December 18, 2011
“. . .and all who heard it were amazed. . .”
- Luke 2: 18
What gives your life meaning? It’s a good question to ask yourselves in this holiday season, or at any time, for that matter.
Religion has always been about the search for meaning in life. Among other things, we gather to explore the various meanings that others have found, and, perhaps, to find in them a meaning for our own living.
Unfortunately, most of us do not have as much time to spend on the search for meaning as we would like; we even may not be consciously aware of the meanings which actually sustain us. It is one of the tragic consequences of modern life that so many of us find ourselves separated from the ground of our being: fragmented not only within and among ourselves, but in our relationship to the sources of meaning in life. In traditional terms, we would say that we are alienated; separated not only from other people, but from God.
To be separated from others is to be separated from God: from ultimate reality, the ground of our being, and meaning in life.
Our alienation is apparent in the way that we relegate religion to one day of the week, if that. How very different is the experience of the Pennsylvania Amish community, about whom I have been recently re-reading. For the Amish, every smallest and seemingly insignificant act has religious consequences. The Amish have intentionally kept the pace of their lives slow, so as to be able to keep the awareness of the meanings of their days. To the outsider, they seem merely quaint; but a closer look reveals a conscious, well thought out system for keeping the fragmented modern world at bay.
The Amish make numerous well-considered sacrifices in order to hold on to a life which knows less of the modern separation of the sacred from the secular, the heavenly from the mundane. They are not separated from their meanings, but live in them at all times. Paradoxically, their separation from the modern world has allowed them to hold on to and be constantly aware of those meanings.
For us to live in our meanings requires an equally conscious effort: first, to become aware of the meanings, and, second, to keep the awareness of those meanings throughout our busy days.
I’m not suggesting that we become Amish, even if that were possible, which it is not. But religion doesn’t have to be a once-a-week event in our lives. The search for meaning can and should be carried on in all that we do, even in the midst of our too-crowded lives. In our rush to get things done, we often lose sight of the meanings which are to be found even in the most common of tasks. We are too often in a hurry to complete those tasks, only to find when they are completed that we feel empty; we feel that our work has been for nothing. Too often, we are left with time which we do not know how to fill, and so end up filling it with a lot of “sound and fury, signifying nothing” [Shakespeare]. We hurry up and wait—but for what?
We forget that all of life is religious, that all of life contains traces of the sacred; we forget that all of life has the potential in its parts to tie up our fragmented lives, to “rebind us,” to help us to “get it together.” But we have to pay attention to the details; we have to be aware, and practice a little of what the Buddhists call “mindfulness.”
Life, as many have pointed out, has both a horizontal and a vertical dimension. Most often we are aware only of the horizontal dimension of our lives, without giving much thought to the vertical. That is, we are not often enough conscious of the ways in which our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the universe have a transcending quality. As the Amish recognize, the smallest act of a busy day can have a meaning which far outweighs its appearance. To be mindful is to be aware at all times of the miraculous nature of life, of the sacred in the ordinary: the mysteries of birth and love, of laughter and grief. Joy and sadness can find us when we least expect it. We are moved by other people and by the natural world; we can feel empathy; we are able to care, and to experience the beautiful.
Everything we encounter is meaning-full: all things, all experiences. Nothing is meaningless, although the meanings may not be always immediately clear to us. Poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins said it in traditional terms: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Our lives and those of our fellow human beings are filled with moments of meaning. The feeling of meaninglessness is perhaps better understood as our inability or failure to see the meaning that is always there; or, perhaps, the mistaken idea that meaning is supposed to be “out there,” rather than right here under our noses.
The job of religion, I believe, is to focus our attention on the meanings that are right at our fingertips, on the tips of our tongues, in the smiles of our children, in the embrace of those we love but too often take for granted. In short, on the meanings that are to be found in the everyday, in the so-called ordinary and mundane.
The question, what gives meaning to your life, is a question that calls not for some weighty metaphysical speculation on our parts, but for our undivided attention to the details of our living; and not just during this one hour of the week, but during every moment of every ordinary hour and day.
Because what gives our lives meaning is the people, the things, the memories and thoughts which move us to joy or sadness; those everyday experiences which, almost without our knowing it, make life worth living; those fascinations and even those confusions which constitute our awareness of ourselves and of the world in which we live and move and have our being.
