Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

Sources of Meaning in a Secular Society
by Reverend John Alexie Crane

Actually, you find when you look closely that there are a wealth of possibilities to choose from. There is no lack of available values. It is just that our society no longer instills these values in us through social conditioning, so that we take them for granted. This was true for centuries; but it is no longer. Now we ourselves must search, must weigh and consider — and choose. Make choices again and again. We must make the life-giving choices and commitments that were in years past largely made for us by society, by our embodiment of its conditioning. As Joseph Campbell once put it, the old religious traditions of the world “are dissolving from around us, and we are left, each on our own to follow the star and spirit of our own lives.” [from Myths to Live By, p256]

II.
What is it that matters in this life? What are the really important things in life to strive for? What significant values, goals, aims, purposes are there to choose from? — in this time of transition from an old world view to a new one that is presumably emerging around us and within us.

There is, to begin, personal growth: growth in the character and quality of our own personal being, fulfilling ourselves, actualizing as much as we can of the enormous potential our humanity contains: growing in awareness, understanding, empathy, self-command, spontaneity; in ability to care, to love, to think, to feel, to experience, to be fully alive.

To grow and to grow beyond that. It matters profoundly. When we move in this direction, strive for growth, find our way to circumstances which press us to grow, expand in powers -- when we do this -- we move in harmony, I believe, with the nature of things, with the essential structure of life. To become what we are capable of becoming: it is without doubt a major, central source of meaning. Certainly I myself find it so. It matters deeply to me, moves me.

To grow, to become what we may. This surely must mean things like learning to love, and to open ourselves to love from others. It means learning to use our energies and abilities constructively in work (whether public or private, personal or social); and. learning also how to set the work aside, turn away from it and give ourselves to play, pleasure, leisure. Learning to work well, and then to let go of it from time to time, to look up from it, to relax and just be, here and now.

It means learning to reason, to be conscious, acquiring knowledge of ourselves and our world; and it also means learning to be imaginative, whimsical, free in fantasy, rich in feelings, sensual, lusty, sensitive to beauty in sound and sight, in art and nature, in everyday life.

It means learning to let others know you, get close to you, learning to move into intimacy, learning to be creatively close, in intimate relation to at least a few other human beings; and, on the other hand, learning also to find satisfaction and reward in being alone.

It means learning to be grown-up, mature, responsible, and then, from time to time, letting go, regressing, being a happy, impulsive child. Something like this, all of this, is what it means to grow. It is surely a goal, an aim, a purpose large enough to fill a whole life-time, to give direction to our life's energies. It matters. Has meaning.

The creative writer,Robert Louis Stevenson, saw this long ago when he said: "To be what we are and to become what we are capable of becoming is the only end of life."

III.
There is more, of course. Much more. Many other things of value, many other goals worth striving for. One that matters especially to me is truth. Getting as close to awareness of reality as possible. I find myself moved by a strong desire to understand how things really are out there in the world and in myself, in others; and I give a lot of my time, energy, and. attention to pursuing this goal.

It is for me an intensely rewarding experience all at once to come upon a flash of insight into the nature of things. I can still remember vividly a relatively minor experience of this kind more than fifty years ago, while I was in college. I was reading, of all things, a physics textbook, when I came upon a paragraph that generated an epiphany in me, that, in a flash of understanding, revealed to me the essential nature of heat. It was wholly unexpected and thoroughly memorable. I still remember it vividly, can still see the printed page, and where the passage appeared on the page.

Or, I may work hard for a long period of time at gaining an understanding of one thing or another, will puzzle over it, labor hard at it, and then will turn away from the pursuit to other activities, get busy at some other necessary task. The, all at once, the insight will pop up in my mind, and I will see light where there was darkness.

There is much meaning in that endeavor, in the pursuit of truth, of expanded understanding. Indeed, so much meaning is there that one of our ablest contemporary philosophers, Huston Smith, was moved to assert that "the only thing good without qualification is extended vision, the enlargement of one's understanding... of what reality is ultimately like."

