The relentless search for a meaningful life
Dt
28:65-68: Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the
sole of your foot. There the LORD will
give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart. You will live in constant suspense, filled
with dread both night and day, never sure of your life. In the morning you will say, “If only it were
evening!” and in the evening, “If only it were morning!”—because of the terror
that will fill your hearts and the sights that your eyes will see. The LORD
will send you back in ships to Egypt on a journey I said you should
never make again. There you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as
male and female slaves, but no one will buy you.NIV
That
scripture is an eerie description of anxiety and despair. Words like longing, suspense, dread, and lack
of assurance for one’s life all describe the tensions and contradictions
brewing in an anxious mind. When you
ultimately reach a point where nobody wants to buy you even as a slave then you
know you are at the end of your tether.
When you are there you ask the question, “What is the meaning of my
life?” That question was made popular by
Viktor Frankl (1984) after his
excruciating experiences in the Nazi death camps. There was nothing left off him except his
literal naked self.
Of
course, we are not all going to go through a Nazi holocaust experience but
every one of us will from time to time be confronted with the question of
meaning; for better or for worse; it stays with us till the end. As I write almost all eight billion
people on earth are under some form of lockdown for the fear of an invisible
pandemic with many variants called COVID-19.
German cars are parked in the garages, cosy offices are empty as people
work from home, conference centers are suddenly not useful as meetings go
virtual, airports stand empty with no one to fly or be flown in the gigantic
Boeing machines, economic systems around the world are almost brought to a screeching
halt and squeezed for subsistence. Pharmaceutical
companies are stretched and competing beyond capacity and competence in the
race to manufacture a vaccine or vaccines to combat the deadly virus or bring
it under control at least.
Almost everyone on earth is walking around
with a mask on their faces, a privilege once enjoyed by thieves. Many people have lost one or more of their
loved ones to an adversary we can identify yet cannot identify. Practically thousands have died due to the plague
and still counting…Death stands summoning at the horizon, and once more we are forced
to ask, is there more to human existence than the necessary yet fleeting icons
we build it on?
Frankl asked that question repeatedly as he
stood underneath a shower, never too sure whether he would be sprayed with
water or a poisonous gas in the Nazi death camps. He was pushed to conclude that there must be
as he finally wrote Man’s Search for Meaning.’ He
was a psychiatrist but that did not count for much now, he was just a number as
he dug railroads with his bare fingers in the icy European winters along with
millions of Jews in Hitler’s concentration camps. But then, the story of six million Jews dying
in Nazi Germany has been told in various ways and countless times even as we
conveniently forget Leopold II’s killing of more than ten million Africans in
the Congo Free State and the Nama and Herero in present day Namibia. Genocides have been part of human history so
much so that ‘an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation [has become] normal
behavior’ (Frankl 1984,
38).
As Reinhold Niebuhr said, ‘We are anxious
below and anxious beyond.’
Our anxiety, believe it or not, is not
death but the knowledge that death; even as we pour billions and trillions of
money-worth into shifting the ultimate reality; cannot be done away with. We know we will die; but what for? Alternately, for what? Paul Tillich, that astute theologian, participating
and nurtured by observations in World Wars I and II made the acute observation:
The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite
being about the threat of nonbeing, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to
existence itself (Tillich 1952,
39).
This
book is about meaning; the meaning of one’s life. It proceeds from the assumption that no one
is an accident of creation. We are all
here for a reason and our earthly assignment—between birth and death—is to
discover, explore and actualize that reason for being. In the greater scheme of things, no gift is
ever too big or small. Everything is
working together towards the ultimate in God’s purpose for the universe.
The
stars were created to shine, fish to swim and birds to fly; there is no
competition just being what they were created to be. The point is each one of us was created for a
purpose, an exclusive and tailor-made Raison
d’être. Some people call it
passion. Paul Tillich repeatedly called it
‘ultimate concern.’ That concern in
which every other concern is consumed (Aldwinckle 1966).
