A View of Life by Dominic Kirkham
So what was all that about? After decades of living I ask myself: What did I make of it all? Childhood dreams, aspirations and ambitions, anticipations and longings – where did they all lead? What was my destiny? Destiny, as the poet Rilke wrote, is but childhood dreams interpreted in the light of experience.
Generally the world has been plagued by men – and it is mostly men! – who felt themselves 'called', destined for great things. We look back and create patterns of meaning with which to confront the future. This itself betrays a most fundamental characteristic of humans: we search for meanings, we need to make sense of 'it all'. But how?
The writer, George Eliot, in Middlemarch, has a little 'parable' to explain how we may contemplate the surface of a polished steel plate, meticulously polished by the housemaid leaving it 'minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions: but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! The scratches will all seem to arrange themselves in fine series of concentric circles around that little light.' Thus we arrange the events of our lives around the light of our SELF.
Our meanings gradually coalesce; 'a' meaning subtly becomes transposed into 'the' meaning, having found which we feel content. Thus we deceive ourselves, falling into the trap – the 'ontological illusion' of the medieval scholar St Anselm – that the greatest of ideas cannot but be real. That our destiny is predestined. But in fact our grandiosity remains our own creation.
Another view, a more modern and humbler view of life, was taken by Viktor Frankl, peering at life through the barbed wire fencing of the Auschwitz extermination camp – yes, this is what 'men of destiny', convinced of the greatness of their ideas, create. He saw that we derive meaning in our lives from the small encounters and events of everyday – the 'scratchings' of life – by our attitude.
As Frankl so often watched human life ebb away in the most horrific circumstances, he realised that each day there are three things our existence calls upon us to achieve if we are to find fulfilment and meaning: we must do a deed of generosity or create something of value from our own powers, which itself expresses life's abundance and bounty; we must appreciate something of value such as a work of art or natural beauty which takes us beyond ourselves; we must carry a burden or endure suffering positively, reminding us that life is never easy or to be taken for granted, that our lives are never perfect or 'finished'.
In this quest to understand the meaning of life another great contemporary of Frankl, Martin Buber, gives us further insight. For him, 'all living is meeting'. It is in the encounters of daily living with others that we discover ourselves. Every encounter invites a response that should spring from the depths of our personality, this is our 'responsibility', which helps to create the person we are, that calls us forth.
The purpose of life arises from the possibility of meetings that arise from the moments through which we are passing. We can passively accept these moments, letting them pass by unheeded, or creatively enter into them and find meaning and fulfilment. We can respond mechanically by way of formulaic dogma or openly explore the potentiality of the given moment in 'realisation'. For Buber, religion is 'not removing oneself into another world, but responding to the call that comes in your everyday life.'
These two writers of the twentieth century give us an insight into how far mankind has travelled in its search for meaning since its remote beginnings. When we look back to the earliest evidence of how man saw his world, some forty millennia ago, we see, in the palaeolithic cave art of southern Europe, a very different understanding. Here a world is portrayed in which puny humans are challenged by the power of its creatures and the natural order. It is a world before morality or deities, before good and evil, in which man tries to create a place for himself through the shamanistic manipulation of natural forces.
It was only relatively recently, historically, that a moral element was introduced into human religious beliefs, most notably by Zarathustra some four thousand years ago with his sense of the goodness of creation by one all-powerful being. 'The Good Religion', as his followers call their faith, remembers little of his teaching other than the injunction to practise, 'good thoughts, good words, good deeds.' Such was the challenge to traditional ritualism that he was assassinated, stabbed in the back by a karapan (priest).
Over the millennia humans have undertaken a stupendous spiritual journey which has taken them from shamanism to humanism, from ritual enactment to human engagement, from the amoral order of natural survival to the moral sense of common responsibility. It is a journey that saw the creation of powerful elites and hierarchies, the divinisation of natural powers and the creation of the gods, the ritualisation of life and the sacrificial order of intercession, to perhaps the greatest human creation of all, the idea of one all-consuming explanatory power, God – as in 'Abrahamic monotheism': a unitary all-powerful figure that strides the cosmos for ever, the ultimate male fantasy from pharaohs to fascists!
