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THE LIFE OF MEANING
Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World
Now available Online @ Shop Thirteen.
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Creating THE LIFE OF MEANING
by Bob Abernethy
In 1998, retired South African Archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu was a scholar-in-residence at Emory University in Atlanta, where I interviewed him for RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY.
We sat in a corner of the library talking about that week's events and Tutu's health as he recovered from cancer surgery.
Then, when we had finished our conversation about the news, I asked "The Arch," as he said some of his friends call him, "While we are here, with the lights and the microphones and the camera, would you mind if I asked you about your spiritual life?"
Many of the rest of us might be shy about speaking of something so personal, but not Tutu. Without reluctance or hesitation, and with great intensity, he described his wordless prayer at the beginning of every day, his sense of being in the presence of God, and he likened that to sitting near a warm stove on a cold morning.
"I don't have to do anything," he said. "The fire warms me. I just have to be there, quiet." His simple description moved all of us in the room.
Over the nearly ten years RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY has been on the air, its reporters and producers have interviewed many hundreds of men and women who also spoke about their deepest beliefs and practices with extraordinary insight and eloquence. As the program's videotape library began to bulge with their rich observations, it became clear that these contributors deserved far more attention than had been given them in the excerpts from the interviews used on the air and online. So religion writer Bill Bole and I chose 59 of the most memorable conversations and edited them into 66 essays, trying to make each one both graceful in print and at the same time full of the vigor and color of the spoken word. With our comments beginning each chapter and item, and with a generous introduction by Tom Brokaw, the result was THE LIFE OF MEANING: REFLECTIONS ON FAITH, DOUBT AND REPAIRING THE WORLD.
Many of the contributors, but by no means all, are religious and prominent, representing all the major faith traditions. There are Buddhists such as the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, Protestants Martin Marty and the late William Sloane Coffin Jr., Rabbis Irving Greenberg and Harold Kushner, scientists such as Francis Collins and John Polkinghorne, and writers Madeleine L'Engle, Thomas Lynch, Barbara Brown Taylor, Phyllis Tickle, Studs Terkel, Frederica Mathewes-Green, and Rachel Remen. Jimmy Carter spoke of prayer in the White House, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr explained Islam.
Whatever their fields and age, and whether they are formally religious or more independently spiritual, the contributors turned out to have in common a powerful underlying conviction. Many of them expressed it as the "Something More," their bedrock intuition that beyond or beside or as part of everything that is material, everything that can be sensed and measured, there is another realm of being called by many names but central to their understanding of life and the universe. Many referred to this as God or, for Muslims, Allah. Some spoke of "Ultimate Reality" or "the Really Real."
Another quality many of our interviewees shared is their gift of noticing, of being "mindful," as the Buddhists say. The great Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh spoke of mindful breathing, saying this practice alone "can bring you home to the present moment and help you to be fully alive."
"Everyone can practice mindfulness," said Nhat Hanh, "without becoming Buddhist."
Though she is a Protestant Christian, the California writer Anne Lamott has followed a similar path, realizing the spiritual value of simply being attentive. "Anything that can bring you into the now and into the breath and into the present moment" is indeed a present, a gift, she observed. Lamott was also quick to note, "I don't find spiritual insight sitting around thinking 'thinky' thoughts about what it all means and who God is. I find God in the utter dailyness and mess of it all."
In the minds of many, a good reason to stay spiritually alert is that the sacred can be lurking anywhere, opening the way to insight and wisdom. "God could talk to you in the kitchen or in the supermarket," noted the physician Rachel Remen, relating the thinking of her grandfather, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi who was a student of kabbalah, the mystical arm of Judaism. "There was no place to go to be out of relationship with the Holy One, so it just made sense to stay awake and pay attention, because the mystery at the heart of life could show itself to you at any time."
From another theological perspective, Eileen Durkin, a lifelong Catholic in Chicago, said she believes "grace is everywhere. All of life is gift." Theologian and papal biographer George Weigel observed that in Catholicism, especially in its sacraments, "stuff matters."
However they expressed it, many of our contributors shared an enlarged capacity for finding and making meaning out of life's events, large and small. The writer Phyllis Tickle insisted that bread-making puts her in touch with "the wonder I cannot see, which is happening beneath my hands." And while witnessing savage conflicts from El Salvador to Bosnia, former NEW YORK TIMES correspondent Chris Hedges discovered that war is "a force that gives us meaning," gives us a sense of ennoblement and yet becomes a consuming addiction for which the only antidote, he said, is love.
