Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

The Meaning of It All
by Reverend John Alexie Crane

I had lost sight of the fact, until I read this article, that this country, sixty or so ago, in 1933, “was an insular, desperately poor, ardently patriotic but second-class power” in the world. “The nation’s population was less than half its present size, but more than 15 million men were looking for jobs that did not exist. Rural America had no electricity; its roads were dirt. In foreign affairs the country was isolationist. At home, Americans were tightly sheathed in social discipline.” In morality and custom and tradition.

“Divorce was disgraceful. So was welfare, even to those forced to apply for it. Manliness was prized; indeed all real authority was vested in men, most of whom, in their role as heads of families, did not permit their wives to work. People of color were silent and invisible. Drug abuse was unknown. Homosexual men were called ‘sexual perverts.’ Millions had never heard of lesbians.”

Today, almost 70 years later, after swiftly successive waves of change, the US is radically transformed. “We have been remolded by racial upheaval, a sexual revolution, a redress in the balance between men and women, a new national identity as a world power, and communication breakthroughs that have seemed, at times, to be the driving force behind all this.”

A world lit only by change.

II. The Crisis of Meaning
All of which has some bearing on the question, what is the purpose of life? What is my reason for living? I expect you have thought about this from time to time. As I have. As many people do.

Something I learned over the years was that the word "reason" points your thoughts in the wrong direction. A reason is not necessary and is not particularly helpful. An affection for life will do it, will carry you much farther. A wish, a drive for life is enough. A lust for life is much better. It is more a gut-level feeling that is required, rather than a set of systematic, consciously developed reasons.

How can we encourage feelings like these in ourselves? What are their sources? There are many, but one of the major sources is meaning: the meaning we experience in life. Albert Camus, the French writer and philosopher said once, "Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.... I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions."

The fact is that we have a profound need for meaning. We need it in much the same way we need water, food, and sleep. It is essential to us if we are to be fully alive. In the absence of meaning, we wither: meaning experienced at some level of ourselves, whether tacit or articulate.

Our society is in crisis in relation to meaning. It began shortly after World War I, a singularly disenchanting series of bloody, senseless battles between highly learned, rational, civilized countries.

T. S. Eliot was the prophet and poet laureate of the crisis of meaning soon after World War I. He characterized the western world as a “Wasteland.” ("This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper"). The crisis of meaning has continued down to the present, reflected consistently in our high arts, and even, since the 1960s, evident in the mass media.

I see it in the people I move among, in the books I read, the plays I attend, the movies I see. I observe it in the people I encounter, ever so many of them, a dark wondering whether it all makes sense, whether life is worth living. It is like this in some of our best people: artists, writers, intellectuals, scholars, scientists.

In these circles, generally, optimism is regarded as ridiculous. People who are hopeful appear naive, sentimental. What makes sense, what looks probable are outcomes like decay, disintegration, disaster. The able philosopher, Huston Smith, observed (in Condemned to Meaning), that "An ingrowing pessimism seems to characterize most of our writers. Almost unvaryingly they depict a world that is meaningless or absurd." Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot,” is a classic expression of this cultural development. The “theater of the absurd,” it’s aptly called.

It is, Smith said, one of the great ironies of history. At the very time that we have gained the greatest mastery over our environment, have had the highest success in science and technology, in meeting the physical and material needs of the American people, there is clearly "a growing question as to whether there's any point to the whole affair."

We need meaning if we are to be vitally alive. In the past, societies met this need for their people by providing a stable social structure and assigning each one a place, a role within it; by providing a religious world view, a set of firm ethical rules, an image of the universe with humanity set down meaningfully in it.

Now, because of the decay of the traditional order, we are required, each of us, to create a pattern of meaning for ourselves (or to encourage it to happen in us). It matters, is consequential. We owe it to our species as well as ourselves.

The able writer and social critic, Walter Lippmann, years ago said that the sense of meaninglessness so widespread in the Western world has been generated by "the impact of science upon religious certainty and of technological progress upon the settled order of family, class and community."

A hundred and fifty years ago, people saw themselves as central in the universe, as creatures of notable significance within it. But science has accumulated a mass of knowledge in the interim which creates a tacit image of us as infinitely small creatures, inhabiting a planet of no evident significance, revolving around a minor sun in an obscure segment of an immense universe. We are obliged to conclude that the entire human experience on earth, with all its achievements, will eventually go out like a lamp, when our sun uses up its finite supply of energy. What difference will all our suffering and striving have made?

