Do I mean anything?

I'm reading two different books right now.  One is called The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, a fiction story about two teens with cancer who fall in love.  The other is Pastrix by Nadia Bolz-Weber, a former addict turned tattooed, f-bomb dropping Lutheran pastor. The differences between these two books is like oil and water.  In Fault, the main character Hazel has to carry around an oxygen tank because her lungs won't work otherwise.  She has terminal cancer.  A young cancer survivor named Gus comes to a support group meeting.  When asked his biggest fear, he responds, "Oblivion," meaning to cease to exist after death. 


Hazel tells him the following:
"There will come a time...when all of us are dead.  All of us.  There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything....Everything we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught....if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it."

Wow.  Makes you feel small and insignificant, doesn't it.  But then...I read a chapter in Pastrix called "Beer and Hymns."  Nadia tells the story of how her church meets in a bar to sing hymns to God each week.  However, one particular week stood out because a few days before that one guy shot and killed some 12 people in a movie theater during a midnight showing of Batman. 

Nadia considered cancelling the meeting, but instead, they did it anyway.  Here are some of her remembrances of that night.

"It took a few minutes for me to pinpoint the uniqueness of how these hymns were being sung [that night].  But then I knew.  It was defiance.

"Mary Magdalene was the very first to proclaim, in the midst of loss and sorrow, that death had been defeated.

"Of course, Mary Magdalene would have very little tolerance for the Christian platitudes and vapid optimism that seem to swirl around these kinds of tragic events.  Those platitudes are tempting, but they're nothing but luxuries for people who've never had demons (or at least have never admitted to them).  But equally, she would reject nihilism, or the idea that there is no real meaning in life or death--ideas present in so much of postmodernity.  Those ideas, too, are luxuries, but they are for those who have never been freed from demons.

"When we sang hymns to God at the bar, it sounded like a people who simply would not believe that violence wins, a people who know that the sound of the risen Christ speaking our names drowns out all other voices.  It drowns out the sound of the political posturing, the sound of cries for vengeance, the sound of our own fears and anxieties, and the deafening uncertainty--because all of it is no match for the shimmering sound of the resurrected Christ calling our name.

"This is the resurrected God to whom we sing.  A God who didn't say we would never be afraid but that we would never be alone.

"Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples.  Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we can stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary, are bearers of resurrection, we are made new.  On the third day, Jesus rose again, and we do not need to be afraid.  To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles...that death is not the final word.  To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it.  And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, still we make our song alleluia.  Alleluia.  Alleluia."

I'm not done with The Fault in Our Stars yet, but I'm hoping Hazel finds more hope than that sad "reality" that she gave to Gus.