Life in the Terrible Shadow

I read this post by my good friend and quasi-philosopher, Brian Trapp, and just had to post it here. I'm not sure if there is an easier way to reference this, so the post in its entirety is below.

Socrates told us that the unexamined life is not worth living, but the problem with the examined life is that it is lived under a terrible shadow. The shadow is the knowledge of our own finitude, our own limitation as weak, ignorant, and temporal beings. We have a bleary-eyed notion of something greater than ourselves that exists beyond the borders of the world, yet when we grasp for it we find that it is gone. We turn to the wisdom of the philosophers, those farseeing sages who have wrestled with such questions for two millennia, and yet they have nothing to say to us, their arguments over even the basic structure of reality a testimony to their ultimate impotence. We catch a glimpse of an uncertain splendor in the barest corner of our eye, but when we turn our head we see only the grey twilight. We turn to the politicians, who with shameful bombast declare that the light we seek lies just beyond the next wave of political revolution or within the latest social structure, only to discover their words to be as empty as the wind. With unblinking clarity we understand the type of person we ought to be, but find that becoming such a person is like fighting an enemy we cannot see, a phantom version of ourselves with deeper power and greater cunning. Our limitation is blindness. Our failures are emblems of human finitude.

In the light of this uneasy knowledge, what choice do we have for salvation? To whom will we turn for redemption from these awful states? Do we even have the ability to choose rightly? I don't think so. Our only hope is that God will reach into our world, and as Christians we believe that He has done so. He has reached down not only into history in the Incarnation, but He daily reaches into individual lives with the Spirit's transforming power. But even after this is accomplished and we remain in this mortal flesh, many of our own failures and inabilities remain. But now it is different. Now we can cry with Paul, "What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!"