Life Is Pain...

...and life is pleasure....life is mountains, and life is valleys...life is heaven, and life is hell. While parts of life are available for us to examine and think about, life itself is beyond our ability to rationally examine, for life, in all its breadth and height, all its hills and valleys, is simply too big for us. We are living life, we cannot step out of that living to see what is 'really there' behind it all. Knowing is beyond us, believing is the best we get.

"The childlikeness of an adequate religion lies not on this but on the other side of sophistication. It is not the childlikeness of primitive ignorance but the childlikeness of a wisdom which has learned the limits of human knowledge. It therefore approaches life with awe, hope and fear. With awe, because it knows that the mystery of life is something more than an unknown region not yet explored by an advancing science; with hope because "it doth not yet appear what we shall be" and no record of past history gives us an adequate clue of what creative omnipotence may bring forth out of the infinite possibilities of existence; with fear, because it knows the possibilities of evil, which appear at each new turn in history, are never adequately anticipated by any analysis of the past. The wisdom of such childlikeness will prefer its hopes to its fears, knowing that good is more primary than evil, that the world could not exist at all if it were not good, creation being a triumph over chaos. It will therefore approach life fearful and yet unafraid. Its serenity will be more lasting than that of a culture which based its confidence upon the illusion that human intelligence had overcome the chaos of the nature about us and the nature in us. It will not be surprised if ogres and goblins suddenly appear out of the darkness; any more than fairies and good spirits will surprise it. It knows the dimensions of life to be both deeper and higher than the thin surface of expected occurrences which has been frozen by rationalism into an icy solidity, giving those who seek a firm footing upon it a false sense of security. The ice is not very thick; the ocean beneath it is deep and tempestuous; and the sun above is warm and melting."- Reinhold Niebuhr

See also:

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-lies-half-truths-of-death_6.html