Not a Stranger

I wouldn't say I'm idealistic.  I wouldn't even call myself an optimist.  However, I have always been secure in my conviction that life has meaning and coherency.  While there are aspects of existence that humans can never expect to understand, there is so much beauty in the world that I find it impossible to believe it came about by chance.  For this reason, when I read Albert Camus' decidedly nihilistic The Stranger the second semester of my junior year, I was disturbed and unsettled:  the novel essentially culminates in the protagonist's realization that life is meaningless. About to be executed, he thinks: "As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.  Finding it so much like myself -- so like a brother, really -- I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again" (122-123).  

The protagonist Meursault's contentment in the supposed purposelessness of the universe contrasted sharply with everything I'd been taught or believed.  How could anyone be happy in the absence of hope and meaning?  In my opinion, one cannot just give up faith and live a live centered around the idea that the world is indifferent.  Without hope or meaning, life would mean nothing, and who would want to live that kind of life?  A life without seeing the value in the small things; beauty and nature,  love and friendship, success and failure, excitement and tranquility, patterns, colors, joy, and disappointment; would be worthless.

This book of faithlessness did not weaken my faith.  Although I can't say Camus was wrong, that his exploration of the unanswerable question "Does life have meaning?" was entirely invalid, I make the deliberate choice to believe.  Where before I had simply assumed that I was alive for a reason, that I was destined for more than an empty life made meaningless by death, I began to look at my existence in a different light.  Yes, it's impossible to know beyond doubt that there is a God who cares, a higher power who crafted the universe and still knows my name, but if I have to make the choice between a faith I can't be sure of or a life without faith, I choose faith.