From his book “Receiving Personal Revelation” Larry L. Tippetts teaches:
. . . So created meanings work less rationally and communally than discovered meanings. They are also less durable, less able to get through adversity and suffering.
Secularism is the only world view whose members must find their main meaning within this life. All other ways of understanding the world hold that “this life is not the whole story,” but with secularism, it is. That is why all previous religions and cultures have been able to find in suffering and death a way to affirm something that matters beyond and more than just this life.46 When secular people create their meanings, however, it must be around something located inside the material world. You might be living for your family or for a political cause or for career accomplishments. To have a meaningful life, therefore, life must go well. But when suffering disrupts this, it has the power to destroy your very meaning. The secular approach to meaning can leave you radically vulnerable to the realities of how life goes in this world.
Victor Frankl was a Jewish doctor who survived the death camps of World War II. His famous book Man’s Search for Meaning explored the reason why some people under those horrendous conditions seemed to stay strong and kind while others simply gave up or even became collaborators in order to survive.47 His conclusion was that it had to do with a person’s meaning in life. Many people have made a career or social status or family their meaning. These meanings were based on things in this life that the death camp had swept away from them completely. Some collapsed psychologically and spiritually and often died by simply “giving up.” 49 Those who did not crumble, often had a different kind of reference point that transcended the circumstances of this life. Many prisoners turned back to a “depth and vigor of religious belief” that surprised the new arrivals.”50 One woman in camp said, “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.”51 When Doctor Frankl spoke to prisoners, in order to infuse their suffering with “dignity and meaning” he would say that “someone looks down on us in difficult hours—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, of a God—and he would not expect us to disappoint him.”52
Frankl discovered that the only way for prisoners’ humanity to survive was to relocate the main meaning of their lives to some transcendent reference point, something beyond this life and even this world. All other religions and cultures outside of secular society do this. The Meaning of life may be escaping the cycle of reincarnation to go into eternal bliss, or escaping the illusion of the world to merge with the all-soul of the universe or resting with your ancestors after living an honorable life in faithfulness to your family, or, as with the Christian faith, becoming like Christ and living with God and others in love and glory forever. In each case the Meaning of life cannot be destroyed by adversity. If, for example, your Meaning in life is to know, please, emulate, and be with God, then suffering can actually enhance your Meaning in life, because it can get you close to him. Anthropologists have observed that all nonsecular cultures give their members resources for actually being edified by suffering. Though not welcoming it, they see it as meaningful and help toward the ultimate goal. Only secular culture sees suffering as accidental and meaningless, just an interruption or destruction of what we are living for. And so our society makes it difficult to fully affirm the goodness of all life, even life in the midst of affliction.53
As we have seen, Camus argued that what we most want in life is to not lose our love relationships. The knowledge of our impending death, he concluded, takes love away and makes life meaningless. Many people find Camus to be too gloomy, but the older one gets, the more one feels the force of his words. If you believe that death really is the end of love, then you will not want to think about it as you get older. However, if you believe, as Christians do, that death is actually the entrance into greater and endless love relationships, then thoughtful reflection will only make it easier to face what is coming.
Western societies are perhaps the worst societies in the history of the world at preparing people for suffering and death, because created meaning is not only less rational and communal, but less durable.54 ~~Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God (VIKING, An imprint of Penguin Random House, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York, 10014, penguin.com
