Sermon: The Quest for Meaning

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The Quest for Meaning

By Charles Rush

September 9, 2007

[ Audio (mp3, 7.7Mb) ]

en I was very young as a Minister, I got a call from a Funeral Director asking me to do a funeral for a man that had died. He informed me that some funeral directions had been written into the will but that he couldn't locate anyone from the family locally, and the only number he possessed was a niece on the West Coast. So I called this niece to get some information. On the other end of the phone, I found myself talking to a niece that hadn't seen her uncle in probably 6 or 8 years, couldn't tell me much about her uncle but was glad there would be a funeral.

He was divorced for decades, was estranged from his children since they were toddlers. He played golf, had lived alone for quite a long time. She thought he watched a lot of TV because every time someone from the family would call, the TV could be heard in the background. He didn't have many friends. He had his routines. She told me one mildly funny story that he was in the habit of sending out the same Christmas card every year with the same salutation. Probably he had purchased them on sale and didn't think anyone would notice. She told me she had a collection of 5 or 6, the last few yellowing around the edges. That was about it.

She didn't exactly say it, but from the conversation, I could sense that she was hoping I would cobble these tidbits into some kind of eulogy. What kind of eulogy… I have no idea!!! In spite of the sensitive nature of death and the dignity of each person, it was a Monty Python moment in ministry.

I remember that it was snowing. I got out to the cemetery. The coffin was there and the two guys with the backhoe. Two people were there, so I introduced myself. One was a distant relative, the other just a friend of the distant relative… I donned my robes, said the prayers that we say at every funeral and I was thinking about the hallowed dignity that each and every person should have, even Mr. Eleanor Rigby. After 15 minutes, I'd read all of the prayers. I stood there for a minute in silence just watching the snow really come down.

As I turned to leave, I was filled with an undifferentiated anxiety that was entirely new to me. It was so unfamiliar that I didn't actually experience it as anxiety at the time. I just had this overwhelming compulsion to drink and dance all night long, to drop everything and travel to some place exotic and far off. I wanted to fall madly, deeply in love and run away- never mind that I was already madly, deeply married. I shivered and shook but I wasn't cold.

It was an early experience of what Heidegger and Tillich termed 'existential angst' at the prospect of an insignificant life. The ripple in the pond was just too de minimus. This man's impact on other people was just too limited. Far more haunting than the prospect of actually dying, is the prospect of insignificance. No one really noticed that he was gone. In the movie 'Braveheart' a bunch of stalwart Scotsmen come to William Wallace and ask him if he is afraid to die. He says, 'Every man must die. But not every man really lives.' That is the haunting specter that legitimately stalks the conscience of waking adults… to have existed but not to have really lived.

This anxiety periodically surfaces from the depths of our subconscious during our 30's and 40's, fortunately only from time to time. Usually you have a dream where time is running out or things are passing by. You are on the walking escalator at the Newark airport, heading out to the terminals. In the beginning there are lots of people around, the mood is festive. You pass one Houlihan's bar after another with people fraternizing in a party spirit. Then after a while, you notice that there seem to be fewer people. Then, after a little more time, people around you on the escalator seem to get quieter and quieter as the escalator heads to what appears to be a fairly desolate end of the hangar. Then you wake up with a start. It is 3:30 in the morning and you are hoping like hell that you renewed your subscription to HBO because you are not going right back to sleep.

These are fundamentally spiritual dreams. We are putting our lives together, our careers, our families. Subconsciously you are asking yourself: Am I really grasping what I should be about? Am I really tasting what life has to offer? I am surrounded with appearance, am I really ingesting the substance of the fullness that life has to offer? Father Time is moving on, am I really getting it? Like the line from the song by Tears for Fears, "Welcome to your life / There's not turning back"

Jesus has that wonderful and intriguing line that speaks to this hunger. Jesus says, "I came that you might not only have life, but that you might have it abundantly." It suggests a life that is pregnant with meaning, that is redolent with significance.

I was thinking of those anxiety dreams about meaning this summer when Kate and I were Down East- Down East past Maine, past Nova Scotia, across the 8 hour ferry on the Bay of St. Lawrence, all the way up to Newfoundland.

We were Salmon fishing, all the way up North where the road literally ends. It is up past St. Anthony's. This is what it looks like [slide 2]… Up above this point, there are a few fishing villages, a couple Air Force bases, then some Inuit villages, and then just open country to the North Pole. The sky looks a little differently up there doesn't it? Here is a picture of the guy that literally lives at the end of the road. [slide 3] The village in this picture, all 8 or 10 houses, got electricity in 1972.

