With apologies to any who might care, it has been a little over a month since the first post in this series of blogs on finding meaning in one’s life. Although this one was ready to post weeks ago, a tragedy occurred in my life that brought me to an abrupt stop. With a further plea for forgiveness to anyone who feels “left in a ditch,” I will address this sad event at the beginning of the third post, which I am now in the process of writing.

That said, it is important, I believe, to revisit briefly, as it was covered in the first post, the concept of finding meaning in one’s life. As noted there, the biological sciences have established a process that occurs within and among the living cells called “equilibrium,” a dynamic balance that makes life possible. As research revealed, it seems that most of the biogenic needs are soon ”frosted over” with a variety of novel new interests, motives, and “appetites” that arise from the culture. These psycho-social needs become functionally autonomous,” basic needs fully capable of standing on their own feet. This urge for balance, I argued, expresses itself basically in a universal human need for meaning in life, that appears around some focal center, or centers.

Viktor Frankl, in his iconic book that arose out of his own experience in Nazi prison camps, said that there’s no general meaning of life and not even one, singular, meaning of your own life. Your life’s meaning is unique to you and depends on your decisions and situations. He argued that we have to identify what is meaningful to us in every moment. The philosopher, Friedrich Nietzche, essentially agreed with Frankl’s approach. His view was that the meaning of life is to live authentically and powerfully, creating one’s own goals and values.

That, perhaps all too brief, reflection from the first post leads me now to address, as I understand them, some of what are, or have been, sources of meaning in my life. If you begin to feel overwhelmed by the fact that there are several, perhaps many, of them, remember two things: (1) that, in agreement with Frankl and Nietzche, they can change—disappear, reappear; and (2) that most of them, over time, have an “internal” meaning—that they function as a source of satisfaction, of motivation/inspiration, as well as a “projected” meaning—one sees, or hopes to see, positive, helpful, appreciated results that are meeting the needs of others.

I will begin, then, with religion for several reasons. Because, in the first place, as I have noted many times, it has been “a long and thoughtful journey,” beginning when I was a preteen youngster who had never heard of “a search for meaning” and had no idea that religious experience was, indeed, providing it to and for me. I was raised by parents devoted to the fundamentalist Baptist church where they were members—and I, as a six year old, “walked down the aisle” to accept Jesus as my Saviour and be baptized, with little understanding of what it meant. And, second, later in my teenage and college years, I struggled with whether I had actually been “saved” when, as a six year old, I understood so little of what it meant to be forgiven of my “sins.” So, during my sophomore year—at a conservative Baptist college—I gave in to my uncertainties, made a second profession of faith in the church I had been attending, and was baptized a second time. That, however, would be only the continuation, not the resolution, of my “journey.”

To establish a “cornerstone,” a solid presence, from that college “conversion” experience to this day, let me first quote briefly from that article, noted in the first post, written fifty years ago which inspired me—maybe too  strong a term; how about “motivated” me—to write this blog. 

• . . . “conversion” is a change in the “hot spot” of personality . . . . The locus of this reorientation of life in Christian conversion is the individual’s commitment to Jesus and his way of life. . . . it is [basically] the claim of the Christian gospel that the quest for meaning has not found its maximum level until Jesus Christ becomes its final center.

Secondly, this half-century old article also dealt briefly with the role of the church as “a reinforcer of individual quests for meaning.” It made the point that any given church—whatever its theological posture—is made up of persons in “the never-ending process” of trying to bring themselves “into harmony. . . with Jesus and his way of life,” and, therefore, ”It is the real needs of these real persons in search of meaning to which the church must minister.”  So, these are a couple of the things I would stand by after fifty years, and which I tried to live by during the six years or so that I pastored churches before finding my place in teaching and learning in the world of higher education.