Not knowledge of what it's like — but understanding. Knowledge is what you find in books, expressed. in words. It's good, is useful, is a vital means of communication, of storing up and transmitting the accumulated experience of humankind, passing it from one mind to another, from generation to generation. Knowledge is verbal, is lodged in language; and the words and phrases come to be stored in the intellect, to be drawn upon as the occasion arises.

But it is quite possible, indeed it is even common, for an individual to contain an enormous fund of knowledge in the intellect, yet have little or no understanding of its meaning in his or her own personal, private existence, nor that of those they encounter in everyday life. They may live almost entirely in an abstract, verbal, conceptual world, and have only a dim grasp of the concrete reality in which they must actually live and move.

A physician, a psychotherapist, a scholar, an engineer, a minister may be exceedingly competent professionally, contain a staggering quantity of knowledge and skills, yet have only the most rudimentary understanding of themselves in relation to others, to the patterns of life that embrace them every day.

Understanding is rooted not in the intellect alone, but in the whole being, the whole self. It may well use knowledge as a tool, may draw on verbally expressed facts, perceptions and. insights, but it will draw also on subtle materials — feelings, intuitions, awareness — caught up in the intricate depths of the self. It will draw, above all, on direct awareness of what is actually there, present in the world and in others, in oneself — direct, non-verbal awareness.

Each of us understands, is aware of things that we would find it very hard to put into words, to express in language, things that simply are not part of our communicable knowledge.

If we can't communicate it, what good is it? A major American thinker, Henry David Thoreau, once wisely observed that “the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by one person to another.” This is how it with us, I’m sure. The most significant understanding lies out beyond the reach of words, and finds its home, not in books but in the intricate nature of the human self, each individual person, in each individual’s awareness of the nature of things, verbal and non-verbal together, intimately intertwined.

This, in turn, points to the close link between personal growth and the pursuit of truth. The quality of our understanding, its scope and depth, is dependent upon the quality of our personal being; which is to say that understanding and awareness of what reality is ultimately like (“the only thing good without qualification”) can only arise in a developed self, in a person who is relatively whole, one who has grown in quality, in depth, in openness.

To grow, to understand, to be aware: these things go hand in hand and they matter profoundly in human life, are major sources of meaning.

IV.
But there are many others. There is love, of course; and. it is so important that it can stand alone as a goal of existence, an ultimate value. Indeed, it was an understanding of this that, no doubt, led one of the ancient writers of the New Testament to assert that "God is love,” (The word God is understood here as the highest of all values, as what matters above all in life).

Love, truth, understanding, personal growth together are highly significant sources of meaning, of direction and. purpose. Reverence for life is an important value, and one that is spreading among our people, as seen in their rising ecological concern. It is a vital, life-giving value, and one that will be magnified in importance as more and more people become painfully aware of the impact on them of the warming of the planet induced by the world-wide pollution generated by our intensely productive way of life.

The patterns of personal relations to which we give ourselves are also a major source of meaning. The causes and institutions to which we commit ourselves also create meaning for us; as do our families, of course. The work we do contributes greatly. The pursuit of excellence in art, craft, and music renders much meaning.

So, as sources of meaning, we have looked at love, truth, understanding, awareness, personal growth, people, causes, institutions, work, family, artistic excellence, the pursuit of happiness, of pleasure, serenity, and joy in living. No doubt there are many others.

All of these values are important, are extraordinarily significant sources of meaning, any combination of which may vitalize our powers, give shape and structure to our existence, and prove to be a rich mine of life-meaning. V.
There Is one other source of meaning that I haven’t yet mentioned. It's not easy to talk about. Yet, it matters profoundly, is indeed something like the ultimate source of meaning. A few men and women at least in every age have been aware of it; many others have given a large part of their lives to pursuing the experience. It is a striking experience of the whole nature of things all at once, one that is laden with intense meaning.

Many individuals over the course of the past 3000 years or so have tried to put it into words. I have tried myself more than once, but no description is entirely adequate because the words inevitably fall short. However, some time ago I found in the mail an unusually clear account of it. A colleague friend of mine back east sent me a copy of a short story he had written, and, near the end of it, one of the characters (a man in his mid-twenties) spoke of this experience which he had only recently encountered for the first time.

