Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
The search for meaning is the pre-occupation of the human race. We have an innate sense that there is some sort of “ultimate reality”, something that makes sense out of our existence. We consciously or unconsciously spend our entire lives trying to find an answer in the universe, a definition of who we are and why things are the way they are. It does not matter whether we are rich or poor, intelligent or simple, young or old; most if not all of us have a need to find out the meaning of our lives.
In our Post-Modernist age many of the old and not so old assumptions about where to look for this have been rejected. Post-Modern searchers, whether they know they are Post-Modern or not, tends to doubt reason, science, history, philosophy and theology as places to find absolute truth. This is the legacy of an age that is self-consciously multi-cultural and hyper-tolerant; in short, open to any and every kind of belief system or lifestyle as being equally valid. We have become a people who reject any creed that claims to be overarching and normative for all people at all times (what has come to be called a “meta-narrative”).
Today reality is, we say, what we make of it.
Inventing your own meaning for your life has a wonderful ring to it for those of us who live in the West. We have, after all, elevated individualism to the status of an undeclared civil religion. The idea that we are all masters of our destinies and captains of our souls, as the thoroughly Post-Modern poem Invictus tells us, is powerfully intoxicating to the citizen of the 21st Century West. We don’t trust anyone else to define us and human ego does its best to make sure that we do not want to get over that distrust.
But therein lays the rub. Something deep within us incessantly whispers that something is missing from our self-directed lives. We think our “freedom to be” is enough to ensure we find our bliss, but our deepest hearts tell us something else. The most self-actualized person on the planet cannot answer the fundamental question of “who am I?” and “why are things the way they are?”
This is because the answers to these questions lie beyond us. We have an existential itch we can’t scratch and the only One who can scratch it has been pushed out of our consciousness by a fashionable ego-centrism that we have been duped into thinking is good for us. Someone else must provide the meaning we cannot stop seeking, someone outside of ourselves and infinitely bigger; someone who is the Embodiment of true meaning.
Life is an absolutely unsolvable puzzle without knowing the One, who dwells outside our personal “reality”. Only He is the solver of all puzzles, the final answer to all questions, and He has a name. Without Him we will never know why we exist and what our ultimate destiny will be; and the answer to those questions are the only ones that really matter in the end.