Faith: Security and Risk. Richard W. Kropf
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Название: Faith: Security and Risk
Автор: Richard W. Kropf
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Религия: прочее
isbn: 9781621893509
isbn:
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are for the sake of a much greater and more lasting happiness — something that we nowadays are apt to call “fulfillment.”
But the meaning of “fulfillment” is not self-evident either. For some, fulfillment means cramming in all the pleasures and experiences one possibly can into a lifetime-and as quickly as possible, just in case one doesn’t live very long. For others, fulfillment seems to take the shape of living as long as possible, even if one deprives oneself of the possibility of accomplishing anything else in life.
Still, as we are all too well aware, life is limited. As the psalmist reminds us “our years are seventy, or if we are strong, eighty” (Ps 90). Today, now that this biblical lifespan has almost become a fact, not just for the lucky few who once made it to adulthood but for whole populations of modern industrialized nations, people have become more and more concerned not just about mere survival on the one hand, or immediate pleasure on the other. Today more and more people think of their long-term happiness. Such happiness is seen increasingly as the fulfillment of our own individual potentialities, or in becoming precisely that unique person that God and nature have destined us to be. As a result, the search for fulfillment has become a major industry of the modern world.
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 СКАЧАТЬ