This young man had been visiting a family he had come to care about — a man and a woman and their two children. The visit had moved him deeply, warmed him. Their house was in a rural area, and as the young man left to go home, he stepped out into an especially beautiful winter's night. Then. all at once, the experience swept over him.

"Suddenly for the first time,” he said,” I caught a glimpse of the ecstatic beauty of reality. I can't tell you why or how it came. I didn't see anything new but I saw all the usual things in a miraculous new light. I saw for the first time how wildly beautiful, beyond the power of words to describe, is the whole of life. I knew that everything in life, every man, woman, child, tree, animal, every living thing was richly beautiful and important. A rabbit scurried by me in the snow, and I couldn’t describe the ecstasy of it. I saw life in a new dimension. The moonlight coming through the branches of the trees and planting patches of silver on the snow was so beautiful that tears came to my eyes. I saw life as it really is — ravishingly, ecstatically beautiful, and filled to overflowing with a wild joy and value and meaning that can never be measured. I somehow knew that everything was important. What the importance was I could not quite grasp — but I knew. I knew. I was in love with life for the first time, with all of life. I was not imagining, I was really seeing the truth about life, the actual loveliness that is always there but so often unnoticed or unrealized."

"There was no narrow religious content in what I experienced. I didn't think of God — or a Bible verse — or anything like that. There was nothing of a moral nature. It just seemed as though beauty and joy were more at the heart of reality than an over-anxious morality. It was just that I was overcome with the preciousness of the life that had been given me — and the preciousness of the world that had been given me in which to live my life. I saw for the first time the responsibility that was mine to be worthy of this gift. But the responsibility was not of a hard moral responsibility — it was rather a responsibility to live life abundantly with joy and happiness and the sharing of that joy and happiness with others. I could never again accept anything too much less in quality of living. I saw that Heaven, whatever it is, is here and now, before our eyes, surging up to our feet, lapping against our hearts — if we somehow could only let it in."

This is one person’s description of a mystical experience. It has been described in similar ways down through the centuries by many individuals, in many different cultures around the world. It is an intensely subjective experience, impossible to describe fully in words. Even so, a few scientists have indicated a direct knowledge of the experience. Einstein, for example, described it succinctly and accurately in brilliant summary: he called it “the experience of all things as a meaningful unity.”

VI.
It is without doubt, an intense, life-affirming experience. However, a critical problem remains in relation to meaning. Our society does not condition us to adopt, as we grow up, any of these values or goals, does not instill them in us. Socialization in the US has conditioned us, for nearly 500 years to regard it as our highest obligation to pursue success, status, recognition, prestige, achievement, and wealth.

Traditional religion and democratic ideals for many years softened the somewhat the harsh impact of these values on our people; but now that the religious tradition has declined sharply in influence, the drive for wealth evidently has become the central source of meaning for a very large number of our people.

This, in turn, generates deprivation and suffering for a substantial percentage of the population. A minority at the top has grown wonderfully wealthy, and with that wealth has been able to buy political power, in this way circumventing the influence of democratic process. Our society has become, temporarily I trust, more of a plutocracy than a democracy.

The result is, if any of the innumerable values and goals cited above are to be sources of meaning for us, we ourselves must deliberately choose them, make them our own, commit ourselves to them. No one can do it for us now. We ourselves, individually, must deliberately create the meaning of our lives, by our own choices and commitments. We are responsible for the task. Better still, we are free now to undertake it. We now have the precious freedom to define, in large part, the shape and quality, the meaning of our own existence.

That is grounds for rejoicing, as well as for some fear and trembling. Both together. It is at once an awesome and inspiring responsibility and, at the same time, a liberation — both a blessing and a burden. We are not as safe, secure and certain as we once were some years ago; but we are free now to be and become ourselves through our own deliberate, personal choices.

It’s not an easy time to be alive, but it’s a time of wondrous possibilities and potential. So, let us be glad we are alive, and that we have inherited the world’s burdens.

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

Lex1304@aol.com

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