No difference. The findings of science imply that humanity is of no lasting significance in the scheme of things. Humans are interesting, complex and capable creatures (if quarrelsome), but their entire history on earth will, it appears, prove ultimately to have been only a brief, transitory episode in the life of the cosmos.

This understanding of the implications of scientific knowledge is widespread in the American people. Science is powerful, persuasive, pervasive in our culture. Children absorb its world view in school. College students are immersed in it. Properly. It is an extraordinary tool, enabling us to know the world in an orderly, systematic, disciplined way. It is indispensable to us.

But it renders little meaning. Indeed, it is a hazard in this regard. It erodes meaning. Science is essential to us, but, in its present form, it erodes the meaning that most people require in order to be vitally alive. That is the bind. That is the source of the crisis of meaning.

What is the answer? We need meaning. What can we do to encourage its growth in ourselves?

When we set out in search of meaning for our lives, it is not an objective, scientific, analytical statement that we require. What we need is a perception, a vision, an image of life that will unify our understanding and experience, our faculties and our feelings, that will link us effectively to the world. It is, above all, subjective meaning that we require, not only objective knowledge.

However, we are so committed to the objective, scientific mode of understanding, that we regard what is merely subjective as inconsequential. We are convinced that only science can describe the real world. This actually is the widespread and persisting blight of ethnocentrism: that is, the conviction that my world view is the ulimate, the only valid world view. Which is what the medieval church claimed for centuries; the same claim that fundamentalists make today. It’s science as dogma. We must escape the bondage of this delusion.

It is exceedingly presumptuous (and ethnocentric) to conclude that science presently offers the one and only correct way of viewing the world, and that its findings up to this point are so certain and so ultimate, we can conclude with absolute assurance that there is no point in the entire human adventure.

A little humility is not out of order here. We do not know everything. It is possible that some of what we think we know is misconception. There are many other ways of apprehending the world, ways that render subjective meaning. Which is what humans everywhere need.

Science intentionally sets subjective meaning aside. That is one of its great strengths. Science is powerful, useful, effective. Subjective meaning we must gain from poetry, drama, myth. music, the novel, religion. We must school ourselves to perceive the world in other than objective ways as well, and to realize that subjective meaning also matters profoundly to us. Our feelings matter as well as our thoughts. We must school ourselves to experience nature, not as an object only, but as a living presence, as a resonant source of meaning.

III. Kinds and Sources of Meaning
We are not sharply conscious of the characteristics of meaning. We do not think much about the matter. It is important to be aware that there are, broadly, two kinds of meaning: 1. Those attached to words — literal meanings. 2. Those deriving from contexts or situations, from life itself — situational meanings. Literal meanings and situational meanings.

Then, it should be noted that with respect to situational meanings, some can be expressed in words; others can in some way be sensed but not stated; while there must be still others, of which we are not yet aware, which are neither sensed nor stated.

So there are three levels of meaning: spoken, unspoken, and unperceived. From time to time, for any one of us, for all of us, meanings may move from one level to another. They need not remain fixed.

In addition, we can now see that the meaning of life is not something we find in a book, stated concisely. It is not something we discover in one place. Nobody can tell us what the meaning of our life is. It is something we create, in large part; and it also is something that happens to us. Partly voluntary, partly involuntary. Objective in part; subjective in part.

The order, the pattern, the meaning we see in the nature of things is not arbitrarily created by us; nor is it passively imposed upon us. It emerges out of the encounter between ourselves and reality. It is rooted in facts, but meaning involves both facts and feelings.

We derive a great deal of meaning from the pattern of personal relations in which we are involved, and much of this is tacit. We would find it hard to express the meaning in concise phrases. The fact that we live in a home with one, two, three other persons, some adult, some children perhaps, generates patterns of meaning in our lives. Or, if there is a lover in our life, an intense personal relation, the meaning may be overwhelmingly evident to us. Though impossible to express fully in words.

Our being part of a particular community (neighbors, friends, co-workers, acquaintances) also is a source of meaning. The causes and institutions to which we commit ourselves are consequential: club, community organization, an action group, a study group, a church, a temple, a union, a professional association. There is meaning in these activities and associations.

In addition, meaning is created in us by our striving for the life goals we absorbed from our society: the pursuit of recognition, prestige, status, achievement, power, wealth. Indeed this is the major source of meaning for most of our people, it seems likely. The work they do looms large in their lives. The pursuit of pleasure is another source. The enjoyment of art, music, literature, drama, the dance all contribute to the meaning we know in life.

