In Ecclesiastes 6, Solomon makes a rather shocking statement:
A man may have a hundred children and live many years; yet no matter how long he lives, if he cannot enjoy his prosperity and does not receive proper burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he.
Here we have the description of a man who has received immense earthly blessings: he has an overwhelming amount of offspring (blessing #1), and he has lived a long time (blessing #2), but despite this, even a stillborn child is better off than he is. How can this be?
The stillborn child has avoided the pointless existence of life—unending toil and suffering. In Ecclesiastes 6 Solomon draws us into how meaningless life without God truly is. Charles Taylor uses the term “immanent frame” to describe our pursuit of life without God. Taylor’s point is not that God doesn’t exist (because he’s Catholic himself), it’s that we often live like he doesn’t exist. Here’s how Taylor describes this:
“With this immanent frame, there is a loss of a cosmic order; everything important is this-worldly, explicable on its own terms; it fits within the time-space-energy-matter dimensions.”
The immanent frame is the world of matter—what we can see, feel, and touch. But if God is real, it seems that often this frame gets invaded by the transcendent and that deep within our souls the search for the One who made us never ends. James K.A. Smith wrote a whole book on Taylor’s concepts, including this great quote on the immanent frame:
“Don’t you feel it? Don’t you have those moments of either foreboding or on-the-cusp elation where you can’t shake the sense that there must be something more?”
It is this idea that we long for something more that intrigues me. Because if we all long for lives that have purpose and meaning (and I think we do), then we must go about creating pathways for meaning that help us make sense of life in this immanent frame.
Without God, either through belief or through the practical reality of living like he doesn’t exist, we come up with a variety of ways to give life meaning, and all of these things are techniques to help us cope with this life where we have become our own god and are in charge of our own destiny.
Two books I’ve read recently have helped me make sense of the various pathways for meaning we are quick to pursue. In the immanent frame, we need stories or frameworks that help us make sense of life and how to make it meaningful.
Pathway Number One: The Way of Affirmation
First was Donald Miller’s Hero on a Mission where he outlines how we function best as the hero of our story, relying on guides to help us overcome life’s challenges. I call this “the way of affirmation,” which mirrors much of the “you are enough” mantra of our society. It says that you have it within you to accomplish the task at hand. You are the hero and you can accomplish things through your own intuition and willpower. If you are falling short, you just need to try harder. The shadow side to this perspective is that you often become highly focused on yourself, and narcissistic.
Here’s a good quote from the book where Donald Miller highlights the calling of the hero to live a story of meaning:
“The hard truth about life is not that it asks us to live a story, but that it forces us to live a story. We have been forced into this life by the breath of God. We come out crying and gasping for air, and what we do with that air is what constitutes the quality of our story.”
Pathway Number Two: The Way of Resignation
Second was the book You Are Not Your Own by Alan Noble. In it, he highlights a second pathway to meaning, “the way of resignation.” It is decidedly opposite of the way of affirmation because it says you can’t do it and you are not enough. In fact, you are a victim in the un-winnable game of life. Whether it was through being taken advantage of or through falling short, you know that salvation is simply not attainable, so you must find a kind of worldly salvation by projecting your despair out to others.
Of course, the way of resignation and its focus on victimhood has to be careful because they can easily become a bully around other people who are even better victims than they are.
Here’s how Noble summarizes these two pathways:
“The affirming believe that they have enough guidance about right and wrong and enough discipline and willpower to be righteous…The resigned consider their own hearts in light of God's law and cannot imagine ever drawing the assurance of God's face. Upon that face they can only see a shadow of judgment and damnation.”
Below is a table I put together to more easily understand the various pathways of meaning. As you can see, both the way of affirmation and the way of resignation have aspects of the truth, but I believe both fall short of helping provide adequate meaning in life. For that, we need another pathway.
Pathway Number Three: The Way of Jesus
This, of course, leads us to the way of Jesus. Its focus is on life beyond itself, and it says that while you can’t do it, He is working within you and He can do it. In order to have God’s life grow within, you become a disciple of Jesus. Of course, the shadow side of this life is thinking that the things you do to grow in your faith are the way you attain your faith and you become prone to rely on religious obedience instead of God’s grace for pushing forward in life.
If we are each being honest, our lives have various aspects where different pathways of meaning are pursued. At times the affirmation of the hero builds our confidence. At times the difficulty of life leads us into the despair of the victim. But, true and lasting meaning is only found in Christ.
The secular person believes in the insignificance of this earthly existence we call life and the emptiness that follows after this life ends and they seek to squeeze whatever pleasure out of life is able to be found. Solomon, however, invites us to place our faith in God and to find meaning in Him, both in this life and in the life to come.
Where will you place your faith?