The whisper on the threshold

‘There’s not a positive answer to the grim reality of life.’ Woody Allen was speaking with typical gloom while at Cannes to promote a new film. Philosophers, priests and psychiatrists bring no good news, he continued.

No-one can ‘honestly’ explain why life is worth living ‘because everything you create in life will vanish. The Earth will vanish. The Sun will burn out. Everything that Shakespeare did, or Michelangelo, or Beethoven will all be gone.’

All making and watching movies can do, Allen concluded, is to help people ‘forget their doom.’

At least Woody Allen is open about the search for meaning. I read an article in Standpoint magazine by Douglas Murray which questions our willingness in contemporary British society to even ask questions about ‘meaning’ in life.

He is fascinated by the number of young Britons who are turning to Islam. When a teenager waking up with a sore head after a night of partying groans ‘Life must be about more than this!’ who in our society is there to say ‘Of course this is not all?’

The media, according to Murray, offer us endless distraction; or tell us there is nothing more and that we must simply embrace the pain and complexity of life; or assure us we’re on our own and must make our own meaning.

I think he is over-pessimistic. I think there’s more questioning of meaning in our society than he acknowledges, and other voices besides Islam saying ‘This is not all.’

But Douglas Murray’s words challenge us. Have I ever asked the ‘meaning’ question? ‘Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life? How will the world be different as a result of the fact that I have lived?’

Many of us find meaning enough in loving and being loved, in work and leisure and the enjoyment of living. But is there a deeper, still more satisfying meaning to seek?

To others of us, as we struggle with brokenness, bereavement, despair, ill-health, addiction or inescapable darknesses from the past, the meaning questions comes more easily.

It’s perhaps more ‘under the radar’ than the stories of young people finding meaning in Islam, but many in their teens and early 20s are embracing Christian faith and finding the meaning which faith in the living Jesus brings.

Faith gives us a deeper purpose – rejoicing in and living for God. Faith helps us realise why as human beings we are as we are – reaching for the stars, but with feet of clay. Faith assures us that we are loved. Faith gives us the hope of a life beyond death when we will see with greater clarity the meaning of our small lives. Faith offers a sustaining presence in all our living. Faith assures us that our lives are meaningful even when we feel all is meaningless.

Woody Allen has rejected meaning – the meaning offered by his Jewish heritage, by Christian faith, even the meaning offered by atheism (‘Let us live bravely, boldly and lovingly, and shine while we may for death is the end.’) Because of his neurotic anxiety, nothing gives him the inner sense of wholeness and significance. He seems never to have had the insight that his life is meaningful even though he feels it otherwise.

For Woody Allen, art is a merely a distraction. Douglas Murray takes a different line. He speaks of sculptor Antony Gormley’s installation on Crosby Beach near Liverpool – one hundred cast iron life-size human figures mounted along the sand at varying distances from the sea looking towards the horizon.

Murray finds this moving, especially when the tide is high, and the sun setting. For him it resonates because it makes ‘tangible’ and ‘experienced’ the ‘story of resurrection which lies at the heart of our culture.’

The purpose of art, he says is to give us ‘the thrill of recognition which grants you the sense of having just caught up with a truth that was always waiting for you.’

And in the symbols of Christian faith – the bread, the wine, the words of the Bible, the love of friends, the living sculpture of creation we find meaning calling out to us and God becomes tangible and experienced.

All of us as Christians find meaning in our faith, although we do not all experience it with the same degree of clarity – there are Woody Allens among us, of whom I am one. We believe that meaning is not a philosophy or a theology or a therapy but the person we call Jesus.

Oh, Woody! Can you not hear the whisper on the threshold?

And beyond the question ‘does my life have meaning?’ lies another of perhaps even greater importance. ‘Am I allowing the meaning I have found to shape my life? Am I living my meaning?’

(Christian Viewpoint from the Highland News, dated 11th June 2015)