Let me begin by telling you a little about yourself. To one extent or another:
You are self-conscious about your appearance;
You feel guilty about things you have done or failed to do;
You sometimes have a hard time accepting or forgiving others;
You are insecure sexually;
You are less than perfect parents and/or less than perfect children of imperfect parents;
You are frustrated husbands, wives or partners, or frustrated not to be husbands, wives or partners;
You have secrets, which you might betray or might betray you at any given moment;
However successful, you are a failure in ways that matter both to you and to your loved ones;
Beyond all this, your life is stressful, your happiness fleeting, your health insecure;
You worry about aging;
You sometimes worry about dying;
More than once your heart has been broken by betrayal or loss;
And however successful you may be, however deep your faith, when the roof caves in, you shake your fist at Heaven, the fates, or life itself;
You beg for an answer to the question, "Why?" -- "Why this? Why me?
Why now?"
You wonder what your life means;
The problem is the question "What does life mean?" has no final answers. When Socrates said, "I am the most ignorant man in Athens" he was boasting. Knowing more than anyone, he recognized how little he actually knew.
Yet Socrates certainly invested his life with meaning. I too am ignorant enough to know a little about the art of investing life with meaning. This summer I even wrote a book on the subject. This morning I shall share a few introductory thoughts.
To begin with, the search for meaning is a religious search. Admittedly, I define religion broadly. I don't restrict the religious impulse to those who identify with the rules and beliefs of distinct communities of faith. Putting aside the existence or non-existence of God even Buddhists don't "believe" in God -- my definition of religion is simple and inclusive: Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. Knowing that we are going to die, we question what life means. We are not so much the animal with advanced language or the animal with tools as we are the religious animal. Having discovered tokens and flowers in ancient graves, certain anthropologists actually apply to us the sobriquet, homo religiosus. We have honored our dead from time immemoriam, even as we continue to sift through their ashes in anticipation of our own pending remains.
If you define religion more narrowly (as a group whose rites and practices involve belief in and worship of God), my point still holds. From atheist to Christian, we mortals are meaning seekers. In response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die, we question what life means while attempting to create meaning within it.
Whether discovering or creating meaning, what an abundance of material we have to shape and ponder. Our lives are cathedrals, with myriad windows and hidden passageways. They are novels, filled with character and shifting plots. Our lives are poems, lyric, epic, free-form, perhaps, at their purest, haiku. They are narratives connected and created by memory. Representational and abstract, they are pictures at an exhibition, snapshots in an album. Our lives are molded and remolded from human clay. They are carved and weathered, built and remodeled. With a given melody and added harmonies, they are filled with consonance and dissonance. They sometimes compose themselves into pastoral, majestic or tragic symphonies. At our finest, we weave our lives into others' lives to create a tapestry of meaning. I call this -- the art of meaning -- Lifecraft.
Lifecraft can be practiced on a canvas or in the office, in a relationship or by the bedside of a loved one who is dying. Think of Lifecraft as a power that we possess and can chose to exercise. Or as the art by which we discover and create meaning. Go even further. Think of your Lifecraft as a vessel sailing in the direction of God.
With a little training and perseverance, anyone can practice Lifecraft. We're not talking great art, only useful art, like potholders and throw rugs, key chains and afghans. But then expand the metaphor. In the 1970s, the Oxford philosopher Bernard Williams suggested the model I shall follow by theorizing about the nature of personal identity in terms of projects.
Imagine your life as a series of works in progress presented daily at a craft fair. Each day's exhibits present an overlapping series of projects -- the child project, the parent project, the love project, the vocation project, the justice project, even the God project. You add and subtract community projects and recreation projects, house projects and old friend reclamation projects. You might help create a project to enhance your church or college or to improve your neighborhood. Less important projects also possess meaning, like attempts to lose weight or to improve your health. Another long-term project might be to read all of Gibbon's Rise and Fall or Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. We work on dozens of projects at once, tasks that invest our life with meaning.
Through hard work on even a single project, we may discover meaning. At the same time, we can also create meaning. Something that otherwise couldn't have existed emerges from our effort. We are the only creatures I know who discover and create meaning by our own endeavors. Yet we rarely do this alone. Someone gives us the lines, and we color them in. Or we give them the lines, and they add the color. It doesn't really matter. We discover and create something that did not exist before. By taste and according to circumstance, the colors differ. So do the lines. That is why meaning is not absolute. There are millions of ways to do almost anything. Not that meaning is relative. The power of the meaning we discover and create can be judged by its impact on other people's lives.
When you make another person feel safe or loved, you create meaning. When you accomplish a difficult project, you also create meaning. Of the two enhancing the security of others or completing an important task -- neither is inherently more meaningful. This century's most brilliant scientist, Albert Einstein, didn't necessarily have a more meaningful life than anyone who can honestly claim to have married well. The same caution holds in other arenas of human accomplishment. Just before he died, after five failures, J. Paul Getty said that he would trade his entire fortune for a single happy marriage.
We each look through our window at the world, but it has many panes. As children, parents, spouses, bosses, employees, friends, we are different people in differing contexts. Even as a fifty-year-old adult, I am a child, and sometimes childish, when speaking to my mother. Beyond this, I am a preacher, pastor, lover, social activist, baseball fan, country music aficionado, writer, father, husband -- the list (including things I am too proud to mention) goes on and on. As D. H. Lawrence wrote, "each of us, as long as we remain alive, is in him or herself a multitude of conflicting people." This rings true to me. In some contexts I am shy, even insecure, in others affable and outgoing. Even within a given context, playing a familiar role, I can be a different person according to mood or shifting backdrops that color the same setting in a brighter or more forbidding light.
