On Mortality and Meaning

 

On Mortality and Meaning

September 15, 2021

 

This post is perhaps more personal than most of my posts are; but it means something to me, and I think it is worth sharing. I’m old. I turned 75 last week. Yes, there are a lot of people older than I am, but I’m older than most Americans by a good deal. The older I get the more I think about death, about mortality, and I don’t mean just my personal mortality. Yes, I’m mortal. Every living thing is mortal. Life is transitory for every plant and animal. But there’s even more to mortality than that. The earth is mortal. There was time when it was not, to modify a phrase of the Arians from the fourth century CE. There will be a time again when it is not. That time may be billions of years away, but the timespan between now and then isn’t infinite. There may even be a time when the universe is not or at least will have become nothing like it is now but rather perfectly static with no energy in it at all. Recently I’ve had a recurring vision of time as a framed glass panel. Beneath it created existence moves as if on a scroll. As we look through the glass panel things, including people of course, come into view, stay in view for a while, then disappear from view off the other side of the panel. They have come into being, been there for a very brief period of time relative to the whole expanse of time, then have faded out of being again. Everything that appears in the panel has its time, but then its time is over and it is gone. That’s how created existence works. Everything in it appears, stays briefly, then disappears as though it had never been there at all. These days my awareness of that reality is leading me to ask if anything at all has any meaning. It often seems to me these days that nothing matters because everything in creation is transitory like that. I’ve been thinking that maybe Ecclesiastes is right: Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. Everything is in vain and without meaning because everything that is will one day cease to be.

That’s what I’m thinking and feeling, and I don’t like either the thought or the feeling at all. I’m looking for something that will tell me there are things that do matter and will tell me what they are and why they matter. By “matter” I mean to say “have meaning.” The only thing I’ve come up with is that what is matters because it’s all there is. Our brief, mortal existence is all we have, all we ever will have, and all we ever can have. If our existence means nothing then nothing means anything. That what we have is all there is seems a very weak hook to hang anything positive on. Yet what we have in our transitory, mortal lives truly is all there is. Or at least it’s all there is in creation. If God is real, and I believe that in some ultimately incomprehensible way God is, then God is neither transitory nor mortal. But we aren’t God.

There is one other thought that comes back to me as I write these words. I have written somewhere that humans are meaning making animals. That humans make meaning out of the things we experience in life may be the thing that most differentiates us from other animals. This line of thought tells me and if my life has no meaning it’s because I have not made meaning out of it. Or better, I have not injected meaning into it. Is there some meaning, any meaning, that I can inject into my life?

The only thing that comes to mind as a possible source of meaning is the way none of us lives in total isolation. Life is radically relational. We live in relationship with other people and with the natural environment that surrounds us and in which we stand. We live in relationship with God even if it is the negative relationship of unbelief. A human life lived in total isolation with no relationship to anything except itself isn’t possible (as much as some people try to convince themselves that it is so that they avoid responsibility for anything or anyone other than themselves). It is relationship and only relationship that can be the source of any meaning at all. The meaning in our lives depends on our personal universe of relationships. We can make meaning out of those relationships. Our meaning, if any there be, lies in being a creature created and called to make all of our relationships healthy. If we do that we have meaning because we are not living in total isolation. How we live always and necessarily affects more than ourselves. It affects other people and the natural environment in which we live. It may even affect God.

Why does meaning arise from living to make all our relationships healthy? Why can’t we get meaning out of living to destroy those relationships and the people or things with which we are in relationship? We can’t the negative has no meaning. It is precisely the absence of constructive meaning. The purely negative cannot build up, it can only tear down. We humans are masters at making what we think is meaning out of things that are actually only negatives. That we do doesn’t mean that the negative has meaning. It means that when we think we have given something negative a positive meaning we’re just wrong. Yes, for a relationship to thrive it may be necessary for one or more of the elements of the relationship to be removed. But is removing a negative of some sort that is making a relationship unhealthy itself a negative? No. The negation of a negative is a positive, though for what we do in removing a negative truly to be a positive we must make certain that that which we are negating is truly a negative and not a positive that we wrongly think is a negative.

Perhaps what all this comes down to is that our lives have meaning to the extent and only to the extent that we live them at least as much for others as we do four ourselves. We all unavoidably live as  centered selves. As a centered self, however, it is possible to live only for the self or to live at least in significant part for the other. Living as a centered self beyond the self for the other is the highest level of psychospiritual development. Perhaps that means precisely that it is the stage of development in which we can finally make meaning out of our lives, a meaning that actually makes life worth living.

To live at that highest psychospiritual life, the life of living out of the self for the other, isn’t easy, or at least it isn’t easy for most of us. The trap of reverting to selfishness is always there for us to fall into. We must always tend all of our relationships, evaluating them constantly to assure that we are making them healthier and not less well. We will certainly have to do much of our tending to our relationships in conjunction with that with which we are in relationship, be that another person, the natural world, or the supernatural one we call God. However we do it, tending to our relationships is a big part of what makes life worth living.

To say that the highest level of psychospiritual development is the one in which we can truly make meaning is to say that our meaning and the fullness of our being come in the form of healthy relationships. It doesn’t mean that our meaning depends on what others think of us. To have one’s meaning depend on the attitude of others toward us is to live significantly below the highest psychospiritual level. Our meaning comes from our own inner satisfaction that we have indeed not been living for ourselves alone.

A secular skeptic told me once that there is no moral difference between the kind of living I’m advocating here and selfishness because we do both ways of living only to satisfy ourselves. Some satisfy themselves by living for another, others do it by living only for themselves. Yet if there is such a thing as morality at all (and for life to mean anything there must be) there is and must be a significant difference between these two ways of being. Living only for oneself does no one else any good except perhaps for the people from whom we by unnecessary, expensive things in an effort to fill the void that living only for ourself makes in our soul. Truly to live for the other doesn’t just make our lives better. It makes others’ lives better too, or at least it has the potential to do that. In making the lives of others better we make the world a better place. The moral difference between these two ways of being should be obvious.

So yes, I’m mortal. All of us are mortal. The earth itself is mortal. Even the universe may be mortal. Yes, our own mortal existence is all we have, can have, or ever will have. But we can make our transitory, fleeting existence mean something when we live not for ourselves alone but also for other mortal, transitory beings. Live with the conviction that that is true, and it will become true for you. Live with the conviction that living for the other gives your life meaning, and it will give your life meaning. We may wish that there were more to life than that, but there isn’t. We may wish that meaning were a fixed objective thing, but it isn’t. So live as a mortal being for other mortal beings. That way lies meaning. That way lies fullness of life. I pray for both you and for me that we find success in that way of living. It truly can make life worthwhile. It gives the lie to Ecclesiastes. There is indeed more to living than vanity.