Living Vicariously

The pain of unrealized lives.

It is not the pain of failing to reach your potential.  That is a different sort of pain. It is the pain that you have achieved your potential in one way and so did not achieve it in another.  It is the pain of the lives you did not and even could not live.  It is a pain that comes from having a sympathetic imagination and usually comes to us through books and film.  But art will do, or old snapshots, Bible reading when it catches you just right, poetry, an odd turn of phrase, or sometimes you just round the corner and the light catches the scene just right and there it is your seabreeze from another world.

I think there is something to be said for living vicariously.  We mostly know living vicariously and it’s aspect of vice.  It’s vice involves fredering away your own strong life because you are longing for other lives, or shoehorning others into the life you wish you had lived in defiance of their needs.  But I believe there is a positive virtue there too that we do not have a word for.

There are implications for God’s relationship to us and his purposes and creation that I shy away from.

In the temple our ancestral dead live vicariously through us and we do not think it reflects badly on them.  Just as we in the temple are experiencing a creation drama vicariously through Adam and Eve.  Or to be more precise, vicariously through people vicariously portraying Adam and Eve, and others.

We live spiritually vicariously through Christ.

These two virtues don’t seem to slap nicely into our two main virtue types.