One of our most common shortcomings is our tendency to take things and people simply as they are and to see nothing more than meets the eye. We are much too literal-minded. We spend way too much of our time in the horizontal dimension. It is possible to live almost completely in the horizontal dimension, and never to be aware of the vertical one at all.
The vertical dimension includes memory, beauty, the collective experience of humanity, dreams, the sense of mystery, the symbolic, the other: all of the things which expand our experience and make it more than it is. It is the more that we are after. Find the things in your life which give you the more and I think you will find that they are the same things which give your life meaning.
The holiday season is a good time to think about meanings, to think about the vertical dimension. What ruins the Christmas story, in my opinion, is the literalness which cuts both ways: the literalness which says either the story is literally true, or that it is completely false. Both interpretations are horizontal.
I happen to believe that the Christmas story about the birth of Jesus is not literally true, and I have it on pretty solid scholarly evidence. But that does not mean that I believe the story to be false. What I would say instead is that the story is true, but not in the factual or empirical sense by which we customarily determine the “truth.” If there is anything that the late Joseph Campbell’s groundbreaking work on mythology should have taught us, it is that stories—myths, legends, fairy tales—contain fundamental truths about what it means to be human. The story of the birth of Jesus is a case in point: it does not have to be factual to be true.
And what is true about that story? That birth is difficult and often dangerous; that the world is not always a friendly place; that motherhood and childhood are beautiful and worthy of our worship; that bad people plot, and have always plotted, the destruction of the good and the innocent; that the human contains the divine; that when God became human (according to the story), God came in the form of a poor—literally poverty-stricken—helpless baby, born in a stable among lowly beasts, of common parents; that the universe was changed by the birth of a child; that the trajectory of the sacred moves toward justice; that life is miraculous; and that even God suffers: that God suffers with us.
There are hundreds and thousands of stories just as true as this one, but what makes this story special is that it is the common property of so many of us in western culture. Indeed, this story is so deeply embedded in western culture that it is inescapable, efforts to eliminate it from public space notwithstanding. In this sense the story is archetypal: it is a type for other, similar stories. Any story about birth gives reference to this foundational story of a birth.
Not surprisingly, other cultures and other religions have their own birth stories, not about Jesus, but about the Buddha or Confucius.
And why is birth so important? An obvious answer is that it is the way that all living things come into the world. It is a miracle which we have all experienced. Along with death, it is the great shared experience of creation. Birth is the new beginning, the fresh start, the clean slate. We even speak in terms of the “birth of the universe.” Life is a miracle: life is where we should look for the divine, even in the most common and most ordinary representation of the life, which the birth story of Jesus purports to be.
This is what I mean when I speak of the vertical dimension of life. The holidays are meaningful—either positively or negatively—because of the associations and memories that we have of them. These are heightened times. Experience is a little larger than usual, a little more exposed. Other times may be just as meaningful, perhaps, but they don’t carry the collective weight that these shared holidays do.
Whenever I try to answer the question of meaning in life, I am reluctant to answer that “God” gives meaning to life, because that statement implies a lot of things I don’t mean. And yet, it is a truthful answer to the question. For as the late Forest Church reminded us, “God” is not God’s name, but our name for that which is greater than all yet present in each. “God” gathers up all that is important to me and all that makes my life worth living.
God is the relationships that I have been blessed with in my family, marriage, friendships, church, and community. God is love and beauty and intelligence and goodness. God is music and literature and art, which discovers that in each of us which is common to all. God is in my friend and in me and in the world in everything. The world is charged with the grandeur of God, it is filled with divinity, the sacred is to be found in the ordinary and in the natural which we seem bent on destroying to our own detriment.
That which is greater than all yet present in each: when we begin to look for this we are beginning to live our lives in the vertical dimension. When we begin to seek the meanings of our lives in earnest, we begin, as some familiar words have it, “to weave our lives into some semblance of the pattern we dream about.”
That is my holiday wish for each of you: that you will find the search for meaning becoming an essential part of your life, and that you will experience those moments of meaning which bring peace and wholeness to our too often fragmented lives. May it be so for you, this day and in the brightening days to come. Amen.
- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock
Reading: from a newsletter column by the Rev. Phyllis O’Connell