Not to “drag” this on forever, but my seminary education and my own teaching/learning career led to an understanding that the New Testament, particularly the Gospels, came to us from a long and somewhat unknown process of oral and written sources which we do not have, along with some that we do. This produces some uncertainty—the “inspiration” issue aside—about how many of the sayings and the events in the accounts of the life of Jesus are historically valid and trustworthy. This is important because I have on many occasions “confessed” that I find meaning in my life by committing myself to “the life and teachings of Jesus,” with a longing to “know” rather than just “believe.” As a brief aside, I posted over five years ago four blogs on “Knowing and Believing,” and addressed in my “World View” posts the “sticky” issue of trying to determine the veracity of each of the sayings of Jesus that appear, especially, in the three Synoptic Gospels, based upon their consistency with other “confirmed” sayings of Jesus. Many scholars have devoted themselves to this search, perhaps chief among them the Jesus Seminar, which involved some 50-75 scholars over a period of 6 years! 

While this issue is relevant to my search for meaning in my life, I will not take us further into what was, for me, an important and dedicated project. Anyone interested can find further accounts in the blog posts noted above. Meanwhile, with significant help from scholars with far more competence than mine, I continue my own search for the legitimate accounts of the teachings and the deeds of Jesus, because this is where I have placed the locus of one highly significant source of meaning in my life!

In the context of religion as a source of meaning, it would leave a huge empty space to ignore the existence and presence of God. I will not burden you, however, with all the basic arguments that emerge in the attempts to grapple with the puzzling inconsistencies in the nature of a God presented as all-knowing, all-powerful, loving and compassionate in a world full of evil and suffering. Perhaps one answer—assuming such a Being does, indeed, exist—is to fall back, as I try to do, in grateful ignorance—as John Claypool taught me—to “the Great Mystery.” And as to a source of meaning, drawing briefly on the fifth post in my series of blogs on my World View, I deeply need those interior resources that can help me hang together when life threatens to go to pieces. There have been times in my life when I have felt a sense of “connection” to something larger than myself and have drawn from them strength, resolve, exhilaration, peace . . . depending upon the situation. I have not been able to say from where such reserves have come, other than from deep within myself. At my best moments, however, I have leaned evermore toward belief that at the inner precincts of my being there is a connection to a Ground of Being, to The Great Mystery.  The sense of meaning connected to that came (as also described in my World View post noted above) from my wife, who said that in her own experience of a connection with God, the initiative is always hers—she “speaks” to God, she is aware of a presence, she finds comfort or challenge in the experience. She approaches God, not the other way around, which suddenly resonated with me, like “a light went on in my head!” And, thus, the real beginning of a resolution and a sense of meaning in my leaning toward a connection with The Great Mystery.

I’ll turn now to a second source of meaning in human relationships, especially in those that become true friendships. In my World View (WV) blogs, I identified myself as a reverent—perhaps spiritual—“humanist.” The reverent part was, I hope, addressed above. It should be no surprise, then, that, as a humanist, I have identified as my highest priority the supreme value of persons. While I think, hope, that I have honored that for most of my life, especially during my years as a pastor of two churches, but also in all of my relationships, it did not become a self-conscious commitment until a third or so of the way through my 20 years as a college/university professor. While every person with whom I come into contact deserves that consideration, it was the young people in my classes who were the focus of my attention, that I sought to “mold” into learners—not just for the purpose of a good grade on a paper or a high score on an exam, but for the purpose of learning, of “knowing” what they had not known, sometimes for its practical usefulness, but mostly just to develop the gift of curiosity and the joy of learning! One never knows, for sure, in a class of 18-20 students, who-is-who, which-is-which. It is easy to spot those students whose attention, questions, asking for time to talk outside of class, seem to identify them as eager learners, but one sometimes later learns that some were very smooth at simply trying to impress the professor for that higher grade. It is also usually easy to identify early on those students who just want pass this class and “get it out of the way” so they can move on to what they really care about. At the same time, most every teacher has had a letter from a student of many years before who just wants you to know how grateful they are for what they learned in your class! Usually, that letter is, no surprise, from a student you “knew” to be an eager learner, but sometimes it comes, as a total surprise, from a student who seemed a nearly invisible “chair-sitter” who was just shy and chose not to bother you. The bottom line for a serious humanist? Every student in your class is a human person, who deserves to be valued through your attention, your response to their needs, your offer of your best as a teacher and an exemplar of the love of learning for its own sake! I hope I was that and did that, because those students were a gift and givers to my search for meaning in my life.

