Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
When human beings separate their existence from God, they separate their existence from meaning in any ultimate sense. This is why existential angst is the natural byproduct of secularism.
Apart from God, all of the things that we count on to give our lives meaning are temporal and therefore temporary. None will continue past the end of our physical existence, and many will be taken from us long before that happens. As a race we have always longed for the transcendent permanence of something or someone. This is often true on a conscious level, and I would argue that it is always true on an unconscious one.
Even as an atheist, I knew this longing. The world and all it contained in the 80 some odd years I might be expected to experience it was not enough. For me this fact was mostly unconscious in the earlier years of my life. The longing was present, but I could not define it or even express it very cogently. It mostly manifested itself in a feeling I sometimes knew. Perhaps some piece of music or natural scene caused me to gaze into the distance and feel that there had to be more to existence than what my senses could deliver. It also showed itself in my pursuit of the things of this world looking for some kind of happiness or joy, which eventually proved to be futile.
One of the reasons those worldly quests as a young secular humanist turned out to be futile was that even at the same time I sought and experienced them I had an increasingly debilitating sense of meaninglessness in the “here and now” of my human existence. The lack of something ultimately true and permanent in my life was slowly driving me to despair although, at the time, I could not have expressed the reality of this aspect of my state of being very well either. Today I would say that there existed in me an unasked-for desire for something I could not obtain materially but could no longer truly live without as well. It was a huge part of what led me to nearly self-destruct in my early 20’s.
The answer which came to me before that became my fate was one that I had not considered except in the negative sense of being sure I did not want it. This was a belief in, and relationship with, a transcendent yet personal God. The full story of how that came to be cannot be told here (although I have written at length about it elsewhere). Suffice it to say that I finally consciously came to know what, or actually Who, I was missing. When I asked for this “Who” to help me He made Himself known to me in such a sublime and powerful way that my life was never the same. “He” was the God of the Cross.
I now knew why I existed and for Whom. I knew that the Ultimate Meaning I had unconsciously, and finally consciously, tried to find was undeniably real. It was the self-existent and eternal answer to everything I could possibly conceive and desire (and, as it turned out and continues to turn out, much that I could not yet conceive).What I obtained at that moment, and have had ever since, is an existential “Bottom Line.” I have had a myriad of difficulties and pains in life in the ensuing years, but the agony of meaninglessness has never been one of them.
C.S. Lewis once wrote that, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” Beyond this, I would add that that we were also made for the Maker of that other world, our present world, and all worlds. It is only in coming to know this eternal and infinite truth that existential angst can be replaced with the certainty there is an ultimate meaning for our existence as human beings.