On
Finding Meaning
July
21, 2022
The Scripture quotations contained here are from the New
Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian
Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and
are used with permission. All rights reserved.
Does human life
mean anything at all? If it does, what does it mean? If it does, where does
that meaning come from? These are probably the hardest questions to answer we
humans ever face. To most of us it seems that there must be meaning in life. We
think, “If life has no meaning, why are we even here? If life has no meaning,
what do I have to live for?” We feel ourselves compelled to find some meaning
in life. We just don’t want life to be without meaning. To think that life has
no meaning leads to despair. So meaning we must have; but what is that meaning?
Where does it come from? Most importantly, how do we find it and live into it?
These are immensely difficult questions to answer, but answer them we must.
The Bible offers
us various answers to our questions. The prophet Micah offers one passage that
might give our lives meaning:
He has told you,
O mortal, what
is good;
and what does the Lord require of
you,
but to do
justice, and to live kindness,
and to walk humbly with
your God? Micah 6:8.
Doing justice, loving kindness,
and walking humbly with God could be our purpose in life, a purpose that would
give our life meaning.
At the end of his
Gospel, the author of the Gospel of Matthew proposes a different purpose and
meaning. We read: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
Matthew 28:19. The Christian tradition calls this verse the “Great Commission.”
Being convinced that God’s call to you is that you to try to convert everybody to
Christianity certainly could give your life meaning, and I have known a
Christian or two who believe deeply that that is indeed the meaning of their
lives.
The Bible has yet
another answer to our questions about the meaning of life. It goes like this:
Vanity of
vanities, says the Teacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
Ecclesiastes 1:2.
The author of this passage, who
calls himself Teacher and claims to be King Solomon but almost certainly isn’t,
also says:
I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied
my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it
is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with all
the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing
after wind. Ecclesiastes 1:12-14.
The Teacher also says,
I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun,
seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me—and who knows whether
they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled
and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity. Ecclesiastes 2:18-19.
Clearly, the
central concept here is the “vanity” of human life. To understand these texts
then, we must understand what the word translated here as vanity means in this
context. When asked to define vanity, google.com gives two definitions. The
first one is, “excessive pride in or admiration of one’s own appearance or
achievements.” This, I think, is what the word means to most English-speaking
people today. The second definition google.com gives is, “the quality of being
worthless or futile.” It is certain that the intended meaning of “vanity” here
is Google’s second definition. The word here means worthless. It means
meaningless. Ecclesiastes answers our questions very differently than Micah and
Matthew do.
So what are we to
do? Of course, I can’t answer that question for anyone but myself, but I find
it useful in my search for answers to the questions of meaning to take a cue
from an academic discipline called hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the theory of
interpretation.[1] It
can apply to many different things, but in my experience it is most commonly
used in connection with written texts. One of the core principles of
contemporary hermeneutics is that meaning does not exist in a text alone. A
text has meaning only when a reader reads it. The meaning of the text then
arises from the interaction between the text and the reader. One corollary of
this principle is that because each reader comes to a text with everything that
they are, and because the experiences and other characteristics of each person
are unique to that person, a text very likely will mean different things to
different people. This fact doesn’t mean that anything goes in interpreting a
text. Any meaning that arises between a text and a reader must bear a
reasonable relationship to the text. Stray too far from the text, and you aren’t
drawing meaning from it, you’re reading meaning into it in an inappropriate
way.
The main point
here is that meaning does not subsist on its own as an objective thing. The
mind of the reader creates the text’s meaning. One of the best ways I’ve heard
of to distinguish humans from other animals is that we humans are
meaning-making creatures. As far as we know, other animals do not create
meaning the way we do. We seem driven to make everything mean something. What
we think a thing means may be profound or trivial depending on what the thing
is and the context in which we approach it. Either way, however, we create any
meaning the thing has when we encounter it. Which of course makes meaning subjective,
something to which a great many people object (no pun intended). I, however,
have never found or heard any valid way around the subjectivity of meaning.
