You know of the disease in Central Africa called sleeping sickness.... There also exists a sleeping sickness of the soul. Its most dangerous aspect is that one is unaware of its coming. That is why you have to be careful. As soon as you notice the slightest sign of indifference, the moment you become aware of the loss of a certain seriousness, of longing, of enthusiasm and zest, take it as a warning. You should realize that your soul suffers if you live superficially. People need times in which to concentrate, when they can search their inmost selves. It is tragic that most men have not achieved this feeling of self-awareness. And finally, when they hear the inner voice they do not want to listen anymore. They carry on as before so as not to be constantly reminded of what they have lost. But as for you, resolve to keep a quiet time both in your homes and here within these peaceful walls when the bells ring on Sundays. Then your souls can speak to you without being drowned out by the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
Sermon
Every year the Unitarian Universalist ministers gather the day before General Assembly in June for Ministry Days. The draw to get ministers to attend is usually a special, nationally known theme speaker. The two day program includes workshops, meetings, a special worship service to honor those completing 25 and 50 years of ministry. The events build with anticipation to what, for many, is the highlight our time together, the prestigious Berry Street Lecture.
The Berry Street Lecture has a long history that goes back to 1820, five years before the gathering of New England Unitarian churches which began the American chapter of the Unitarian movement. William Ellery Channing called it to bring together the New England liberal Christian clergy to, among a long list of idealistic aims, encourage the development of our ministry and the "best means of advancing our religion."
The 177th speaker this year was the greatly anticipated Rev. Judith Walker-Riggs who is well known among the ministers as a powerful, engaging and entertaining speaker. She serves the Rosslyn Hall Chapel which is a British Unitarian Church in London. As those who saw the video this morning will attest, she did not disappoint in any of these categories.
In the middle of her lecture, she presented her thesis which I think surprised many of us -- even challenged our Unitarian Universalist Purposes and Principles. Here are three excerpts from her lecture which define and defend that thesis:
I've come all the way over from England to say to you, give it up. Give up this idea that religion is a search for meaning because it is often only when you give up meaning that truly creative responses can come.
Giving up meaning is sometimes the healthiest thing you can do because whenever we are too conscious of the meaning of things we no longer see things as they are - we see things as we are, dimly through the veil of our own meanings.
Jesus said "The Kingdom of God is within you." He did not say, go find the Kingdom of God. He did not say philosophize and philosophize and maybe someday you will find the Kingdom of God. He said the Kingdom of God is already within you.
Yes! She told us we should give up our "free and responsible search for truth and meaning" as is spelled out in our Unitarian Universalist Purposes and Principles! Being raised Unitarian Universalist, the search for meaning is a phrase I imbibed practically with my mother's milk. Unlike many other world religions, we do not enshrine meaning from one exclusive revealed scripture or one divine messenger. It is precisely because we are a non-creedal religious tradition that we have embraced the idea of the individual search for meaning Her challenge to us stimulated my interest in what she had to say because I've found those who dare to question our ideals often have something important to teach.
While Riggs is a magnificent speaker choosing colorful engaging illustrations, spectacularly humorous stories and beautifully worded insights, I came away from the lecture with some concern. While I readily concurred with some of her examples of why we ministers must abandon the search for meaning as we practice parish ministry, I still felt something was amiss. After watching my video tape of her presentation several times, I started to get a sense of the source of my discomfort.
Before abandoning the search for meaning, we do need to look (much against her protestations in her lecture about definitions being a helpful source of meaning) at what the word "meaning" really means. The Oxford English Dictionary has several pages of definitions of the word but three in particular will helpful this morning. First, the definition of the word "mean" is "that which is in the middle, the absence of extremes, moderation." Finding a mean often connotes a wise or positive solution as in the expression: the golden mean or a happy mean. The most relevant definition for the word "meaning" for our purposes is "intention or purpose." Thus to search for meaning most correctly is not to search for a "thing" called meaning or some universal philosophy or idea but rather to seek a purposeful middle way. (Sounds kind of Buddhist doesn't it?)
Early in Riggs' lecture, she casually dismissed Victor Frankl and his book, Man's Search for Meaning as perhaps the origin of the phrase in our Purposes and Principles. I had read the book and enjoyed it long ago so I decided to get it out of the Port Charlotte Library (which thankfully had the Murdock library's copy on the shelf) and reread it. This is a particularly appropriate time to be remembering his work because he died somewhat unnoticed on September 2nd.
Frankl, an Austrian Jewish psychiatrist from Vienna, vividly describes in his book his experiences and unexpected discoveries while interned in Auschwitz and three other Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. Although originally written in 1959, the book continues to be a best seller. In the preface to the 1984 edition he comments:
I do not at all see the best seller status of my book so much an achievement and accomplishment on my part as an expression of the misery of our time: if hundreds of thousands of people reach out for a book whose very title promises to deal with the question of a meaning to life, it must be a question that burns under their fingernails.[1]
The horrific, subhuman treatment people endured in those concentration camps could fully be expected to crush the spirit of even the strongest man or woman. Indeed, Frankl watched once proud and noble people around him weaken, starve, get sick and die. The intense desire to survive surfaced some of the most base, anti-social, cruel and animalistic behavior of those interned. But this human degeneration was by no means universal. What Frankl observed during his internment was the people with a deep sense of meaning or purpose which organized and drove their lives fared the best and were the ones most likely to survive. People with a deep religious commitment like Father Maximillian Kolbe didn't lose heart in the face of their suffering. Frankl himself credits his survival to the destruction of his book manuscript when he was arrested and his intense desire to reconstruct it and get it published.
