Legal Commentary

A Thought Transfixed Me

By Kevin Funnell

"This" could refer to any of the many tragedies we suffer in the course of an existence lived here on Earth, although not meant for here on Earth. On her "old" blog (before she hit the big time), E.M. Zanotti reflected on certain self-evident truths "in times like this":

Often, in times like this, I turn to the foundations of my beliefs, to the Universe and the expanse: the way that love and loss are constantly at odds. Love and loss are really the foundations of life, they are, when it comes down to it, where we learn, where we find happiness, and where we find sadness. It is from love and loss that we come to know life's truths.

The Universe distributes love and loss unevenly. Many of us suffer tremendous loss in our lives, many of us see nothing but love, some of us deny both, though they are there, simply waiting for us, staring us in the back of the head as we go about our daily life, deliberately inflicting on ourselves the pain of reality, creating a world in which we want to feel nothing. But what we believe does not change what we are given, only our recognition of life's blessings.

Good stuff, good enough to save a copy in the corner of my desktop and read it again from time to time.

Whether consciously or unintentionally, she also echoed the late Viktor Frankl, who I've always considered a "stealth believer" masquerading as an "existential" psychiatrist. In his book Man's Search for Meaning, he asserts that there are three basic sources to the discovery of your life's meaning: (1) love, (2) a great work, and (3) suffering. I favor "love" and "suffering" as the two most promising avenues. As to suffering, Harvard psychiatrist Gordon Allport  states the central tenet of existentialism in his preface to Frankl's book: "to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in the suffering and the dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes. If he succeeds he will continue to grow in spite of all indignities."

Frankl spoke with authority on the subject of suffering, as well as of love. A survivor of the Nazi death camps, he lost his family in them, including his beloved young wife. Out of his tenure in that land of utter horror and unspeakable human depravity he evolved his school of Logotherapy, which treats certain psychological disorders as "spiritual disorders," and helps its victims find their life's meaning. Wallowing in this Nazi-dug cesspool of hate, while being marched at gunpoint to another day of forced labor in which some more of his mates would die,

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth  that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way -  in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life, I was able to understand the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

Maybe it's just me, but I think you need to listen to what such a man might have to tell you about life.

As I struggle with my own search for meaning in my response to a God that reveals, I don't turn off my intellect; rather, I apply it more diligently. You can acquire nuggets from many sources.

From young Catholic lawyers, full of life and with their adventures spreading unknown before them, as well as from dead Jewish sages who evoked more meaning from facing evil than I could ever discern if the Holy Spirit walked up to me and smacked me in the face with a two-by-four. But then, I've always been "perception challenged."

Full post as published by Counseling Kevin on September 21, 2010 (boomark / email).