SEVEN BASKETS FULL

What will the aliens say?   Theology 12

Class Assignments 

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What must I do to find meaing and vaule in my life?      What must I do to inherit eternal life?

We begin the class asking a strange question, "What will the aliens say?"  The question comes from a story Kurt Vonnegut never wrote.  He had an idea for a book which began with aliens coming to earth to survey our world in search of what humans find meaningful.  The aliens were more confused than unimpressed.  They just couldn't understand why we spent most of our time worrying about two things: football and oral sex. 

So often we go though life without ever asking the question, "What is the meaning of life?"  Why do we exist?  What is my purpose?  We've actually, without even noticing, already decided what brings meaning and purpose to our lives and the answers lie in the way we live, our actions, our behaviors, our deeds. 

There's good reason why John Mellencamp said we "hang onto sixteen as long as we can...Changes come around real soon that make us women and men."  In other words, we become adults; grown ups with responsibilites.  A life of unfufilled dreams and expectations can drive us to despair.  There are perhaps times when life seems as though it is completely meaningless.  You wouldn't be the first person to make the claim.  It's even mentioned in the bible in the first lines of Ecclesiastes.  "Vanity of vanities...All things are vanity.  What profit has man from all his labors which he toils at under the sun?  Try anything, any labor, any toil, and Ecclesiastes can find a way to make it seem pointless.  Even the faith revealed in the book seems pointless and unispired.  And that's perhaps the point.  Ecclesiastes monologues for pages about life and God, but never once does he speak to God, nor does God ever speak to him.  The book stands in contrast with the rest of the bible.  God never reveals Himself, but what is revealed is a life empty of passion for and with God. 

Job stands in stark contrast with the author is Ecclesiastes.  In the midst of the most terrible and humiliating suffering, Job has passion.  Job never ceases to speak to God.  He may not like Him very much, but hope prevails in the soul of Job.  Only hope and hope alone can utter these words in stifling darkness, "I know my redeemer lives." 

While many of us have feel too old or too busy to ask these questions, there is a time in our life, though, when we do begin to ask these all important questions.  We ask them when we are young.  Youth is a "special treasure" as John Paul II says.  "This is the treasure of discovering and at the same time of organizing, choosing, foreseeing and making the first personal decisions, decisions that will be important for the future..."

Just as the rich young man asks Jesus the question, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" so does every young person ask "What must I do so that my life may have full value and full meaning?"  Here we begin see a connection that John Paul II makes about things that are truly meaningful in our lives and eternal life.  This desire for meaning is in a sense a desire for eternity.   

The essence of hell is not suffering, but meaninglessness.  For even in suffering, one can find meaning and purpose.  This fact, though often avoided at this time in our human history, comes to life in the real life stories and suffering that took place in the Nazi death camps of World War II.  In Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning we see in the midst of humanity's greatest suffering and hopelessness, there was meaning and where there is hope. "The purpose of my words was to find a full meaning in our life, then and there, in that hut and in that practically hopelss situation."

"Suffering is an ineradicable part of life," wrote Frankl which echo the words of John Paul II in Salvici Doloris in which he stated that suffering "forms part of the history of man."  In the popes Apostolic Letter on the meaning of suffering he goes on to say that suffering "in a certain sense co-exists with him in the world."  He also reminds of the salvific meaning of suffering for a Christian.  It is in Christ's suffering that we are saved.  How much more opportunity there is for redemption to reign when we unite our sufferings with the eternal power of the Cross.  There is cause for joy as St. Paul says,  "I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake."

For God so loved the world.....  It is from love that He gave his life.  This is, in it's truest sense, the essence of love: to give one's life as a gift to another.  "This is my body....this is my blood.  Love takes on a human face to be a gift of new life. 

In the next semester we will further our contemplation on the meaning of life in the meaning of love.