Such configurations linger on, as does the vestigial tiered cosmos of the cave world with its tripartite division of heaven, world and underworld, its haunting monsters and intermediary spiritual agents, angels or 'soul carriers', and its sense of 'super-' natural endings. But we have now passed on beyond such meanings, even beyond the hypostasisation of good and evil, as simply 'given' realities, to the challenge of human encounters: of what we must do to become humane.
We have now passed on to an understanding of that which binds us – religio, and the origin of the word 'religion' – is not some universal 'solution' to life, some ideology or dogma, but the human engagement that binds us to each other each day. The greatest sages of ancient Israel, Hillel and Jesus, summed up the essence of their belief and religious tradition in the same way: refrain from that which you would not want others do to you, and to do to others as you would have them do to you, 'this is the meaning of the Law and the Prophets.' True religion is that which binds us to each other.
How neglected this teaching has been! The prophet Isaiah came to understand the essential quality of divinity as hesed: loving kindness. Today we watch on our news bulletins as orthodox Hassidic Jews – whose name derives from hesed – rejoice at the shelling of Gaza. So has it ever been. Millenarian attempts in the tenth century Rhineland and southern Europe to revive the Apostolic Life of brotherly love – of which Norbert of Xanten's Pentecostal community at Prémontré was one example – led to their demonisation by the Inquisition of the official church and then their extermination through the Albigensian crusade. It was left to Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor to point out just how dangerously wrong Jesus had got it all!
Similarly, however merciful and peaceable the prophet Mohammed may have been, his followers now issue fatwas such as that by Nasir al-Fahd: 'If Muslims cannot defeat the kafir (unbeliever) in a different way, it is permissible to use any weapons of mass destruction. Even if it kills them all and wipes them and their descendants off the face of the earth.' Thus monotheism is traduced by its own practitioners in their pursuit of supernatural illusions; religion becomes a tool of power that divides humanity into 'us' and 'them'. This is also a relic of a past we now move beyond. In reality there is simply a mono-anthropy; we live as I and Thou in the present moment.
In a way we have now come full circle to where, as a species, we started – staring from our caves into the vast infinity with fear. As we watch the 'earthrise' from satellites over the moon we see a fragile blue sphere hovering in the black emptiness of space, mysterious beyond all expectation and comprehension. This is our home. This is all we have, so fragile, alone in the vast infinity; a thin membrane of life enfolding a solitary globe. With this realisation comes a new fear with the realisation of the unsustainability of the human enterprise: the world that was once despised in favour of the 'super'-natural is now being destroyed in the pursuit of illusory natural ambitions. But now we know that our survival or destruction will be of our own making, our own 'responsibility'.
We cannot reconfigure the past nor apprehend the future, all we can do is respond to the present moment. It is here we will find our fulfilment, our destiny. And in the end the most important question for each is simple: what is a good life? As I began with a reference to the death camps I end with the testimony (translated from German by an aunt) of a family friend, Hans Lochmann, who was an artist and also a victim of Nazism – his answer to that question:
One thing I now thoroughly understand – that of all the things in this world one alone is important – that is to say Love. Love to whose realisation we must contribute something of ourselves – a comfort, a pleasure or some other thing, the love of a speck of colour, an unessential part of a picture, or that we allow a flower to remain standing instead of pulling it to pieces, or that we gladly do something that costs us to overcome. All this is not new nor original, but how difficult we find it all the same to go on living. How much more difficult to die! For a good death is indeed to be found in this: that we submit what to us appears of endless importance – our SELF – which is restless, full of confidence, to a great unknown MERCY.'
Dominic Kirkham is an interested follower of the SOF movement who, being now redundant, has more time to think about the issues involved.