Job 3:1-3,11-17,20-23
Job broke
the silence and cursed the day of his birth. This is what he said: May the day
perish when I was born, and the night that told of a boy conceived. Why did I
not die new-born, not perish as I left the womb? Why were there two knees to
receive me, two breasts for me to suck? Had there not been, I should now be
lying in peace, wrapped in a restful slumber, with the kings and high viziers
of earth who build themselves vast vaults, or with princes who have gold and to
spare and houses crammed with silver. Or put away like a still-born child that
never came to be, like unborn babes that never see the light. Down there, bad
men bustle no more, there the weary rest. Why give light to a man of grief? Why
give life to those bitter of heart, who long for a death that never comes, and
hunt for it more than for a buried treasure? They would be glad to see the
grave-mound and shout with joy if they reached the tomb. Why make this gift of
light to a man who does not see his way, whom God baulks on every side?
Food for thought!
Have you
ever desired to die? Have you ever considered death as an option? Have you ever
envied the dead? This is what Job is doing in the Reading: "Why wasn’t I
born dead? Why didn’t I die as I came from the womb? Why was I laid on my
mother’s lap? Why did she nurse me at her breasts? 13 Had I died at birth, I
would now be at peace. I would be asleep and at rest."
Yes, there
are moments we feel like throwing in the towel. Moments we prefer death to
living. Life can loose meaning and purpose, that is, life can become
meaningless and death meaningful. You probably heard about a man called Frankl
Victor. He was cast into the Nazi network of concentration and extermination
camps. Miraculously, he survived. In his book, Man's Search for Meaning, he
shares with us the sources of his strength to survive.
He describes
poignantly those prisoners who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a
future and were inevitably the first to die. They died less from lack of food
or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for. By contrast,
Frankl kept himself alive and kept hope alive by summoning up thoughts of his
wife and the prospect of seeing her again, and by dreaming at one point of
lecturing after the war about the psychological lessons to be learned from the
Auschwitz experience.
He noticed
that life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest
for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task
for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible
sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for
another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of
itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we
respond to it.
Finally,
Frankl's most enduring insight, one that I have called on often in my own life:
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one
thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot
control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will
feel and do about what happens to you.
In spite of
all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a
concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive
people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain,
but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from
their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom.
Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a
less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a
robust nature.
Frankl found
out why this was so. It was due to inner strength, which helped the
prisoner to find a refuge from the
emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty caused by life in the concentration
camp. This is what Job is doing: Now that he has lost everything and everybody,
he can only take refugee to that which we cannot loose, our inner freedom, our
inner freedom cannot be lost.
Frankl found
out that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner
decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. It is this spiritual
freedom-which cannot be taken away from us that makes life meaningful and
purposeful.
If there is
a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering
is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and
death human life cannot be complete. The way in which a man accepts his fate
and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives
him ample opportunity-even under the most difficult circumstances-to add a
deeper meaning to his life.
The prisoner
who had lost faith in the future-his future-was doomed. With his loss of belief
in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and
became subject to mental and physical decay. Usually this happened quite
suddenly, in the form of a crisis, the symptoms of which were familiar to the
experienced camp inmate. We all feared this moment-not for ourselves, which
would have been pointless, but for our friends. Usually it began with the
prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash or to go out on the
parade grounds.
Death begins
when we loose hope. As we said before, any attempt to restore a man's inner
strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal.
Nietzsche's words, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any
how," could be the guiding motto for all. Woe to him who saw no more sense
in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was
soon lost.
We had to
learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it
did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected
from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to
think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly.
Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in
right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the
right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets
for each individual.
I remember
two cases of would-be suicide, which bore a striking similarity to each other.
Both men had talked of their intentions to commit suicide. Both used the
typical argument -they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases it
was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting
something from them; something in the future was expected of them.
(Taken from,
Viktor E. Frankl. Man's Search for Meaning (p. ix). Kindle Edition.)