Moving now more narrowly to the importance of friendships in my search for meaning, please be reminded that the most recent—I use the word loosely—five posts on my website were over three months ago on “the Nature and Existence of Friendships in My Life.” For any who wish to “read between the lines” for more details, I refer you to those posts. I certainly want to celebrate those long and strong true friendships in which trust, confidentiality, dependability, shared interests, and comfort were, and are, real and valued, but also some other relationships that were not just acquaintances, but in a wider realm of “friends,”—a difference most of us can recognize, but is difficult to define. As in the series of blogs already posted, I won’t name names but I do want to mark some exceptional, if not unique, characteristics, events, patterns that distinguish some of these friendships.

I have to confess that—while there were persons across the friendship/acquaintance spectrum during my childhood, my public education through high school, and my undergraduate college years—it is embarrassing to have to admit that the number of those that I could now name are virtually on the fingers of one hand! I remember some experiences and some faces that went with them, but no names. The only one during my high school years was the President of our Senior Class, whom I recall only because I was the Vice President and shared a photo with him in the High School Yearbook. There are a few from college days, but truthfully, there were only two I could remember: my roommates, one for my first two years and the other, for my Jr. and Sr. years. I confess to some “fuzziness” in my remembrance, not of the “whats” that happened, but of the “whens.” What is clear is that the guy who became my roommate for the last two years was the one who invited me during my freshman year to join him to form a “revival team”—he was the preacher, I was the song leader/soloist/choir director. For those first two years, we held revival meetings some evenings and weekends, and back-to-back weeks all summer. It was a significant, long remembered, and meaningful relationship, although after graduation, we went our separate ways to different seminaries. But during my Jr. and Sr. years, we became roommates. He continued to follow his gift and was the “evangelist” in a series of revivals, while during my Junior year I became Youth Director and “general flunkie” in a small church in Cyril, OK—an oil refinery town, the odor of which tended to repel visitors while residents always said is smelled like “money.” During my Senior year I was fortunate to have the well-defined position of Youth Director at a fairly large church in Putnam City, a suburb of Oklahoma City. The pastor there was a superb preacher and a true mentor to this college student headed, at the end of my one year at his church, to seminary in Louisville, KY. He was, easily in that realm of “more than acquaintance, less than life-long friend.” And the same was true of my “revival partner” and roommate—the friendship was close and real but did not survive past our graduation and going our separate ways.

Seminary became not only the most important learning opportunity of my life, but was also the occasion of meeting, at the beginning of my second year, the fellow classmate who would become the person with whom I established the longest-lasting friendship of my life: beginning in 1959 and continuing for 64 years until 2023 when, at some point during our occasional email exchanges, I suddenly lost any contact with him! After trying every effort I could think of—from contact with his daughter, who remarried, changed her last name, and also disappeared from my sphere; to checking, with no result, his city of residence for an obituary or change of residence; contacting the churches in his area and his employer for decades of his life before retirement. No result was found, anywhere! My heart is wrenched at this loss and I continue to hope that, somehow, I will find him again.

The several other friends addressed in those recent blogs, including the two whose friendships encompass 56 and 51 years, continue to be active parts of my life, for which I am deeply grateful.

What was intended to be a single post on my blog site has now become—due to my ever-present absence of the gift of brevity—the first of two posts! The second post will consist—I trust—of more concise but vital offerings of significant elements and experiences that brought meaning to my life. I hope you have the fortitude to stay with me.