We can apply
these principles of contemporary hermeneutics to our search for the meaning of
life. When we do we learn first that life’s meaning does not reside in life
alone. Rather, it arises in the encounter of every individual with life. We don’t
discover objective meaning for life out there somewhere. We create meaning in
here, inside ourselves. We can of course also not create it, and a great many
people don’t. Still, a decision active or passive not to create a meaning for
life is still a human relationship with meaning. It’s just a negative one not a
positive one. If our lives are to have any meaning, that meaning has to arise
from our encounter with life. There’s no other place for meaning to come from.
Just as the
meaning that arises from the encounter between a reader and a text is unavoidably
subjective, so also the meaning that arises from an encounter of a
meaning-making animal with life is unavoidably subjective. We create any
meaning our life has for us. There is no one else to create it. Meaning arises
within us. There's nowhere else for it to arise. But just as contemporary
hermeneutics holds that to be valid the meaning a reader finds in a text must
bear a reasonable relationship to the text, so to be valid any meaning a person
ascribes to life must have a reasonable relationship to life. A meaning that is
that I am called to rid the world of sinners (or anyone else) by killing them
bears no reasonable relationship to life other perhaps than to end it.
Something that negative distorts the meaning of life in an attempt to give life
meaning. Making meaning is a subjective activity, but we don’t do it in a
vacuum. We do it in the context of life, and the meaning we make must enhance
life not just for ourselves but for others and for the world.
So, does life
have meaning? The answer is that it can; but for it to have meaning, we must
stop looking for meaning outside of ourselves. We must make the meaning of our
lives. It’s easy enough to fall into the despair of believing that life has no
meaning. The author of Ecclesiastes is right of course. We’re all mortal. When
we die we leave behind everything we have had and everything we have done. All
of it either passes to someone else or just ceases to exist. The author of
Ecclesiastes concluded that the reality of mortality made his life and
everything in it a vanity, made it a worthless nothingness. The only way we can
avoid that despair is to make meaning for our lives ourselves.
I can hear the
objection to this analysis by people of faith that says that God gives my life
meaning, I don’t create it myself. I understand this sentiment. I’ve had it
myself at times. Yet it contains an existential fallacy. What has happened for
the person who thinks this way is that they have given their life the meaning
that God has given their life meaning. It cannot be otherwise. Our objector
here exists the same way we all do. We exist as centered selves. As centered
selves we experience what appears to us to be a reality outside of us. Our
various senses take in stimuli from outside of us, or at least so it seems. Our
brains work with those stimuli to create what we experience as the reality outside
of ourselves. One of the things we can experienced as centered selves is that
reality that we call God. We can experience God calling us. We can experience
our lives having meaning because we have responded to what we perceive as God’s
call to us. In all of that it is still the “I,” the centered self, that has
those experiences. That self decides what to do with those experiences. That
self can create the meaning that my life is a response to what I have
experienced as God’s call. The conclusion that one is responding to a call from
God can have the power to transform our lives. It certainly transformed mine
when I responded to what I experienced as God calling me to ordained ministry.
Nonetheless, it remains true that the person who holds that conviction has
created meaning for their life. That’s how we humans function, and we cannot
function otherwise. Whether we like it or not, our faithful person’s objection
to the analysis of meaning here does not survive critical scrutiny.
So does life have
meaning? The answer to that question depends entirely on us. Our lives have
meaning if we choose to believe that they do. They have meaning if we find
something in our lives that is worth living for. Our lives have meaning if we
give them meaning. The choice is ours. We can wallow in the despair of thinking
our life has no meaning. That’s what the author of Ecclesiastes did. Or we can find
a meaning for our life and spend our life living into that meaning. I pray for
you that you have found meaning for your life like I have found meaning for
mine. Finding meaning is, after all, what makes life worth living.
[1]
For a more complete discussion of hermeneutics see Stop 3 in Part One of the
original version, or Stop 3 in Volume One of the revised version, of my book Liberating
the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians.
No comments:
Post a Comment