For Bill Bole and me, some of the most meaningful insights in the book are from the many contributors who spoke of suffering and whether it can be compatible with belief in a good and all-powerful God. Rabbi Irving Greenberg split the difference. He affirmed the unlimited goodness of God but not, after the Holocaust, God's unlimited power.
Several of the people represented also spoke of personal suffering, of the difference between curing and healing, and of finding significance in disability. Remen, a longtime victim of Crohn's disease, felt that serious illness can be an invitation to become more than who you are, "to live closer to the soul." Writer Madeleine L'Engle found that "where there is no suffering, nothing happens," and the poet and funeral director Thomas Lynch said "grief is the tax we pay on loving people."
The people in THE LIFE OF MEANING are more likely to find their truth in paradox and ambiguity than certainty. In that way, the Lutheran pastor and historian of religion Martin Marty spoke powerfully of the need to recognize both the reality of God and the inevitability of disappointment. "I have always found," he said, "that it is in the impression of the absence of God where his presence is most felt, that in the wintry spirituality one sees more clearly. You see the structure of the tree when the leaves are gone. You'll see the whole horizon when all the bushes are down. In winter you see a very clear outline, and I think that's what I look for. It rings true to the human condition, and it also affirms."
In the book we profile several people whose vitality and service to others seem to define the life of meaning. Many of them are religious, but not all. Scott Neeson, once a Hollywood movie mogul, chose to leave behind his mansion and yacht in West Los Angeles to go teach Cambodian children he found picking through the garbage dumps of Phnom Penh. What has drawn Neeson to this particular life of meaning is not religious inspiration as such, but the sheer pull of the human spirit, which he finds overflowing among Cambodian families who, materially, have just about nothing.
Similarly, Rajiv Vinnakota, who educates poor children in Washington, D.C. is not sure if his motivations can be bundled as religious or spiritual. "But I know what I know," he says, which is that his work now feels, to him, like a calling.
Rochel Berman in Westchester County, New York finds "the most profound connection" with her Judaism in her work as a volunteer who prepares the bodies of deceased women for burial. "I think it is considered the greatest mitzvah (good deed)," she says, "because the person that you are serving can't say thank you."
Finally, there is the late William Sloane Coffin, Jr., whom I interviewed shortly before he died. He spoke of his lover's quarrel with America, with the social injustices that persist in his country, but he also spoke of gratitude, which he called the most important religious emotion. "When you're grateful for the undeserved beauty of a cloudless sky, you're praying," he said. He quoted the early Christian theologian Irenaeus: "The glory of God is a human being fully alive."
THE LIFE OF MEANING is filled with the words of such fully alive people. They do not preach. But they do have wise and beautiful things to say, things readers of all dispositions can find meaningful at all stages of their spiritual journeys. I have felt my own spiritual understanding grow steadily with exposure to the people who come together in this volume, all of whom I now think of as friends. They remind us that the purveyors of great wisdom are alive and well in our times just as they were long ago.
(Bill Bole contributed to this article.)
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Praise for THE LIFE OF MEANING:
This rich, meaningful book is, literally, an answer to your prayers or, if you prefer, a fascinating journey through the labyrinth of questions we all have about life, faith, God, choices and doubts ... Bob Abernethy and William Bole have done us all a great favor with this collection. — Tom Brokaw
from the Foreword
This is a feast of ideas and insights, a banquet of hard-won wisdom to which you can return time and again when your heart yearns for inspiration and your intellect for illumination.
— Bill Moyers
A noted theologian (Paul Tillich) has said that religion is a search for the truth about our relationship with God and our fellow human beings. This book will help us in that search. — Jimmy Carter
Many of us have been commenting much about a spiritual hunger at work beyond the walls of organized religion. In assembling these probing reflections on life and meaning, Bob Abernethy and William Bole have prepared a marvelous feast for the hungry.
— Richard J. Mouw
President, Fuller Theological Seminary
If you want to know how a wide and divergent array of thoughtful Americans understand and practice their religious faith, no other one book can tell you more than this collection of honest and often powerfully moving reflections.
— Peter Steinfels
Co-director, Fordham Center on Religion and Culture and religion columnist for the NEW YORK TIMES
Some books -- almost all books, in fact -- are for reading. Only occasionally is there that stately book which is so substantial and yet so open and present that it is for being with. This is a book for being with ... THE LIFE OF MEANING is more infused with wisdom than any I have seen in many, many a year.
— Phyllis Tickle
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