WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT (2)

Fifty-five years ago, or thereabouts, I found myself asking the question that I posed at the beginning of this book – “What’s it all about?” It’s a question that’s echoed throughout my life, one which was addressed early on when I joined the Franciscans in 1976 – ‘Why have you come?’  It’s a question, of course, that Jesus posed in different ways: of some young fishermen he asked ‘What do you seek?’ or to some women ‘Who are you looking for?’ Maybe it’s the kind of question that you find rolling around in your head at odd moments when you’ve nothing else to think about. And it can come in different ways. The poet, William Henry Davis (1871-1940), famously wrote:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

and declared, at the end, that -

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

But, so often, we don’t. Instead we spend our time working out how we can get what we think we want, or what we’re told we want – more of this, some of that, a holiday in a remote location where we can live for a while as if we were in Brighton but with sun.  Or we bury ourselves sin our latest electronic or computer gadget which will take us away from reality. Is that what life’s about? That can’t be why we’re here, can it? So I, probably like you, wonder what it’s all about and whether ife has any meaning or whether it’s just some vast inter-galactic joke. Then, a few years ago, a friend introduced me to Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning.  After surviving Auschwitz Frankl wrote from his experience as a Holocaust survivor and pondered on the meaning of life. What he noticed, in particular, was that it was those who held onto a reason beyond themselves who managed to survive through the horrors on the Camps. Something bigger than themselves.  T. S. Eliot wrote, in The Four Quartets, that what we think we’re here for is always having to burst out of the shell that contains it; that the purpose of our life is always greater than what we think it to be and is altered as we encounter it.

            All that leads me to recall the old Catechism, something I was never introduced to when preparing for Conformation all those years ago but which I am drawn to. There are a number of different forms and St Ignatius Loyola adapts one for the opening of his Spiritual Exercises. He says that the meaning of life is:

Man is created to praise, reverence and serve our Lord God,
and by this means to save his soul.’

So what does he mean by that?