Nelson
Mandela articulated his “ideal” for which he was willing to live or die. Martin Luther King’s dream answered deep questions
he raised in the heat of racism in the deep American South. He did not live to see it realized, but in
his last speech he declared, ‘I have seen the promised land, I may not get
there with you…’ But deep down the
‘Not yet’ was forming in the ‘Now.’ Not
too long after that speech he was assassinated.
Purpose
is not vision; it is the bigger picture in which vision is achieved. We pursue purpose but we achieve vision. Purpose is the spirit and vision is the
action. In purpose we are released to
act and in vision we measure how far we have come. Vision says, “I have arrived,” and purpose
responds, “There’s more beyond where you now stand.” Purpose therefore is like
an ocean and vision is taking a sip of the vast waters of the ocean one cup at
a time; it is the creative atmosphere in which innovation continues to be born.
This
tapestry called human existence is made dynamic and exciting by the
contributions that each one of us can make in our uniqueness. Thus, in the question, “What is the meaning
of my life,” the individual asks and is asked, and ultimately is the only one
who must give the answer. Meaning is
derived, not so much in the achievement as it is in the existential processes. The challenge is not whether you arrive where
destiny calls, it is what you become in the continuous transforming furnace of
how you get there. What makes you is the
journey not the destination.
The
question of purpose must ultimately be asked in the bleeding jungles of East,
West and North Africa. When you watch
every single member of your family being butchered by merciless rebels or
mercenaries and their skulls and headless bodies scattered like rubbish all over
the streets and countryside; there you are pushed to ask, “What is the meaning
of my life?” If things can turn out to
be so bad, what am I living for?
Einstein (2010, 3)—probably in response
to the philosophers of his time—did not think that was a very clever question
to ask. He wrote:
To
inquire after the meaning of life or object of one’s own existence or creation
generally has always seemed to me absurd from an objective point of view.
In
fact, he thought anyone who asked that question was not fit to live. Yet, he obviously was wrestling with the
question when he wrote:
Without the sense of fellowship
with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally
unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have
seemed to me empty (Ibid.)
The
question of meaning fills life with determination, focus and expectancy. You wake up every morning filled with the
spirit of pursuit. Nothing is guaranteed
in terms of achievement, but the attitude is what makes it all meaningful. Mandela lived to see his ideal, but Martin
King’s dream materialised long after he was murdered. Purpose is ultimately determined in what
Reinhold Niebuhr called the “greater scheme of things.” Nietzsche was right, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how” (Frankl 1984, 94).
The
person who has achieved all there is to achieve probably has not achieved much
that is meaningful. That is why
‘Retirement’ is such an existential misleading term beyond which most people
disintegrate when they have done all they knew how to do and beyond which they
can do nothing more.
In
1952 Paul Tillich wrote an all-time blockbuster in Christian existentialism
titled The Courage to Be. He wrote vigorously and intelligently about the
tensions and contradictions that exist in the challenge to become all that God
has created us to be. Of course,
existentialists like Nietzsche (1967) and Schopenhauer (2004) did not think God
had anything to do with it. Erich Fromm (1941) wrote of it as an ‘Escape
from Freedom.’ In existential
psychology we shape our own destiny.
Tillich
was a Chaplain and stretch-bearer in World War 1. He witnessed first-hand how life can be snuffed
faster than the twinkling of an eye. He
survived the bombs that destroyed everything around him. In a letter to his father he wrote, ‘Hell
rages around us. It’s unimaginable,’ and in the end, he had to ask that
soul-searching question of meaning. Many
others came out of World War 1 & II asking similar a question. In that context Viktor Frankl (1984) finally
came up with his theory of Logotherapy and
Jurgen Moltmann (1993) chiseled his “Theology of Hope.”
In
The Courage to Be, Tillich takes a
plunge into these vast and complex waters of meaning from a combination
of philosophical, psycho-medical and theological perspectives. That multi-dimensional approach must be
commended because there is no single discipline in the social or theological
sciences that can fully claim to understand the intricacies and complexities of
human nature and its search for ‘meaning.’
