Ask a Catholic

[Randy Carson]

I'm a Catholic. You have questions. Let's get started.

Where did you go wrong?

Technically, it was my grandmother.

She WAS a Catholic and left the Church, so my dad was raised as an Episcopalian. 

I found my way back to the true Church while I was in college.

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How do you feel knowing that your own life here on earth - all that you love, all that you dream, all that you have accomplished - will eventually fade into nothingness?

Where will you spend eternity?

Shame, I was hoping you would at least make an attempt at answering it. But I'll play along in the hopes you directly address it somewhere down the line.
I draw strength from it. I know that I'm a very small link in a chain that has existed long before I was born, and will continue for a long time after I die, and my legacy - no matter how small, or how forgotten - will have at least made its own contribution in shaping the world. I realise that this is the only experience of life I will ever have, and that rarity makes it all the more precious to me. So I have worked (with stops and starts, mind you, it hasn't exactly been a smooth road) to be the best man that I can, and help others who need it, and love those close to me. This cosmos is vast, and old, and to know that I and everyone I know play out their lives in a very small corner of space and time is both liberating and refreshing. Empires have risen and fallen, cities have crumbled, civilisations have been lost, confident religions created and destroyed, continents shifted and mountains eroded, planets coalesced and shattered, stars shone and then died. Against this vast canvas, we have evolved and tried to make sense of this incredible natural machine that gave rise to us.
The human experience is a gift, borne from a chain of events set in motion billions of years ago by natural forces that were able to shape and guide molecules in exactly the right way so that we could be here, in our ordinariness, to ponder those events. I have used that gift as best as I know how so far, and once my time on this planet is done, then I will cease to exist as a conscious entity.
As for where I will spend eternity - the same place I spent the 13.7 billion years before I was born...non-existence.

Now, would you kindly address my question?

There's not much I can say. You're cynical, fatalistic, and sound like you're only a one bad day at work away from becoming the next Robin Williams.

Take your meds...you'll feel better.

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I'm a Catholic. You have questions. Let's get started.

We're sorry, are we supposed to pity you?

1 Corinthians 15:19-20

19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. 20 But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21 For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.