It is cold there. The locals were complaining about a 'Heat Wave'. It might have been 50 at the height of the day and the water was still cold too, colder than usual.

The morning that we were there, hoping to see some whales, the skipper of our boat headed out of the harbor through the thick mid-day fog and told us that he has something for us to see. I'm wondering what it could be because you couldn't see 100 yards from the bow of the boat.

Just a few miles out, we came upon this… [slide 4] This Ice Berg had run aground in 250 feet of water. [slide 5] That is a big ice berg. He cut the engine way down as we got closer so we could hear it. Ice Berg's come from Greenland. They are the compressed snow falls of thousands of years. As the snow gets compacted, it becomes ice. As the ice becomes compacted, it pushes out oxygen and slowly it changes color over time-[slide 6] from white to green and from green to blue. The whiter parts of the ice berg are probably 10,000 years old, the greener parts are said to be closer to 25,000 years old. And the bluest parts are up to 100,000 years old.

What I didn't know is that Ice bergs actually make noise as you come close to them. As the ice melts in the ocean water air pockets are released [slide 7]. So Ice bergs sound like a huge bowl of Kellogg's Rice Krispies^®, doing this snap, crackle, and pop.

The skipper pulled up some small pieces of the Ice berg [slide 8]. They are collected by the locals as a delicacy. The water is some of the purest on earth. They put the ice chips from the berg in glasses of whiskey for a little pick me up.

[slide 9] We got to one of those places where the mystery of our world opens up before us. It is the entrance way to the great northern oceans that lead up to the Artic. The fog bank… you are expecting some Vikings to appear on the horizon.

And then there is the epic age of the berg before us [slide 10]. Like the ancient Oaks that our ancestors experienced in the great northern forests that seemed to them to come from the ancient mists of pre-history, these Ice Bergs glide past like Father Time before whom we appear almost as apparitions. [slide 11]

All of these snows fell before we humans ever built our first city. Some of them fell before humans invented tools. Some of them fell before we had actually evolved into homo sapien sapien- when the world was just filled with higher primates. [slide 12]

So much history, so much span. [slide 13] And we need some kind of gauge like this more than ever for a sense of perspective. In the Middle Ages, we built these huge vaulted Cathedrals in Europe so that we humans stood in Holy Space with a sense of the bigness of God and the puniness of humans. However powerful and self-sufficient we might think ourselves to be in our own little context, we need to periodically remember the wider context, the bigger picture. [slide 14]

In the intervening millennium, we humans have become so much more powerful, organized, and technologically sophisticated that we can't even erect a Cathedral big enough to give us that sense of perspective.

Against an Ice Berg, it is not just that our personal lives come and go, the span of snow over our life times adding so little to this great mountain as to require a microscope, our whole species has come and could conceivably go- like the May fly that is born, runs through adolescence, mates, raises the next generation and dies all in one single day.

Against that backdrop, it is perfectly natural and sobering to ask ourselves the fundamental spiritual question, what is the significance of our lives? What is it that will give us purpose and a meaning that is coherent?

We are not here for very long. There is not a whole lot of time left. What is it that You are supposed to be about? What is it that God wants You to actualize? Where will you find genuine, authentic fulfillment?

You know, your life has a mission statement. It is pretty hard for most of us to articulate it in the middle of our lives but you can look back on the previous chapters your life and reflect on what you have been about- what you have done, what you have left undone. You can look back and see how lucky breaks opened doors and put you in place to actually achieve what you have achieved. You can look back and see how things in your character that you have to struggle with actually made you stronger so that you developed other capacities you might not have developed if you hadn't inherited certain limiting issues. You can look back and name people that have inspired you, hopefully people that mentored you, so that you could develop certain skills.

The spiritual question for you is what you are to be about in this limited time we have left on this earth? What is your legacy going to be? What difference will you make? Where will you invest yourself?

I want you to take time to reflect on your life. It is important occasionally. The last day of the summer, I was at the beach that my family has been going to for the last 25 years. I rode my bike all the way across the island. It took a long time, hours. And I was moving fairly slow. I saw so many things from the last chapter of my life.

I saw the beach where one of my sons caught a blue fish bare handed. I saw the Post Office where I mailed the final copy of my dissertation. I saw the pond where my kids first went crabbing. I rode by an old house we used to rent. My sister-in-law died a few years ago. Their family and our family vacationed together in that house, grew up in that house. I saw her come out on the front porch and wave at me… Lots of reflections… I was thinking to myself, "Man we laid down some good track… We created good memories… We did some good family stuff there." And I was thinking about a bunch of things that still aren't done. I haven't written THE BOOK yet. There are other personal issues that I wished I'd resolved better than I have.

