These four videos could be useful to start a dialogue about the brevity of life and its ultimate meaning. The passage of time, the various stages that we cross, the challenges that we overcome, the plans and projects that we will build, everything that we acquire (all symbolized in the videos in different ways)… what is it good for, if, at the end, all that awaits us is death? It is a fundamental question that unfortunately, today, few people ask themselves.
All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan. The length of our days is seventy years– or eighty, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away. Who knows the power of your anger? For your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you. Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
Psalm 89
As we read in the psalm, Learning to calculate our years and realizing the brevity of life can help us to acquire a heart of wisdom. A heart of wisdom that gives start to a serious effort to respond with the mind and with one’s own heart to the most important questions of my existence: Who am I? Where do I come from? What must I do to obtain eternal life? Reflecting on death and the brevity of life, according to the Sacred Scriptures, has the capacity of opening man’s heart to the deeper dimensions of existence and, as apostles, we cannot not pay heed this advice.
For this reason, we propose the following videos. As you see, none of them explicitly confront the problem of death or try to give an answer. They are videos that appeal to intuition and emotions. Their function is to impress a basic message into the heart: “life is brief.” With this, I am sure that you can start an interesting and fruitful dialogue.
Personally, after the videos end, I wouldn’t recommend starting right way by giving many answers or reflections about the meaning of life, the meaning of death, original sin or other subjects (these type of dialogues always end with questions about hell (smiley)). Remember, what we want to achieve is simply to help the person “calculate”, to go deeper, to make their own the experience of the breveity of the human journey. An interesting activity could be categorizing one’s own ideas by a writing exercise like a poem, or responding to questions, or writing a story, etc. After this, I think the catechetical criteria would be better received and understood.
Live painting show: The life of a woman drawn in Photoshop from her birth till her death.
People in order: 100 years counted by 100 people of different ages.
Life in 1 minute: a lineal history of a stick figure from his birth till his death.
