Your life is a court case. You are the jury and the defendant.
Yes, you have a team of crack lawyers; brilliant and committed advocates, people convinced of the worth of your life. They present the jury, you, with a series of arguments that draw up an admirable, if not shining, picture of you, the defendant. The mother who knows you’re smart. The friend who could easily imagine you in the Major Leagues. The pastor who is immovable in his belief of your compassion. These lawyers plead and contend, reason and persuade, urging you to look and see what they see so clearly.
And then the prosecution. Every bit as decisive and determined, full of great faculties of reason, coupled with deep-seated passion. A passion to see the “sad truth,” that you are an unfortunate assemblage of matter, destined for anti-self-discovery, and full of tragic and insoluble inconsistencies. The devastation of their arguments lie in the absence of dramatics and hysterics. Their analysis is calm, resolute, tempered, and marked by a surprising empathy for the defendant they condemn. “No,” they say, “condemnation is too strong a word. We’re simply after the affirmation of plain truth.” The father who suggests a more reasonable plan of study. The husband who equates your anxieties solely to maladjustment and chemical imbalance. The sister who hugs you and smiles and talks like she’s mentally replacing you with someone more interesting.
There are witnesses. Tangential people who’ve witnessed you. To them, you were a great employee, a real bastard in the check-out line, a timely rent-check-payer, kind-of-cute-but-not-my-type, stupid, a genius, a committed-father-and-loving-husband, a classic mean-girl, a classic case of ADD, a class-act, an obnoxious ego-maniac… these fragmented visions lie before you like a shattered something. It is up to the defense to piece them together in an ultimately encouraging fashion. It’s up to the prosecution to show how incompatible and incomprehensible they really are.
And now you are twenty, or twenty-eight, or forty, or sixty-two, and you have finally tired of this incessant case, more drawn out, costly, and melodramatic than the O.J. trial. You’re disillusioned with pretty much every participant, because you’ve noticed that if you simply look from another angle, they are defending themselves against themselves, and are, in a sense, using your trial to assess their own lives.
After a while, you are able to ignore everyone, and look at yourself, there, next to your lawyers, and there, in the jury-box. Just as the air clears, just as the illusion of everyone else’s expertise has cleared away like a dissolving fog, you are faced with the disorienting notion of looking at yourself, as if possessing two distinct selves. You find it difficult to make any determination. Is the real self the seeing self, or the seen self? Are you an established creature, or a constant creator of self? Your last attempt at objectivity has been severely thwarted. And you should note how unbearably and vacuously egocentric this moment of self-reflection is.
So the court collapses, each component showing itself to be something other than what it appeared to be. The premise was flawed, the whole exercise an elaborate hoax.
Even God, who is characterized as one who judges, cannot be the kind we imagine. With all of his insight, intimate involvement in our every molecule, He must not resort to the sort of proceedings that involve disparate external evidences. I can’t imagine Him straining over a hair follicle or a receipt to determine the verdict.
He wants to recognize us.
He made us in a glorious, admirable fashion. He set us to glorious, admirable work. And on that day of judgement he wants to recognize the creatures that he crafted. And if we fall short, if He says “depart from me, I never knew you,” it might have had something to do with all that staring at ourselves, all that egocentricity. Because “to be” is in direct opposition with “to stare at oneself.” The one who endlessly considers his own nature depletes his own nature. You cannot know yourself very well, which can put you in a place of existential paralysis, or in a place of extreme dependence.
Case in point, I don’t believe the end of time will play out like A Few Good Men. All of us, naked in the presence of God, will lose our worldly bearings on legal loopholes, impressive speeches, and briefcases of evidence. There will be no uniformed guards, and to be told “You are free to go” may as well be a condemnation. God as “judge” or “father” or “Lord” or “helper” will be exchanged for God as God. The most substantial question will be raised, and the answer will ring out in the fabric of your being as a resounding yes or no. The least trial-like trial will culminate in the weightiest verdict, and every inch of you will agree with it.