These sources of meaning are significant. But not sufficient for all of us. Many of us, including myself, feel a need for something more, for some larger meaning, one that unifies, focuses, fuses those derived from the above situational circumstances.

It is important to be aware that a kind of cultural mutation has occurred. Large numbers of Americans, probably including you and me, are no longer entirely defined by our social conditioning (as people were 100 years ago). The level of consciousness in many of us now is such that we do not just compliantly do what our society conditions us to do. Society no longer has the power to define the meaning of life for us, as it could for most in times past.

If we are to find life worthwhile, if we are to find meaning in it, we must take a hand in creating it, in encouraging it to happen in us. By our choices and commitments, by study and reflection, by taking action, we must expand the meaning of our lives. We are free to do this. We are responsible. It is for us, each of us, to define the shape and quality of our own existence, to perceive and to create its meaning. As Josepth Campbell once put it, we are now no longer conditioned to follow”inherited patterns of thought and action.” Rather, we are asked, each of us, to become “an innovating center, an active, creative center of the life process.”

IV. The Meaning of My Life
A number of us feel a need for something more than the everyday sources of meaning. I do. When I look back over my life, I can see that there have been a few values or goals that have determined much of what I did or held back from doing. These values shaped many of my life decisions. They still matter profoundly to me, are the major sources of the meaning of my life.

First of all, I have been moved by a need, a desire to understand the nature of things and myself set down in it. I have, I can see, spent the bulk of my life energies on this task. When I am engaged in it, immersed in it, I feel most alive. It excites and enthuses me. It is not too much to say that expanding, deepening my understanding of the nature of things, of reality, of myself matters more to me than anything else in life.

The understanding I speak of is not intellectual only, not only verbal, articulate. It also involves meaning, involves feeling as well as thought. My whole self, not the intellect alone, participates in the act of understanding. Intellectual awareness is essential to me, is meat and drink; but I need more. I need a more direct, unmediated, in-touchness with the nature of things.

It is the search for and growth in understanding that generates the central core of meaning in my life. I discovered, however, that there is an inescapable precondition for the expansion of understanding, and this led me to adopt as a goal, a major life aim, to become a better lover. I discovered that understanding is a function of being. The quality of our personal being, our self, affects the level of understanding we are able to attain; and the quality that is most significant is summed up in the word "love." Love here means, above all, caring. Caring about the well being of others as well as one's own. Caring about the quality of life of the species. Caring about the natural world that supports our lives. It means acting out that caring, taking intentional action.

Growth in understanding. Growth in the quality of my own personal nature. These are the two major sources of meaning in my life. Both necessarily require, not only solitary study, reflection and practice, but moving among, being with, relating to, learning from other people. Being with people is also a source of excitement and enthusiasm, of meaning, and my awareness often expands in such a context.

V. Conclusion
That (roughly) is what it all means to me. It is hard to put into words. It has seemed to me that when I pursue the goals outlined above (striving for growth in quality of being, in ability to love, and continually striving for growth in understanding) that I am moving, in some way, in harmony with the essential structure of life, with the nature of things. That I am serving God, to put it in traditional language.

To grow, to become what we may: that is, learning to love and to allow ourselves to be loved. Learning to work in a disciplined way, and also to set the work aside, turn away to give ourselves to play, pleasure, leisure. Learning to reason ably, to be fully conscious and acquire knowledge of ourselves and the world; and also learning to be imaginative, whimsical, free in fantasy, rich in feelings, sensual, lusty, sensitive to beauty in art, in nature, in everyday life.

It means learning to let others be close to you, know you, means moving with them, caring about them; and it means also to enjoy being in solitude. Learning to be mature, responsible, and then, from time to time, letting go. regressing, being freely, joyously impulsive.

To become what we contain the potential for becoming, to continually expand our understanding is surely a purpose large enough to fill a whole lifetime. If we give ourselves to it. If we care about it and act on it.

The Meaning of Meaning: We tend to think of meaning as a substance that we either contain or do not contain. Actually, meaning is less like a substance than it is like a situation, a set of circumstances, an interrelated system of elements. The life-meaning we experience arises out of the symbolic, linguistic, institutional, and experiential components which, interacting with our selves, give form and direction to our existence, to our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Dr Alexie Crane
2880 Exeter Place
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
(805) 682-3476

Lex1304@aol.com

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