The Meaning(s) of Life

"Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being born and having to die."

--F. Forrester Church

Actually, of course, Sabrina did most of the work. But the weight of responsibility that I felt for having helped to bring a new life into the world was almost overwhelming. Consider what the world was like in 1983: the Cold War was at its height. The Nuclear Arms Race was raging between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. President Ronald Reagan had dubbed the Soviet Union "the Evil Empire." A movie of the time looked at what the aftermath of a nuclear exchange might be like. In rural Minnesota, where I was serving my first church in a small, prairie farming community, farmers were going out of business on an almost daily basis, shattering their lives and their families.

I was far from friends and family, and, as earlier generations of Unitarians had lamented before me, the friendly "environs of Boston." The people had strange names like Kjolstad and Beckius and Blomquist. I had never lived outside of New England, and had only occasionally traveled beyond it. I had only recently conducted my first memorial service: someone had actually had the nerve to die! I had known that it was going to happen eventually, but the reality of it so soon after my arrival was sobering. All of the stress indicators in my life were on red alert.

I was expected (or at least so I thought) to make meaning of it all: the world crisis, nuclear proliferation, unemployment and foreclosure, death, my own life and the occasionally broken lives of my parishioners, and my newborn son’s arrival in a world that I wished was a whole lot better than it was. Obviously, I didn’t have a clue. It was a wonderful but mind-focusing moment when Ben arrived, almost three weeks late, looking a lot more grown-up and mature than I had expected or was quite ready for. I was 31 years old, but, as my mother will attest, I was something of a late bloomer myself. I should have been ready, but I wasn’t.

I expect that we all feel something of the same when our children are born. Even if we have never considered it before, we are confronted head-on with the ultimate question of life’s meaning. "How does a man bring a child into such a world," asked Mr.. Tessler in the morning’s reading ["What Life Can Make You Ask" by David Mazel]. "How does he bring even a bagel?" How, indeed, in such a world?

As time went on, of course, I got used to Ben being around, and after a while it just seemed normal that he should be here, hanging out with us. But I have never forgotten that initial feeling of all the world’s weight falling on my own and on his tiny shoulders.

What does it all mean? Why are we born in the first place? Does the arrival of a new life take on added significance nowadays because we are actually able to exercise some choice about it? Did my parents and grandparents feel the same awesome weight of responsibility and concern and fear when their children were born?

As a minister, I have the luxury of getting to consider such questions on a fairly regular basis. That does not mean, alas, that I have found all, or even any, of the answers. If anything, having the time to think about them just sharpens the questions: why was I born? Why must I die? What am I meant to do with my life?

My colleague Forrest Church has, I believe, accurately defined religion as our human response to the dual reality of being alive and of having to die. Religion is the discipline, the body of belief and practice, which helps us to approach and hopefully to answer, at least temporarily, but at least to grapple with those ultimate questions of life, death, and meaning in-between. It is the science of connection and of the search for wholeness in a world of disconnection and fragmentation.

As a new dad serving a new church in the non-fictional equivalent of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, I came face to face with those questions, if not for the first time, at least in a far less theoretical way than I usually had before. People were expecting me to make meaning of things, which, well, didn’t seem to have much, if any, meaning at all. (Or so I thought. Of course, being way smarter than I, they were not, and it was only my own youthful pride that made me think it was so.)

For the first time in my life, I realized why there were such things as catechisms. (I envy our Transylvanian Unitarian friends because they still have one! In reality, however, the questions persist, even in Transylvania). I found myself longing for the answers, and like Mr. Tessler from the morning’s reading, I would not have been above asking a ten year old kid for answers. (In fact, a lot of ten year old kids have just as good a grasp of the issues as I have. Maybe better.)

Of course, I am one of those pariahs of the contemporary cultural scene, a "moral relativist." I am intellectually skeptical about absolutes of any kind. I am an agnostic about God, though emotionally I feel and act like a theist most of the time. I suspect we are born out of a biological need to reproduce our own kind. We die, I would venture to guess, out of a similar biological necessity.

