The Meaning of Life

Our lives, from the moment of conception, are a search for connectedness. We begin as one germ of life seeking to connect with another. Out of the two, a human being is created. Not any human being, only that particular one, in all his or her particularity.  The particularity of the human person, and of all sentient beings, is not simply uniqueness or ‘specialness’. Being ‘special’ is a rather bland term which appeals to our personal insecurities but says little about the value of life, or about the real self.

The idea of particularity resonates with intention, God’s intention to create a person, a species, a world, and universe upon universe, in an ongoing process whose mysteries we have barely begun to penetrate.  When scientists do touch on these mysteries they are connecting with something already known, already brought into existence by love itself. They are discovering truth in a particular way as they reveal something they already knew to be true. This is not only about proving a theory. It is more like the kind of discovery the artist makes when he or she stumbles on  truth, the only way an intuition can be communicated in words, or colour, or stone.  Creativity belongs to science, art and the realm of faith. It is about connecting with something already known but which we need to discover again and again. This is a very powerful need, peculiar to humans, or at least that is what we assume. Human beings need to know the meaning and purpose of their lives and of the whole of existence in a definable way.

Thinking about this, I wonder if the house martins who nest under the eaves above our front door aren’t involved in a similar urge to discover and make meaning. Their obedience to the call to return here each year, in order to nest and raise their young,  is perhaps a kind of reconnecting with meaning. They fly due north in a direct line from the shores of North Africa to the same spot in the same valley in South Wales.  They fly a ‘life’ line. If, as a result of climate change (caused by our human interference) they find, perhaps next year, that there are no insects, because it is unseasonably cold when they expect it to be warm, they will not survive. The life line will have been broken. It will have been broken in two places, the first physical, and the other perhaps spiritual pertaining to the realm of meaning and purpose, as God has ordained it for house martins.

Perhaps this sense of purpose and meaning keeps migrating birds in flight, as it does human beings whose lives are held with theirs in the ongoing life of God. For human beings to be at peace with themselves, their lives need to have meaning, direction and purpose.  Their lives need to be energised so that they can make meaning from within the greater life which they share with God. This is the life of the Holy Spirit which energises all existence and from which come wisdom and understanding.

The bible tells us that wisdom is of the highest price, the most valuable of all treasures and that it is to be desired and sought above all other things. Wisdom is God’s own energy ‘working’, literally ‘energising’, all of life. Wisdom begins when a person realises that they are more than a collection of cells, or an accident of nature, but that they belong in the wider ambience of the love of God. Wisdom comes with the realisation that our lives have a purpose which is worked out in and with the lives of others, including the lives of birds like the house martins. When we pause for a moment, aware of our connectedness with the created world, we are more alive than we were perhaps five minutes ago when we were absorbed by our own self and its immediate short term needs and desires.  Jesus told his disciples to go out and make other disciples, not because he wanted a huge personal following, but because he had allowed them to discover and understand something which makes the difference between life and death. It involves knowing that in Christ we are fully alive. In him, we are deeply connected to one another in God.