle, indeed!) in 1968:
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