Now you may ask: “What does all this have to do with faith?” Quite a lot, actually — and in more than just one way.
For one, faith, in the broad sense of believing that something is possible, has everything to do with it. We would hardly even begin to seek happiness or fulfillment if we didn’t think it is possible to find it. In a way, it is something like starting up a business, or even like betting on the lottery — unless you believe success is possible, you will not even bother to try. And without some trying (despite books titled “. . . without even trying”) it is very unlikely you’ll succeed.
For another, when it comes to seeking long-term happiness
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or fulfillment, faith, in the religious sense of the word, has always had everything to do with people’s hopes of a happiness or fulfillment that somehow escapes death. Generally, such hope has been expressed in terms of faith in there being some kind of heaven, be it in terms of a happy-hunting ground, a Valhalla of the heroes, a paradise of the saved, “the bosom of Abraham,” or even the state of “nirvana.” And while some religions have been rather vague about what happens after death, most religions have had a great deal to say as to how to cope with death — even if by trying to ignore it.
Yet here we run into a great paradox or contradiction. Most of the great or “higher” religions, when it comes to facing this bottom line, are unanimous in preaching one conclusion: that however you think of an afterlife — if you think of one at all-the true key to achieving happiness or fulfillment is to be found in self-transcendence, or the forgetting of self.
This is not an easy truth to accept. It comes down to saying that if you want to be happy, then you must forget about being happy. If you are seeking fulfillment, then the quickest way to achieve it is to forget about it. Of course, we cannot just come out and say that and expect to be believed. And if people took this paradox at face value, the whole self-improvement industry would collapse overnight. And, no doubt, most of the churches would lose a lot of their followers as well.
Nevertheless, when all is said and done, we will find that this paradox is the core truth of all genuine religion, that “he who would save his life will lose it: but he who loses his life...shall save it” (Luke 9:24). I could cite many similar passages from the Bible, from the other sacred scriptures of the world, the writings of mystics and saints, and even of the philosophers, all of which come down to saying the same thing.
The problem is that so many if not all of these sayings
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seem to come from another time, another place — from another world from that of modern persons. Despite what Socrates, Buddha, or even Jesus and the great saints had to say, we are still apt to write them off all the more because they appear to be exceptional, almost as if they were not men and women like ourselves, struggling to find their own happiness or fulfillment in life.
Part of our problem is that although we are perhaps willing to admit the ultimate truth of this paradox, we are not really sure why this is true. Nor are we really convinced that it has any practical application in our ordinary lives, so we are all too apt to fail to see how it most of all applies in the life of faith. To try to remedy this situation, I turn, first of all, to the life-work and teaching of the internationally known and acclaimed psychiatrist, Viktor E. Frankl.
Faith and the Search for Meaning
As a Jew, born and raised in Vienna, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, Frankl suffered personally through a life crisis which not only confirms our thesis but throws great light on what it means to be a person of faith.
Frankl’s insight is as simple as it is devastating. It is basically that human happiness or fulfillment cannot be successfully pursued; it can only “ensue” — which is to say that it can only come to us as a by-product of meaning.
By “meaning,” Frankl meant whatever reason or purpose that each of us has for living. But this reason or purpose must be present in our minds. For while we may vaguely believe or somehow take it for granted that there is an overall purpose for the scheme of things in this universe, unless this purpose translates itself into a conscious meaning for my own life, right here and now, that overall purpose does me no good — it cannot make me feel happy or fulfilled unless I know about it and deliberately relate myself to it.
Yet how are we to come to a knowledge of such a purpose
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or higher meaning in our lives? For those who give thought to such matters, this purpose or meaning presents itself as a problem, but to an even greater extent it remains a mystery. Problems can be, to some extent solved, but mysteries have to be lived. The purpose of life, for each of us, can be such a problem, but the overall meaning of life, as well as our place in it, remains such a mystery. And as such, it reveals itself through life itself, and this experience turns out to be the experience of faith.
Too often we find this same lesson, again and again, suppressed, forgotten, or otherwise consigned into oblivion in the midst of the distractions of ordinary life and the ritualizing of beliefs. Like us, Frankl suspected this truth and even planned to write a major book on the subject. But as it turned out, he first had to live out this truth in its fullest dimension in the midst of the excruciating trials of the concentration camp. His lived experience of this ancient mystery can be a new revelation of this truth for us all.
Perhaps many are already familiar with his story as told in his autobiographical sketch and introduction to his thought, Man’s Search for Meaning. Yet the directly religious implications of this extraordinary story are often overlooked. Readers easily grasp his primary point: only meaning gives purpose to life, and to be happy, one must seek that meaning in something, some cause, or some purpose greater than one’s own selfish desire to be happy. What they so often fail to see, however, is that in the end only one purpose or one center of meaning proves capable of fulfilling this need in any permanent way.
We need only recall the succession of purposes or meanings for which Frankl was determined to survive in order to quickly grasp this point. At first he naively thought he would have much time in prison for writing, so he sewed his manuscript for his book into the lining of his overcoat, only to have it confiscated almost immediately. Next, he resolved to survive to be reunited with his wife, only to soon
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realize that she, also a prisoner, was not robust enough to survive. Soon after, he dedicated himself to helping keep prisoners alive; if you could work, the SS wouldn’t execute you outright-at least not till the end. But then, as the Nazis began to panic at the advance of the Allied forces, they began to compound their horrendous crime by executing, right and left, every prisoner that they thought they could dispose of. At this point, a series of circumstances offered the opportunity for what Frankl hoped might turn out to be at least a slim chance of escape. But instead he hesitated, electing to stay with his fellow prisoners. It turned out that those who accepted the offer to be trucked away to a “rest camp” to await liberation were really being taken out for their execution. Frankl survived when his camp was overrun by the liberating forces before the SS could dispose of the rest of them. Ironically, Frankl lived because he was willing to die with the rest.
Why did Frankl decide to stay? Of course, he suspected a ruse in the offer to leave. But at least it offered a possible avenue of escape, whereas to stay in the camp seemed to offer only certain death. Frankl said that he estimated his chances of survival at that point as less than one in twenty. Yet, stay he did. Why? Frankl put it in these terms: he had already reached a point where he began to see a meaning in what was the apparent certainty of his own death. When he had accepted the offer to work in the