Human existence is not a mathematical formula or a project but a dynamic
process not an event. In the vast
waters, the more you push the wider the scope before you. There, according to Tillich, lies the anxiety
that we often seek to deny. We must push
till the end or be delivered to boredom.
According to Frankl, how we respond to these tensions and contradictions
is what gives life meaning; it is the ‘Freedom’ between ‘Stimulus’ and ‘Response.’
The
question of ‘meaning’ is not given to us on a silver platter; it comes with a
lot of anxiety. As we shall see later, Tillich
(1952, 40-54) provides three
categories in which the question of anxiety can be understood. There is the anxiety of fate and death,
emptiness and meaninglessness and guilt and condemnation. He uses biblical metaphors—or what he calls
myths—as a way of understanding our relationship with God and our world. In other writings (Tillich 1957, 66-72) he takes us back to
the Garden of Eden where it all began.
For him paradise can only be regained, if at all, where paradise was
lost; thus, he speaks of “Estrangement.”
The
human predicament or the problem in the human situation is our alienation from
God. Our problem is vertical before it
is horizontal. The destructiveness we
see demonstrated on the landscape of human history is often a sick drama of how
far we have drifted from God and that gulf is the cause of our anxiety.
For
Tillich, existentialism is the good luck of theology. Existentialists have succeeded in showing us
the dark side of life and theology—if rightly appropriated—shows us the bright
side. It is the existential analysis of
the human situation that makes the theology of a “God above God,” and ‘The
Right to Hope’ necessary. The human
situation demands something beyond the ‘God of theism,’ a universal rallying
point of the divine around which the questions thrown at us by the uncertainties
of human existence must be answered.
Thus
Frankl (1984, 127) concludes, “There
is no emotional homeostasis.” This is
a contradiction to humanist theories that suggest that life at some point can
be free of anxiety. ‘Homeostasis’ is not
the absence of anxiety but the competence and ability to swim through the
unpredictable waters. The neurotic
suffers because life for them is how they think it should be not how it really
is.
Rollo
May, a Tillich friend, and student spoke about religion and anxiety and how
religionists ignore the neurotic dimension of anxiety and psychologists ignore
the religious aspect of anxiety (May 1950). It was Tillich who probably made the first
attempt to reconcile those two extremes (1952, 64-78).
Tillich
was Lutheran so he obviously wrote from a Christian perspective, but he was
never trapped by the dogmatic perimeters of religion or science. Thus, he wrote about the “God above God” (Tillich 1952, 186-190). He embraced Socialism and criticized the
possibility of its demonic eruptions. Meaning
in religion is found only when God appears where the God of traditional theism
has disappeared. If you can find God
beyond doubt and despair, then you have found God.
In
Tillichian terms, “Before sin is an act it is a state.” That condition is the state of individuals
and nations; indeed, it is the state of all creation. In our finite freedom we have been excluded
from the infinite destiny to which we belong.
That exclusion is the “tragic element” of the human situation (Taylor 1987, 191). We belong to that from which we have been
excluded and the tensions and contradictions of that paradox is the source of
our anxiety.
If
one asks, “What is the meaning of my life” in a real sense one, consciously or
otherwise, seeks to reconnect with one’s spiritual deep. In the final analysis that question is
spiritual, and it is precisely at this point where Tillich states, “The
human spirit presents itself to us as religious.” We are a religious species and that is the
difference between us and the rest of the animal world. It is Teilhard de Chardin who said (Egan 2004), ‘We are not human beings on a spiritual
journey but spiritual beings on a human journey.’
The
question of purpose or meaning is not as innocent as it is asked because it brings
with it a whole baggage of anxiety. Ironically,
it does not only come with a collapsing world around us; some ask it at the summit
of ground-breaking achievements, what Maslow later called “Peak Experiences” (1999). What do you do when you have become the
richest person on earth; or you have done what you best know how to do?
