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    Finding Meaning in an Uncertain World, Second Edition: With an Adult Ministry Study Guide
    Finding Meaning in an Uncertain World, Second Edition: With an Adult Ministry Study Guide
    Finding Meaning in an Uncertain World, Second Edition: With an Adult Ministry Study Guide
    Ebook134 pages1 hour

    Finding Meaning in an Uncertain World, Second Edition: With an Adult Ministry Study Guide

    By LeRoy H. Aden

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    About this ebook

    Now with an Adult Ministry Study Guide!

    All of us have a desire to live, not in the simple sense of merely surviving, but in the more profound sense of living with purpose and meaning. But we are not born into a ready-made world filled with meaning. We must find and live the meaning that is ours in the life we have been given. Using personal stories and clinical cases, this book deals with the human and the spiritual side of our search for meaning, and it seeks to help us move toward a more fulfilled life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCascade Books
    Release dateJul 14, 2015
    ISBN9781498233262
    Finding Meaning in an Uncertain World, Second Edition: With an Adult Ministry Study Guide
    Author

    LeRoy H. Aden

    LeRoy Aden is Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Care at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is the author of In Life and Death (2005), and with Robert G. Hughes is coauthor of Preaching God's Compassion (2002).

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      Book preview

      Finding Meaning in an Uncertain World, Second Edition - LeRoy H. Aden

      9781498233255.kindle.jpg

      Finding Meaning in an Uncertain World

      Second Edition
      With an Adult Ministry Study Guide

      LeRoy H. Aden

      9973.png

      Finding Meaning in an Uncertain World, Second Edition

      With an Adult Ministry Study Guide

      Copyright © 2015 LeRoy H. Aden. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989. Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United State of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

      Cascade Books

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      isbn: 978-1-4982-3325-5

      eisbn: 978-1-4982-3326-2

      Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

      Aden, LeRoy H.

      Finding Meaning in an Uncertain World / LeRoy H. Aden.

      xii + 94 pp. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references.

      isbn 13: 978-1-4982-3325-5

      1. Meaning—Psychology. 2. Meaning—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title.

      BF778 A35 2013

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Introduction

      Chapter 1: Meaning and Meaninglessness

      Part 1: Sources of Meaning

      Chapter 2: Meaning and Relationships

      Chapter 3: Meaning and the Self

      Chapter 4: Meaning and the Family

      Chapter 5: Treasure Chests of Meaning

      Part 2: Challenges to Meaning

      Chapter 6: Meaning and Suffering

      Chapter 7: Meaning and Old Age

      Chapter 8: Meaning and Death

      Part 3: A Christian Approach to Meaning

      Chapter 9: God’s Plan for Us

      Chapter 10: God’s Gift of Meaning in an Uncertain World

      Bibliography

      An Adult Ministry Study Guide

      To Ruth and to Beth and David,

      who have been a great source of meaning and encouragement in my life.

      Introduction

      All of us have a drive, a will to survive, not just in the simple sense of existing but in the more profound sense of living with purpose and meaning. Our desire to survive is resolute, even if we must go against and overcome the people or the circumstances that would diminish or destroy us.

      The creation of a meaningful world is not an automatic or sure thing. We have been given the power (the ability) to deliberate and to decide, and we are required to shape, or at least to discover, what is meaningful to us. There are obstacles (sometimes major obstacles) in the path, but the mandate is ours. The challenge is to make the right decisions and to do the right things to bring about a life that is realistic and meaningful, even in an uncertain world.

      In many ways, the world in which we live is stable and predictable. The sun rises and sets at a predictable time. We rely on most of our friends to behave in expected ways. And what we find meaningful yesterday is meaningful to us today.

      At the same time, the world we live in is uncertain and unpredictable. The friend we haven’t seen for a decade now bears the marks of aging, and we do not share the same interests that we once did. Even the church we knew in our younger years may not feel like our church anymore. And the things we found meaningful in our younger years may not be meaningful to our mid-life crisis.