Nobody knows better than I how unsatisfying such responses are. But in spite of my existential skepticism, I do believe that there is meaning in-between, and that the meaning in-between can give meaning to both our beginnings and our endings. Whether such meaning is intrinsic or extrinsic, that is, whether it is there to begin with or whether it is simply-or-not-so-simply given by us, makes little difference to me. The end result, as the Existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sarte recognized, is similar: we can make meaning of our otherwise absurd existence, and we should. Indeed, I would argue, we must.

The fact of the matter is that I think life has meanings, in the plural. It doesn’t seem to me to have a single meaning or purpose, but it provides ample opportunities for meanings of various kinds. I have thought about this a lot. We human beings have an amazing ability to provide meanings even to seemingly meaningless events. (Take the Boston Red Sox . . . or maybe not.)

That we are the "meaning makers" is almost a cliche among Unitarian Universalists. It rolls easily from the tongue. But if we take it seriously, as we are intended to do, it is a huge responsibility. It means that there is no large-A-Answer to life’s many difficult questions, no certainties on which to lean in times either of joy or of trouble. It is an uncomfortable place to be when we are confronted by those ultimate questions of which I have already spoken.

But while we don’t claim to have The Answer, I do believe that there are answers, though those answers may be almost as various as we are. One such answer is given in the morning’s reading: the companionship of a young boy with a memory-haunted old man which provides comfort to the older man, while opening to the boy for the first time the possibility of life’s depth, complexity, beauty, and opportunity:

That morning I walked slowly backward up the street from the shop. I wanted to see the lights as long as possible. I wanted to remember what a deep thing life was, what it could make you dream, what it could make you ask, even there among the lights and the bagels.

So, what of life’s meanings? For some of us meaning will be found in nature, for others in music and art, for others in relationships, for others in sports, for others in literature, for others in the complexity of the mind itself, for others in religion, for others in travel, for others in service, for others in you-name-it, a million other pastimes and passions. These are the things that give life its meanings, but all of them take effort and commitment and continual attention if they are to meet our need for meaning. The religious word for this kind of attention is "discipline."

Speaking of discipline, or the lack thereof, my sons Ben and Josh have brought more meaning to my life than I can ever calculate, though there have been times when I wasn’t too sure about that. My work has given meaning to my life, as has my marriage, my friendships, and my education. Helping others along the journey has brought more meaning to my life than I probably deserve, in terms of return on my investment. Even death, even the deaths of many I have loved, has made my life more meaningful, because it has constantly reminded me of life’s brevity and therefore of its preciousness.

I don’t know what the meaning of life is. I don’t know why we are born or why we die. But I do know that life has meanings, and that birth and death are meaningful passages along the way. I know that human beings have a wonderful capacity for making meaning even where there appears to be none, that some of life’s most meaningful moments have resulted from some of history’s most meaningless and horrific events. I know that death often gives life its meaning, and that birth reminds us all of the responsibility we have for building a better world for our children and for ourselves and for all the world’s people. I believe that our being together is profoundly meaningful, but that it is up to us to build the beloved community, that it is not a given, that we must work at it and work at it and work at it again.

Traditionally, the nexus of life’s meanings, the place where they come together, has been called God, and that is OK with me as long as we keep in mind that this is not the old "guy in the sky" god of our ancestors. Giving thanks to God can be a way of giving thanks for all the meanings we have found in our lives. That is a god that I can live with, and the best part of it is that it is real. Does God exist? One could perhaps offer a tentative yes, recognizing that God will be different for each of us, representing whatever meanings we have managed to give to our lives. But remember that it is not God who gives our lives their meaning, but we who make our lives meaningful for God. It’s up to us.

Shakespeare wrote that "We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on; and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep." As long as we are awake, then, our dreams may still come true. We can help to make it so. May we remember what a deep thing life is. May the meanings of our lives be manifold, and may we work to build the better world of our dreaming. In all our hopes and aspirations, and even in our often faltering attempts to make sense of life and to give it meaning, I believe that world is already being born. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock