Under the title “A Meaning That Suffering Can’t Take form You” Timothy Keller wrote:
In “A Confession” Leo Tolstoy tells how he was leading a very successful life until around the age fifty he began to realize that every loved one would be taken away from him and all he had written would eventually be forgotten. In light of that, “the question was: ‘Why should I live, why should I wish for anything?. . . .Is there any meaning in life that the inevitable awaiting death does not destroy.’ ” He also asked, “How can we fail to see this? . . . That is what is surprising! One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud!”33 He had sobered up and was now thinking rationally (or “coldly” as Holmes named it). He could now go back to writing his novels and loving his family, because the lack of any objective, lasting meaning had dawned on him. He could go back to his prereflective state.
C.S.Lewis describes this same problem Tolstoy had with the added color of modern evolutionary biology. He writes:.
You might decide to have as good a time as possible. The universe is a universe of nonsense, but since you are here, grab what you can. Unfortunately . . . you can’t, expect in the lowest animal sense, to be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all of the beauties both of the person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by a collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can’t go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still, in the lowest sense, have a “good time”; but just so far as it becomes very good, just so far as it threatens to push you from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so far you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony because your own emotions and the universe in which you [think you] really live.34
By contrast, life meaning and purpose play out for a Christian believer in a very opposite direction. Christians do not say to themselves: “Stop thinking about the implications of what you believe about the universe. Just try to enjoy the day.” No, if a Christian is feeling downcast and meaningless it is because, in a sense, she is not being rational enough. She is not thinking about the implications of what she believes about the universe.
Christians believe that there is a God, who made us in love to know him, but that as a human race we turned away and were lost to him. However, he has promised to bring us back to himself. God sent his Son into the world to break the power of sin and death, at infinite cost to himself, by going to the cross. Christian teaching is that Jesus rose from the dead and passed through the heavens and now is . . . preparing a future new heaven and a new earth, without death and suffering, in which we will live with him forever. And then all the deepest longings of our hearts will find fulfillment.
It is fair to say, that if you are a Christian with those beliefs—about who you are to God and what is in store for you—but you are not experiencing peace and meaning, then it is because you are not thinking enough. There is a kind of shallow, temporary peace that modern people get from thinking too much about their situation, but Christianity can give a deep peace and meaning that comes from making yourself as aware and mindful of your beliefs as possible.
If you believe there is no discovered meaning in life, only created meaning, then if you really start to think globally–about the fact that nothing you do is going to make any difference in the end—you are going to begin to experience the dread and nausea of the modernists. And, of course, you don’t have to think like this—you can put it out of your mind—and that is certainly how most of the people in a secular culture live today. But that is my first point. This is not a very rational way to have meaning in life. Created meaning is a less rational way to live life than doing so with discovered meaning.~~Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God, Viking, and imprint of Penguin Random House, 375 Hudson St. New York, NY 10014, 2016