The
search for meaning is anxious and permanent and sometimes we feel as if we are
racing against time. There are more
questions than answers. When we cease to
ask the question, we are immediately delivered to boredom. As Schopenhauer observed (2004, 42):
Not
the least of the torments that plaque our existence is the pressure of time,
which never lets us, so much as draw breath, but pursues us all like the
taskmaster with a whip. It ceases to
persecute only him it has delivered to boredom.
The
question is both creative and frustrating.
It can prompt us in the direction of innovation or lethargy. That explains the human rat race of economic high
speeds and the extremes of sensual indulgence.
Frankl said, ‘When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they
distract themselves with pleasure.’ We
are overdriven by what Martin Luther King called the “Drum Major
Instinct.” The best among us wants to be
the “winner takes all.” Having done all
to achieve, or not, we find the question still stands before us. “What is the meaning of my life?”
As
mentioned earlier, the irony of the human situation is that we are anxious
below and curious beyond. Looking into
the abyss of nothingness, as Nietzsche said, the abyss looks back on us (Rodden 2000). Looking beyond the horizon we are invited
towards life’s’ endless possibilities as we fear we could fall into the abyss. Ours is the perilous position to be pretend
otherwise painted so vividly by Reinhold Niebuhr:
We
are like the sailor climbing the mast…with the abyss of the waves beneath him,
and the crow’s nest above him. He is
anxious about both the end toward which he strives, and the abyss of nothingness
into which he may fall” (Niebuhr 1988,
18).
That
“perilous position” is the source of our anxiety. The possibility to become is threatened by
the possibility not to become. Tillich
calls it the tension between “Being” and “Nonbeing” (1952, 32). In religious terms, ‘to be’ is to achieve the
divine and ‘not to be’ is to be thrown into the depth of the demonic. To achieve the divine, we must forever push
through the demonic. The anxiety of
being is the awareness of the perennial presence of the demonic where the
divine must be achieved. African
philosophy has always been aware of the principle at least, of the tensions
between the divine and the demonic. The Batswana say, “Though an eagle may
catch its prey high in the sky, it must land to consume it on the ground. There it will meet its demise.”
In
the unfolding processes of life, we discover that in strange and precarious
ways, so richly portrayed in the centres of human history, evil is always
good’s weird bedfellow. Every victory is
harassed by the possibility of failure.
Being on every turn is threatened by nonbeing.
How
then should we understand the problem of anxiety? Tillich makes the submission,
The
basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing
cannot be eliminated. It belongs to
human existence itself (Tillich 1952, 39).
He
repeats what philosophers and religionists have said in different ways. Life is anxious. There is a lot of empirical evidence around
us even with casual observation. The
challenge therefore is not to change the situation but to embrace it. If we deny the sickness it makes it
impossible to find a reprieve.
We
need to embrace the possibility of losing where we win and winning where we
lose. If I know I can win where I lose
it prompts me to try again. If I can
lose where I win it gives me the courage to confront the situation and to push
for higher and better. That recognition
is a call for courage and innovation.
Sin
is what introduces the pessimistic; yet we are not sacrificed at the altar of
that hazardous moment because we have a choice.
Choice is that space between stimulus and response. As Frankl (1984) argues, we may not
always choose the conditions around us, but we can choose our attitude and
response towards those conditions.
Each
one of us in different ways must respond to Hamlet’s soliloquy (Shakespeare 1992), “To be or not to
be, that is the question.” So, what
do we do? Do we reach out into the
inviting heights and seeming endless possibilities of human existence, or do we
plunge into the doldrums of its exigencies?
That unrelenting and ever-present juncture of courage and choice is not
only anxious, but also frightening.
As
Marianne Williamson wrote (1992,
190-191):
Our deepest fear is not
that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond
measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
My own paraphrase of the Setswana proverb, “O se bone nong go
ralala godimo, go tla fatshe ke ga yone.”
