The tragic sense of life is ironically not tragic at all, at least in the Big Picture. We are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us. The tragic sense of life is not unbelief, pessimism, fatalism, or cynicism. It is just ultimate and humiliating realism, for which some reason demands a lot of forgiveness of almost everything. Faith is simply to trust the real…. This is perhaps our major stumbling stone, the price we must pay to keep the human heart from closing down and to keep the soul open for something more.
Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: a Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life