A part of personal and formal education should deal with words (concepts) that deal with students’ and societies’ contexts – past, present and future. These have their subdivisions so to gain effective insights into how life should be lived, what expectations should be incorporated, and the course we ought to take in working through life to ending. If the most treasured thoughts of dying persons in their final hours expressing lucid thoughts about life are applicable to meaning for others, we have reason to believe a great mass of the population is missing the better part, or possess it in greater dilution than it ought to be.
As noted for this date a year ago, we should attend to: Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna who was arrested with his family in 1942 and sent to a concentration camp. His wife and children perished there but he lived – prisoner #11904. In 1946 his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, was published. He found the difference between those who lived and those who died came down to one thing: meaning. In 1991, the book was listed as one of the ten most influential in the United States. Today, the book’s ethos – its emphasis on meaning, the value of suffering, and responsibility to something greater than the self – seems to be at odds with our culture, which is more interested in the pursuit of individual happiness. Frankl thought Americans were commanded and ordered to be happy. But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. We must have right consequences to be happy.*
The English dictionary offers straightforward definition of ensue to mean: to follow as a consequence. There is an allusion implied that it is rather immediate consequence or inevitable when the previous action has taken place. The American forefathers approved pursuit of happiness in American declaration. Did they think in the terms of Frankl, or did they think as we now seem to interpret their words – that we can actually pursue happiness as an entity in itself. We cannot pursue life, invisible and without substance, but we can protect it, offer health to hold it, move on our own to prove it – the pattern can be played out. Life resides in us even if we cannot identify its location, or do much to control it, but we can affect it, up or down in the way we nourish it both physically and spiritually. Happiness belongs to that list led by life and like life is mysterious. God is first mystery, offering us a list of mysteries to affirm that he has the creative gesture to carry his creation to a desired end. So we face expectations. I do not pursue happiness. It falls to me. It ensues upon my choices, thinking, experiences, work, recreation, and the like. It follows me.
I wake up and find it is there. I didn’t pursue it, but I did expect it. My expectations were built on the fruit of my Christian faith, my loves (especially in family), my work, my education, my friends, my country, and whatever else I chose or permitted to my life. I did have the final word in the matter. Was my final word representative of that which brings happiness? No. Happiness is ultimately found in experience/feeling of fulfillment that one has gained from life in nature of what was supposed to happen if supportive steps were taken, and the better choices were made. There is a sense in which we do not know what happiness is until we have it. It has ensued (followed on its own) what has gone before. It can be partial, but genuine in that part to be permitted to grow to fullness. When it is full, nothing can take it away. Meaning has been found, and the fruit of happiness, of contentment, of peace has become mature.
I am quite taken with Frankl at the moment, as I was in years now long gone by so to recover his meaning. I have more to say of him on a future page. We end today with his statement: Being human always points and is directed, to something or someone other than oneself – be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is.* If I as a Christian were to grapple with the concepts of Frankl as summarized here, I would say that Jesus would approve the statements. Perhaps there would appear the amendment that the concepts are given of God with representation of humanity as God would hold out for mankind in the context of a conflicted world. Humanity is not alone.
*The italics represent an edited (summary) quotation from The Week, 2/23/2013 and The Atlantic Magazine, from The Atlantic Media Co. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020