Extreme challenges to the human spirit are hardly limited to concentration camps. The examples of genocide from Rwanda to Bosnia, the suffocating poverty in Bangladesh, the self destructive alcohol and drug culture found in every corner of the world, the intense suffering of terminal illnesses, compel us to confront the fact that there is no escape from troubles which can overwhelm our defenses. Not only in the extremes but in the surfeit of ease can come a crisis of meaning. Today in our increasingly secularized, consumer oriented world, many "people have enough to live by but nothing to live for." Frankl identifies all these troubles as what he calls the tragic triad of pain, guilt and death and asks, "How is it possible to say yes to life in spite of all that?"[2]
Responding from the depths of personal experience with unimaginable horror, Frankl posits "an optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential which, at its best, always allows for:
Frankl doesn't believe one finds meaning by choosing from a menu of options as if life were a multiple choice test. Rather we recognize meaning more as an "aha" experience. It isn't so much coming upon an abstract idea but more, "becoming aware of what can be done about a given situation." Finding meaning is discovering a purpose or intention in a given moment in time.
To actualize the potential for meaning, Frankl suggests three avenues:
The first two sources of meaning are active: creating, doing, experiencing, and encountering. The first might be called meaning through work. The second might be called meaning through relationship or love.
The third source of meaning is active but in a paralyzing situation of tragedy and suffering. Frankl explains the third in these words:
Even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself and by so doing change himself.
For Frankl, meaning can be found in any situation of life because "life's meaning is an unconditional one ... paralleled by the unconditional value of each and every person."[3]
Even though life's meaning is unconditional, for each person that meaning is individual and compelling. Again in Frankl's words:
Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life... This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.[4]
To search for that unique and specific meaning requires courage because to recognize and act from that meaning requires an exercise of the will. This free choice is a frightening burden for many. "Instead, [many] either wish to do what other people do (conformism) or do what other people wish [them] to do (totalitarianism)."[5]
The danger of not having meaning in one's life is to sink into Nihilism, the belief that life has no meaning; all of the actions of our lifetime are ultimately for nothing. What we do or don't do doesn't matter because it will be entirely erased by the erosion of time.
Whether or not this is ultimately true, none of us can say for sure. But what we do today, right now, does matter a great deal to today, which should be self evident. If I were suddenly to speak in tongues and call down God's wrath on the sinners in this congregation, I doubt many would experience this as a meaningless neutral event in the congregation's life. In fact I could potentially lose my position here as your minister! On the other hand, your kind words to me after a sermon which touches your heart means a great deal to me and encourages my work.
Let us now return to Rev. Rigg's original proposition: religion should give up the search for meaning. In particular, let us ponder for a moment Jesus' often quoted statement, "The Kingdom of God is within you." Riggs is right on target, I feel, to criticize the outward search for an external meaning to be imported into our beliefs. A survey done by sampling the world religions and cherry picking our favorite fruit bowl of meanings will likely lead us astray. In our Unitarian Universalist search for universal values and beliefs, we can easily deceive ourselves by projecting on to other religions our own individual and cultural biases.
Yet to realize the Kingdom of God is within, may actually require some searching. Not necessarily the outer kind of searching but rather an introspection which pays close attention to the inner movements of the mind. Often what stands in the way of meaning, of motivation, intention and purpose arising spontaneously in our lives are, as Riggs points out, false meanings and beliefs. Because these false meanings and beliefs are often buried deep in the foundations of our thinking, it may take some dedicated digging to unearth them.
And even more difficult to see are our over-generalized meanings and beliefs. A child who was abused by his father generalizes that broken trust to all powerful men. A women who feels disappointed in the lives of her children generalizes this expectation and judgment to "kids today". A man who is fired after 20 years of hard work for his employer may devalue his loyalty and commitment to others. Even little annoying experiences in traffic or in the grocery check-out line or watching the evening news can shade our view of the inherent worth and dignity of others. It takes vigilant soul searching to pay attention to these creeping over-generalizations of one's experiences and see their error. It takes a purposeful commitment to search our hearts as we run this human race if we want to know for ourselves what is true.
The key to my discomfort with Rev. Riggs' lecture is understanding the active nature of meaning. Real meanings aren't static beliefs we collect like trophies or certificates to be mounted on our wall. They do not come to us as abstract ideas or philosophies which we can line up to assemble an attractive set of beliefs. In Frankl's words, "I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than exclusively within man or his own psyche as though it were a closed system."[6] "One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment ... thus everyone's task is as unique as is his [or her] specific opportunity to implement it."[7]
Whatever Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God, he pointed us in the right direction when he said it is already within us. What we are looking for is already within us - but not as some unchanging, static truth, idea, vision or meaning. What is within us is a living process which is constantly growing, changing and responding. There are some beliefs found in the world of religion that I find quite helpful in tuning in to the living process happening inside us. But one must not confuse these pointers with who we are becoming.
Victor Frankl, I think, puts it quite beautifully in these words:
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked ... he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.[8]
What this question of meaning really boils down to is responsibility. Granted the search for meaning can easily degenerate into an escape from our own life by averting our eyes from the issues haunting us and sightseeing in the world of ideas, gurus and philosophers. The real search is to find out how I can respond lovingly, authentically and actively to what is happening today in this very moment. The real search is to discover the intention or purpose which can uniquely direct my life each day. The real search results in an enduring commitment which withstands the tragic triad of pain, guilt and death.
When the search for meaning is revealed as the search for a way to be responsible, I don't think we should give it up.
(c) 1997 by Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.
[1] Frankl, Victor E., Man's Search For Meaning:
an introduction to Logotherapy, Simon & Schuster, NY, 1984, p. 11 ISBN
0-671-24422-1
[2] Frankl, p 139
[3] Frankl, p 151
[4] Frankl, p 105
[5] Frankl, p 111
[6] Frankl, p 115
[7] Frankl, p 113
[8] Frankl, p 113