Is This All There Is?

Google Image

In a visit last year to Dromore in County Tyrone, Ireland, my wife, Amparo, and I stayed in the ancestral home of the family of my great-grandfather. It’s a lovely place, thought to be in the family for over a couple of hundred years.

Our hosts were Sínead McNulty, who stayed with us in Iowa for a couple of months several years ago, and her husband and toddler daughter. Sadly, they have been forced by the house’s deterioration and economic necessities to sell it.

One of the home’s delights is a sun room built by Sínead’s Mum and Dad, the previous occupants. It features a library taking up a whole wall, and Sínead graciously offered me any books I wished. My luggage was already full so I chose only a thin paperback volume I read 50 years or so ago: “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl.

Translated Into 21 Languages
The book had a great impact on me and I’ve referred to it several times in these blogs. It has been translated into 21 languages and the English version alone has sold well over 3 million copies.

Frankl, who died in 1997, was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist and survivor of several Nazi death camps. His famous therapy, called logotherapy (from the Greek word, logo, or “meaning”), grew out of that experience and his book describes his observations of fellow camp inmates and how that evolved into a way to treat people with mental and emotional disorders.

In the book’s preface, Gordon Allport, an author and former Harvard University psychiatrist, describes how Frankl often started sessions with patients who suffer mental and emotional torments. “Why don’t you commit suicide?” he asked.

It may seem like a shocking question, but the answer provided a guideline for the patient’s therapy. For some, the answer may be a loved one worth living for; a mission or project to fulfill; a talent to be used; a religious reason for living, and dying.

Google Image

Amid the horrors of the holocaust, Frankl found that prisoners who had some reason for living were the most likely to do so. Obviously, dedication to a life’s meaning didn’t protect people who were victims of the often whimsical decision by a guard to kill or maim a prisoner. But overall, Frankl found that prisoners with a purpose were less likely to give in to sickness, injury, fatigue or hunger.

Logotherapy, as I understand it, helps people find their purpose and understand how that helps them become and remain mentally, emotionally and spiritually healthy. It’s not a trendy, unscientific practice. Frankl backed up his theories and prison-camp observations with research and practice. And the importance of meaning to mental and physical health is widely recognized.

A recent article by Emily Vaughn on the National Public Radio web site, entitled “Start Fresh: 6 Tips for Emotional Well-Being In 2020,” confirms that.

“Having a purpose in life seems to have a more powerful impact on decreasing a person's risk of premature death than exercising regularly, quitting smoking or curbing your alcohol intake, research suggests.

Touching Lives
“Maybe you find greatest meaning in guarding the environment, raising good children, making music or touching lives through your volunteer work. It doesn't seem to matter what your life's purpose is, a growing body of research suggests. What matters is that you feel you have one.”

I suspect few people actually ask themselves, “What is the meaning of life.” Some may ask it in a different way, such as, “Is this all there is?” or “What’s the point to living?’ But we don’t generally ask even those questions unless something is going wrong in our lives, normally something really wrong.

But the question of meaning has a lot to do with the question of belief. For believers, the search for meaning is the search for God. And when we head down that path, we must not stop or look back, because God can be found. After all, not only are we searching for God, God is searching for us, for our love and our commitment.