Making Sense of Making Sense of it All: A tribute to Ben Larson

On January 22, I attended the memorial service for Ben Larson, who died in the Haiti earthquake. I didn’t know Ben, but even so, I felt compelled to mourn his death with those who loved him.

Though I’m not traditionally religious, I always feel comforted grieving inside a church. In part, it is because I grew up going to church, and it has since instilled in me a feeling of serenity whenever I’m inside a church after a death. It’s not as though I feel a sort of sacred quality innate in any church. Some people believe all churches, upon their construction, are graced with the presence and guiding hand of God. For them, the church is innately sacred. I personally don’t believe this.

For me, what gives a church—and especially the CFL during Ben Larson’s memorial—the aura of serenity and holiness is the people and the history of faith and belief that have fostered compassion and meaning. I know this comes off as strange from a person who’s not religious and is often disgusted by religion. But religion is bursting with paradoxes, and here’s a paradox about many nonbelievers: Just because you’re not religious doesn’t mean you wouldn’t prefer to be religious.

For example, when I was at Ben Larson’s memorial service, I was struck with the overwhelming power of unconcealed faith and sincerity in those mourning. For so much of the time we tend to be terribly concerned with saving face around our peers. But what I find in believers is a completely unabashed comfortableness with themselves and what they believe. And this is one thing I find so inscrutable about religion and believing: how to feel comfortable with yourself when so many around you find your actions and beliefs ridiculous and—more importantly—wrong.

Kierkegaard proposed that in order to find faith you had to make a leap to faith. Now, Kierkegaard divulged that he was unable to make that leap: “I cannot make the movement of faith, I cannot shut my eyes and plunge confidently into the absurd; it is for me an impossibility, but I do not praise myself for that.” I feel a similar inability to take the plunge into the inscrutability of faith.

But occasionally I have the feeling that the impossibility of the leap isn’t as unfeasible as it once was. I had just such a feeling during Ben Larson’s memorial. In my own case, there’s something about grief and mourning that brings out the best of my nature, which is often constrained and hidden: compassion, benevolence, goodwill, kindness, etc. But the feeling that I got when surrounded by the mourners at Larson’s memorial was that they’re always compassionate and benevolent. Maybe it’s the religion that makes them as good as they are, or maybe they’re naturally like that. Or it could be that they’re consciously trying to be good and compassionate.

But for many of us, it appears daunting to make the conscious effort to be good and human. We’d prefer if we could be good and human simply without having to try. In my own case, I didn’t like that it took the death of Ben Larson to make me feel compassion and benevolence and an awareness of the fragility and beauty of existence.

But by all accounts, Ben Larson seemed to have discovered what it takes to be human and good in this world. I don’t know if it was his faith or his personality that caused him to act and live as well as he did, but I’m guessing it was both. I’m sure it was as hard for him as it is for us to be good and compassionate, but somehow he made it work. As for me, I like to believe we’re all capable of such goodness.