I consider myself privileged for having been born into a poor family, one of 10 siblings. My dad’s meagre salary provided only for the bare essentials. Luxuries were few. One of them was when we could afford a few bananas. It was simply great to have half a banana each. It was so precious that we invented a game with that. The one who made his half banana last longest would be the winner. However, you had to keep eating it without pausing or stopping.
How difficult it was to enjoy that half banana, trying to make it last as long as possible and seeing it shrink with every bit we nibbled, however gingerly we did it!
Is not this an apt paradigm of life? How can you live it without seeing it diminishing hour by hour, day by day? All things seem to pass away. We humans crave permanence, yet we live in a universe that is so transitory and temporary. So we often resort to two main options or attitudes.
One is to deny reality, and live today as if tomorrow will never come. Let’s enjoy it while it lasts and continue nibbling at the pleasures and comforts we crave and live for. It’s a blind rush to immediate, short-sighted, dead-end gratification.
Another option is to somehow stop life on its tracks. We engage in a rat race for power, money, success, social status, popularity, traditions – anything that makes us forget the fact that the banana we’re nibbling at is diminishing by the hour. Our inner thirst for survival and a lasting life seems unquenchable. So we soldier on, propping it up as long as we can while denying that ours are only stage props creating a make-believe show out of the drama of life.
Both attitudes lead to a frustrating emptiness that tortures us from the inside. No wonder that humanity is resorting more and more to expensive, superficial and futile means to cover up that emptiness. Fashion, extravagance, waste, corruption, sacrificing truth for convenience, a looming climate disaster – all are catastrophes of our own making.
All of this because we want to make what is essentially transitory and temporary to last. Poor humans, we want to build a permanent home in a time-bound universe while we dream of eternal life. We think we can secure it by fighting back death by all means, even at the cost of destroying our own lives and that of our poor finite planet.
Poor humans, we want to build a permanent home in a time-bound universe while we dream of eternal life
And yet few of us take the trouble to look for the seed of eternity and timelessness where it can only be found. In our efforts to make our artificial happiness last forever, we miss out on the real, lasting happiness by turning our heads from the only place we can find it. So we all die buried in the loneliness of our overflowing and suffocating plenty.
My half banana could not and did not last. It was not made to last. What lasted, in sharing our precious banana with my brother, was sharing our sheer joy whilst consuming it in a precious game of life and love.
This is the Kingdom of God Jesus came to announce to us – an endless life in God who is endless love. In him, all the heavenly and earthly banana plantations will never wilt or wither away. He has made this world to pass but he has made us to last.