If we look at our lives not as a series of parts, but as a whole, when things go wrong, the entire screen turns dark. If we fail in a single project -- our job, health, a relationship -- we may view life's meaning only through one beclouded lens and quickly become hopeless and despairing. As long as we think of ourselves as a single self, successful or unsuccessful, healthy or ill, victor or victim, the moment the world turns against us, as surely it will, we risk sacrificing all sense of meaning.
Fortunately, life is not a puzzle to be solved, but a series of projects to accomplish as best we can. It is not a work in progress, but a series of works in progress. Lifecraft embraces living and dying, loving and losing, failing well, recovering, and coping. The light of meaning refracts through many filters, each changing the light behind them. One filter makes things rosy, another dark. Life only becomes meaningless when we look selectively through the darkest panes of our window, the panes that block the light.
There is never a time when something in our lives could not, in and of itself, trigger a sense of meaninglessness or hopelessness. If we are struggling with but a single important aspect of our lives, even the sun sometimes seems cruel. When I get anxious or depressed, as I do from time to time, it is usually because I am focusing on a single part of my life that has gone awry. This puts me in blinders; I lose my peripheral vision. Blocking out the good, I only see the bad in myself or my situation. Sometimes I am anxious and depressed the very same day! But then another project saves me. Often it is a comfort the dying and their families project, through which the light of new meaning parted the shadows of my self-absorption. I have seen people on their deathbeds take the final note of life and turn it into a symphony. To be present at such a moment is to hear the angels sing.
It begins with a phone call, followed by a few pastoral encounters, often a crisis, sometimes a deathbed confession. Or just holding hands with another human being, mysteriously born, fated to die, who is about to find out what happens next, which neither they nor I really know. Here meaning is completely contextual. We throw parent and child projects, fighting for life and accepting death projects into the mix. We rise (or fall) to the occasion, with tears, often a remarkable amount of laughter, almost always great regret and sadness, ideally humility, sometimes humiliation as the body falls apart, and then, good-bye. This too is Lifecraft, perhaps even the boat that takes us back to God.
Some people resolve the contradictions that might render life meaningless by positing a next life in which scores will be settled. We know that good people get bad breaks and bad people good ones. A theology of the afterlife satisfies our need for fairness. In heaven, the good receive compensation for unfair hardship; in hell, the bad endure damnation for their earthly triumphs and unpunished sins. Driven by the logic of justice, this is a form of magical or wishful thinking. We know infinitely less about what happens after we die, than about what happens before. If we do live on after death, this wouldn't surprise me in the least. To live forever could be no stranger than to be born in the first place. But to draw from an experience we have not had (afterlife) in order to divine meaning from what we do experience (life) is, to cite the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, an instance of misplaced concreteness.
Putting the question of an afterlife aside, because a loved one dies does life mean nothing? Astronomers tell us that our Sun too will die. It will implode and then explode. When this happens, billions of years from now, the earth will be incinerated, its refuse spun into the cosmos. From a blade of grass to the earth itself, everything returns to dust.
The existentialist Albert Camus asked himself daily whether he should choose to continue to live. I once was moved by this; now I find it silly. For me, the question is not "Whether?" but "How?" Having witnessed courage, repentance, even family redemption, at times of greatest trial, I chafe at those who trade in absurdity. The meaning we glean from life is written not with the final period, but in-between the lines. Whenever we surprise others and ourselves by rising to difficult occasions, we redeem the darkest day. A stubborn man finally says he's sorry. A frightened soon-to-be widow tells her husband to let go, kisses him and tells him that it is all right for him to leave her now. Meaning illuminates the darkness as well as the light.
More an art than a science or philosophy, meaning springs from very basic things. It emerges when a father works with his son on his homework night after night. Or when a woman fixes her energy on a project that makes her company, neighborhood or family a little better. You may glimpse it when a couple invests their hard-earned money in a cause they believe in, becoming part of something greater and more lasting. Even, perhaps, when a beachcomber, like the naturalist Loren Eisley, finds a starfish on the shore and throws it back into the sea.
Over the course of our lifetime, we paint, weave, cast and draw, design and build our lives in ways that can, not always but often, lead us to find meaning within them.
One final note, a fter a quarter century of pastoral counseling and twice that of personal failures and successes, I have discovered that we are what we love. If we love too deeply something too small for so deep a human attachment, our love will destroy both it and us. If we only love in little ways, even if their object is as big as God, our love will be insufficient. Any book on meaning is a book on the human heart.
And as for God, though we will never find the God we seek, no human quest holds more potential value, especially if we return blessed with new eyes to glimpse the divine amidst the ordinary, and new ears to hear the still, small voice. Then sight becomes miracle and hearing too.
No further proof is necessary.
So what gives our lives meaning? Here is my short list. Kindness does. Also Forgiveness. Generosity. Enthusiasm. Ecstasy. Empathy. Above all love, given and received.
For any of these things, now is as good a time as any. Ponder your on going projects. Invest your life and love in them. And you too will discover, as you have helped me to discover that life has more meaning than any of us will ever possibly know.
Amen. I love you. God bless. Copyright AllSouls 1999.
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