http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/spirit.png More details here How is your existential crisis doing? Mine is in a rocky place (again). A few years ago I had a conversation with a man facing death, a man who had lived an exemplary Christian life of deep faith. As death approached he asked the question "Is God real?". I thought then that this was perhaps not the best time for him to have that question surface again, but in hindsight I think it was simply healthy thinking. In general, most Christians don't like to get existential ("just believe it"), and such resistance does not strike me as healthy because we grow by questions. My current existential crisis is in a place where its not about whether there's a God or not, its about assessing the meaning of my moments, and what this says for the future. Is my current life compatible with my understanding of my existence? There has a nice analogy in weather forecasting. In the absence of external information, the best forecast for tomorrow's weather is persistence. That is, statistically speaking, if weather forecasting was a betting game you'd win most often by betting on the persistence of today's weather. In that sense weather forecasters try to use additional information sources to forecast how tomorrow will be different from today. Of course, because tomorrow's weather will be some combination of past experience, this helps the forecaster limit the possibilities and focus on the probabilities. With existential crises we have no such comfort. For example, the past is full of evidence about the meaning of the moments we experience, and this has relevance if such experiences recur. But it provides little ground for understanding the meaning for the range of possible future experiences; there is so much that is unknown about what could happen tomorrow, in 2017, or in the next decade, that our future experiences or discoveries might be so unexpected that they force a complete re-evaluation of our understanding of ourselves, From childhood we live this ongoing existential crisis, even before we even know what the word means. Its amazing to me that, for all the education we receive, and no matter how old we get, we never complete the answer to the meaning of life - in fact we're all expected to either simply accept someone else's explanation, or are left to discover it for ourselves. Unless, of course, we conclude that life is meaningless (or accept 42) and so give in to nihilism, or anarchy, and our hedonistic propensities. Some people, perhaps most people, manage to avoid this angst most of the time, viewing it as merely a passing fad of their teenage and university years. Yet, however expert we become at suppressing the question, like an unwelcome friend it manages to crop up again and again. For each individual and age the question varies; for some its forever wrestling with the raw baseline of whether life's meaning is self-ascribed, or externally defined? The first conclusion is a safe and attractive one, albeit a somewhat depressing close cousin of nihilism (and nihilists don't often make good friends). Its the view of philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre: "Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.” It's a slippery path that leads one of two directions; either toward lifestyles of egoism, racism, nationalism (even ISIS), or else it leads to an equally problematic position of extreme progressives who "tolerate everything except intolerance". The second option, that meaning is externally defined, is deeply uncomfortable. For to say that meaning is defined from outside of oneself is to acknowledge absolutes in values that are defined by what is probably best described as a God. I live by this second position; and even more so by the orthodoxy of the Christian God (remembering that "orthodoxy" literally means “right teaching” or “right belief”, not a tradition of ritual and institution). And so back to my existential crisis. I'm trying to deal with the pre-conditioning of meaning that came through an upbringing in the strictures of 19070's evangelicalism. There's a lot in that experience which, by reasoning and examination of evidence, I sincerely accept as "right teaching" about God. But there is also much that I was taught that I begin to view as an artificial constraint on how a life in community should evolve, founded on my continually-examined conclusions about the meaning of my existence. Chesterton wrote a century ago, “Christianity was reproached with its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas. But the next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pomp and its ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold. It was abused for being too plain and for being too coloured.” Today we might speak of mega-church tele-evangelists, the co-option of the Christianity brand by conservatives, or of neo-hermit mystics. Christianity is full of paradoxes, which superficially examined makes Christianity seem wrong in opposite ways and for opposite reasons. Chesterton continued with a conclusion that "Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder than they made out” until he reached a point when all his examination of atheism and the life's experience simply turned him to orthodox Christianity. The challenge is how to separate the real yet illegitimate paradoxes in the institutionalized faith from the apparent paradoxes of a God-defined meaning of existence. And this then is the 2017 manifestation of my existential crisis, to re-examine the expression of the collective faith in the context of an absolute meaning to individual life, not defined by secular measures of achievement and accomplishment, but by relationship.
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Why?
Probably the best therapy is to express yourself. Why do you think psychiatrists make you lie on the couch and talk, while all they do is murmur "hmmm", "uhuh", or "go on"? Archives
May 2017
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