Maybe it is not completely unreasonable to compare the suffering brought about by the economic recession with Christ's passion? To say in genuine anguish on a cross of sacrifice, "I have lost all," (and I do not mean simply my investments!) is to participate in some fashion in Christ's experience, is it not? Of course, the original denouement was not agony but the ecstacy of renewed life. And in Christ we hope for the same.
I was reading in Gabriel Marcel's The Mystery of Being, ch. 10 "Presence As A Mystery," that when the "important" is lost, the "essential" is revealed:
"At first glance, it seems that when I decide that something or other is important I am relating it to a certain purpose of mine or perhaps, more generally, to a way in which I organize my life. If I centre my life upon some predominant interest, say, for instance, the search for pleasure, power, or money, everything that seems likely to subserve this interest will strike me as having positive importance. Experience, however, shows us, and its lessons cannot be rejected or ignored, that our special ways of organizing our lives are always liable to collapse like houses of cards under our very eyes; leaving something else in their place, something which the original structures of lust, ambition or greed had merely masked from us. This something else, which we are not yet in a position to define, and of which we have not perhaps even a direct apprehension, is not the important, but the essential, the "one thing needful." It is obvious that the believer has a name for this 'something else': he will say that the one thing needful is salvation . . ."
So, we should remain hopeful that our experience of "being on the cross," though probably not ludicrous only in our own eyes, can lead to our discovery of the essential, the 'one thing needful,' and thereby be saved.
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