“Nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous and are miserable because of it.”—Fyodor Dostoevsky
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“Do you want to be a martyr?” she asked jokingly and, too, half-serious.
“No,” he answered beginning and staying in the lightness of affectionate ridicule before furthering into weight of under-truth, “but I don’t want to run from its possibility, should such become my fate.”
He had gone war. There, he did not die as half expected; and in peace and existence after, he sought to make sense of a material life and world in which he seemed to have all that one could want. Having all he possessed, too, a misery—despair, depression, desire for life and a more that had nothing to do with material things.
In his misery, despair, he broke down. He failed in his heart. He failed in his mind; and from spiritual state of nothingness while still existing in world-presented life of perceived all; he lived a new beginning.
God and Love—aspects of the same—were all he discovered that he wanted. Finding and beginning to live, whether in life of all or nothing else, he found joy and lived a love.
Remembering, considering, musing, he addressed again the question.
“The modern perception of martyr mostly gets it wrong,” he spoke, “and the way it is named in our modern world undermines the whole message and purpose of one surrendering to self-sacrifice.”
“How so?” she asked.
“I don’t know about you, but when I hear the word, I think of the Moslem way. A man strapped with explosives, walking into a crowd or driving into a checkpoint, killing and maiming as many as he can. Such an act tells nothing of God and much to the ugliness and potential evil within man. The martyr’s death is not the focus or purpose of the act but collateral for the design and end of others’ murder.
That is not Godly. That is not sacrifice. It is only murder.
It is the same of world-named martyrs in present battles propagandized as they die in tunnels of their own construction. To murder, rape, and kidnap neighbors in order to bring a bout an intended retribution to be exploited on a world stage; the victims are not those dying in the dark, weapons raised, but those murdered, raped, and kidnapped on a religious holiday and day of peace. The world-named martyrs have instigated their war. They have chosen their battle; a hole not even hill to die within; and they deserve their deaths. They are casualties of war, not martyred innocents.
The modern atheist, martyr by self-hand and self-willed sacrifice is no better. Their death does not add merit to their faith; for willed non-belief is still a exercise of faith and belief though denied and presented as something different—it isn’t. Self-annihilation in such a spiritual state is the most overt cry of despair and aloneness that becomes a soul divorced from all of life save religion of one’s own vanity and self-absorption…I’ve been that person.”
He paused, collecting mind and thought into better and new direction. Composed, he continued.
“But what if there were martyrs still who are murdered for hate of self or others, but for Love; who do not seek a martyr’s death but accept it should one befall; who die having done no harm—and likely great good for others; and the good is reason they’re reviled? What if the martyr’s death was not an ugly end—as the murders seek to show—but a testament to the quality of life and love lived right up to and through the end: a way of love and living—even in death—the exploiters, manipulators, and coercers of this world cannot break, control, or stand?
With martyrs like that, might the world not have chance to become a better place: not by material or economic metric but in spiritual sense which is the reason why, even with the exorbitance of our modern world and lives, we know something’s missing?”
“I think it sounds ridiculous.”
“Maybe the ridiculous is cure to our miseries.”
