I don’t believe in fairy tales, or destiny, prince and princesses, tragic love stories, or heroic deaths. I don’t buy in to the mushy “the universe conspires” philosophy of people like Paolo Coelho. I don’t believe in Feng Shui, and I don’t believe we can please “luck” or the “gods” if they exist, by burning animals or placing furniture in particular orientations. I don’t believe in “Chi” or spirits. I don’t believe luck exists as something that can be attracted. It is a mere description of a sequence of events. People find comfort in many of those; I have decided not to. It is perhaps a matter of faith for them. And for me too, to decide against those things. Sometimes I think I don’t even believe in hope. There are just things you work toward, and get as a reward for your work - that is the hope I subscribe to. Sometimes though, it is already hard work to just hold on. So maybe I do believe in hope, as some people define it. But things are so messed up in this reality. Sometimes I believe in the absurd. 

If that is so, then it seems I don’t believe in any kind of superstition. Apparently I do. I believe in humans. Believing in anything is already a superstition in itself, and I believe in humans. I believe in them, in loving them. I believe there is transcendence in them. It must be hard to believe that someone who sometimes believes in the absurd also believes in love. This is exactly my point. It is hard to describe, but an analogy might help: if people turn to Feng Shui or Paolo Coelho to get them through the torture of this life - that is, of the lingering thought of the possibility that there is no meaning to it - then I, in contrast, concede to the belief that things may well be absurd. Ironically, this believing in the absurd comforts me. What I am about to say is the main point of the article: It comforts me because I can’t help but feel that I’m wrong. Because no matter how I face the fact that this life may be just one big absurdity, I cannot get my mind around the fact that I love. Love and absurdity cannot fit. But love cannot be doubted. I can doubt absurdity much easier than I can doubt love, even though absurdity is the doubt of all things. I cannot doubt love because love doesn’t exist in the same faculty as things that can be doubted, such as things intellect and reason can understand. Love is surer than the surest thing the intellect can say. If you were to ask me what is harder to doubt, “1 + 1 = 2” or love, I would say straightly, love. For how can you doubt love, if you have been doing it all your life? How can you doubt love when it has been done to you even while you were still in your mother’s womb? Descartes managed to doubt “1 + 1 = 2” but Descartes forgot about love. Forgetting about love is the reason why he was able to doubt everything except himself. Factor in love, and “I think therefore I am” falters. Instead, one cannot help but believe “I love, therefore there is”. There is something beyond yourself, there is something simply beyond, something beyond even reality. Transcendent.

And so maybe you will catch me appreciating the stars, and accuse me of being like the mushy Paolo Coelho. Perhaps. So I do believe in superstition, but not the kind most often done. I do believe in the Transcendent. I believe the Human that taught us Love is the meaning of life. I believe the Human that synthesized all the rules into one commandment, “Love your neighbor” or moreover into one word, “Love”. I may sometimes believe that many things are meaningless, but there are some things I could not argue with, could not doubt. And so even if at times I regard most practices as just a wild play of humans trying to make sense of things, I do still go to church, I do still kneel down in front of an image of a pitiful, dying man nailed on the cross, I do still recite for fifty times praise and ask for intercession from a virgin I have never met, I do still read and believe a big book containing millennia old text, I do still believe in morality and that not “all things are lawful”. I am unable to concede that love is meaningless. And so you will still see me loving my father and mother, you will still see me trying not to steal from or kill my neighbor if the temptation arises, you will still see me loving my friends or my future wife if I am lucky enough to have one. You will see me believing in the act of carrying my future child gently and laying him or her to bed and kissing that blessed soul good night. You will see me believing in the act of embracing my future wife, knowing there is nothing else I could do to help her with the tragedy of the possibility that all things are absurd. You will see me taking care of my parents long after they have stopped being capable of taking care of me, and looking at them with deep gratitude and love, for being the first ones to show me what love is. You will see me believing in priests, sisters, the lay, or myself if I ever be one, for doing the act of giving up one’s desires for his/her self, and offering the one life they have in service and love for the rest of humanity. 

Sometimes I believe that life is absurd, and that humanity is in a bitter, perpetual struggle to find meaning, for which they will simply, repeatedly fail. Sometimes I believe that most things we do are just a tragic play to comfort ourselves from the possibility that yes, it is indeed absurd. And in those sometimes, I feel comfortable. Because I cannot help but feel I am wrong.