How
I Learned To Love Radical Finitude:
Reflections Prompted by Ralph Ellis
Anthony Freeman, Imprint
Academic
The lot is fallen unto me in a fair ground.
Psalm 16:6
All my life I have been handicapped
by contentment. When still at school, I found life so enjoyable that I
believed my schooldays would indeed prove to be the happiest of my life.
But then I went to college and was—if anything— even more
content and fulfilled than I had been at school. And when I began work
it was the same again, and so it has gone on ever since. While other people
are fearful, lost, angst-ridden, crossed in love, disappointed in their
hopes, driven to despair, and made to suffer the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune, I am simply content: happy to be me, happy with my
lot. As the psalmist put it, "The lot is fallen unto me in a fair ground"
(Psalm 16:6). Even when, a few years ago, I lost at a stroke my income,
my home, and my respected place in society, so many blessings flowed in
the wake of the event that I now blush to call even that episode a misfortune.
Even at that time, when the future was all uncertainty, my condition as
I recall it was one of hopeful anticipation, and those hopes have been
wonderfully met.
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