This year was a ripe time for me to reflect like that because I found myself doing some things with my granddaughters- like fishing off the stone jetty- that I did with their parents not all that long ago. I'm nearing the end of one chapter and the opening of another chapter in the family and these reflections bubble up to the surface and they should.

What was your life about in the last chapter? Probably you are still in it, so what is your life about right now? Are you living abundantly? What is it that you do that really fulfills you? What are you doing right now that makes you feel really alive? How do you express your creativity? What are you grateful for? If you had to put this last chapter into a title, how would it read?

Jesus taught us that God wants us not just to exist but to live abundantly. God wants you to become fully alive. God wants you live profoundly.

Immanuel Kant said that a rounded life answers three questions: What is true? What is good? What is beautiful?

We must ask ourselves questions about the truth? What can we know about our world? What can we understand about human character? What are the limits of our knowledge? This is the realm of science, mathematics, the factual dimension of history? Who are we? What is our world? Where have we come from?

And we must also ask ourselves questions about goodness? What does it mean to be moral? What is the right thing to do? How do we live lives that are intrinsically fulfilling- you live this way because it is the right way to live? What are the values that we not only live by, but which we can pass on to Wyatt and Abagail in the future?

And what is beautiful? Art, music, theater, architecture, gardening… How can we develop an aesthetically fulfilling existence? How will you express your creativity- in making a beautiful garden? Playing an instrument? Taking in drama? I love the scene in the movie "Mr. Holland's Opus". The Principal of the High School comes to the Music teacher, Mr. Holland, and tells him that there isn't enough money for the Music department and that he is going to lose his job. The Arts, he says, just aren't as important for job skills as math and science.

Mr. Holland is bitter and disappointed and he says, "Right… teach them math and science so that they will have skills for a great job. Then they get the great job and they make the big money. And what do they want to spend it on. They spend it on the theater, on Opera, on Art… Because this is what makes life worthwhile." That is what we do with our leisure time, our creative time… It is so important for a rounded fulfillment.

What is true? What is good? What is beautiful?

We need to answer these questions for ourselves? You need to answer these questions for yourself? That is your spiritual quest, what it is that you are able to put together.

I know that many of you are surrounded by people that appear never to ask these questions at all, but don't be fooled. These fundamental spiritual questions aren't going away for lack of attention. No, these dullards all around you only prove that it is quite possible to die without ever really having lived.

I'm reading through this spate of Atheists right now. Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and a host of lesser knowns. They are right about one thing, religion has always been better at posing questions than it has about giving answers. There have been a lot of bone-headed answers over the years and Church history is filled with them. But the questions persist. And the task is for you to answer them for you… to make them your own? You can ignore it but you can't escape it?

People will occasionally say to me but why do I need the Church for that. Chuck, isn't religion just a crutch? William Sloane Coffin was right. He said, "Sure religion is a crutch. But look around, everyone you know is limping."

And it is only a superficial analysis that thinks a profound spiritual quest gets an answer right and sticks with it from then on. You may have seen the article in Time magazine about Mother Teresa, the iconic saint of Calcutta, who worked among the poorest of the poor. Turns out, she led a life time of internal dialogue and doubt about the existence of God and her own sense of worth and worthiness.

We had more than a few pundits who were not only surprised by this but actually wondered if we all should re-think who she was and what she was about. It is understandable in part, because there is a certain patina to the hagiography of the Catholic church. Our traditional teaching has depicted saints as heroes that miraculously move through life with supernatural power.

I've never met these supernatural saints and I doubt there has ever been one. The only kind of saints I've ever met are the kind that struggle with basic issues of meaning, and basic issues of character, all through their life. Faith with doubt. Conviction with skepticism. Hope with dread. Calm with anxiety. Courage with fear. Purpose with aimlessness. Meaning with emptiness.

You don't get this settled once and for all. And it sure as hell is never categorical or polished. You will remain a work in progress until the last day. Make no mistake. It is a struggle.

This year, let's ask some questions together. What we can do for each other is encourage us to ask good questions. We can help each other feel safe enough to raise questions with one another. We can encourage one another to live out of our higher selves. This we can do… And we need you to do it.

Get invested here and explore something more profound than the blather of those colleagues that are focused only on getting more, more, more without any plan bigger than that. There is so much more creativity and depth to you. Socrates once said 'the unexamined life is not worth living'. He was right about that.

Jesus said, "I came that you might not only have life but that you might have it abundantly." My friends, in all humility, pray that God would fill you with such abundance as life has to offer. Pray that God might fill those around you and may we all together experience the mystery of being conduits of blessing for each other that together we might manifest truth, goodness, and beauty. Amen.