      The uncertainty of the world means that our search for meaning is constant. As our world changes we are required to find meaning within it. This is the theme, and major concern, of the present book. More specifically, I want to discuss some of the factors involved in pursuing and finding a meaningful life in an uncertain world. My interest is not a theoretical one, though theory is involved, but I want to illuminate the human side of meaning by addressing personal issues or dimensions involved in our pursuit of meaning.

      In a previous book, I dealt with our search for fulfillment. That search and the search for meaning have many things in common. A fulfilled life deals with moments when things come together, when we experience a sense of unity and wholeness. In contrast, a meaningful life examines fulfillment from the viewpoint of intention and significance, from the viewpoint of purpose and meaning. Is my life going anywhere? Do I mean anything to anyone? What do I amount to in the larger scheme of things?

      The lives of all of us revolve around meaning and being meaningful. We go to the movies and derive meaning from them; we visit friends who we have not seen for years and find meaning in the things that we share in common; we give ourselves to other people or we exchange gifts with loved ones and derive meaning from the giving. We are insatiable meaning-seeking creatures.

      Recently, I was at a meeting where the speaker said, I hope my comments are meaningful to you. The speaker could have also said, I hope my comments mean something to you. We have an intuitive sense of what she is saying. She hopes to connect with us and to communicate ideas or thoughts that are relevant and important to us. Generally, we could say that we derive meaning from anything or anyone that addresses us and that elicits a response from us. In this sense, there are degrees of meaning that stretch, on a rough and experiential scale, from means little or nothing to me to is very meaningful to me. What a stranger thinks of me is much less meaningful to me than what a dear friend thinks of me. In addition, how I assess an event depends on how deeply it touches me or how close it is to the center of my being.

      Given the life-giving quality of meaning, we are dismayed to learn that some people feel meaningful only when they are undercutting the work and the worth of other people. The goal of their lives, it seems, is to discredit the lives of others and to question the value of their accomplishments. Only in this very negative way can they experience a sense of meaning.

      There are better and more positive approaches to meaning. We seldom find a shortcut to a meaningful life, but a consideration of some of the challenges and obstacles that stand in the way can put us on the path to a fuller life.

      In chapter one, I deal with meaning and meaninglessness, not as two separate entities in life but as two possibilities that can exist side by side. We can feel both meaningful and meaningless. I use the life and the findings of Viktor Frankl¹ to concretize the struggle. Frankl was an astute observer and an insightful theoretician in terms of our search for meaning. I conclude the chapter with a list of Frankl-like guidelines that help us find meaning in life. The sequence of nine chapters that follows can be divided into three sections. The first section, chapters two through five, forms a quadruplet: Chapter two deals with the role of relationships in the formation of meaning. I find that relationships are the baseline of living with meaning, primarily because they meet our need to be affirmed by someone who means something to us. Chapter three deals with the role of the self in the exercise of meaning. The self serves as a monitor of meaning—to our detriment if it leads us in self-centered directions, to our enhancement if it fills our life with authentic meaning. Chapter four deals with the role of the family in the development of meaning. Our family of origin is the world in which we first experience meaning, and it may be the most lasting impression that we have of ourselves and of other people. Chapter five deals with treasure chests of meaning. Special times and places, nodal events, and other depositories become storehouses of memories and meanings. The next section, chapters six through eight, forms a trilogy: Chapter six deals with suffering as a threat to meaning. Chapter seven deals with old age as a threat to meaning, and chapter eight deals with death as a threat to meaning. The third and final section, chapters nine and ten, turns our attention from the human side of meaning and looks at meaning from the vantage point of the Christian faith. What is our meaning in God’s world? Or more fully, what do we mean to God and how does our relationship with God impact our existence in a world that is constantly changing?

      1. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. See also Frankl, The Will to Meaning.

      Chapter 1

      Meaning and Meaninglessness

      Viktor Frankl was a thirty-five-year-old psychiatrist who was of Jewish decent in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, during World War II. From 1942–1945, he was imprisoned in a series of concentration camps, the worst being Kaufering (affiliated with Dachau). He spent five months there as a slave laborer. He was reduced to a skeleton and carried on a daily struggle to survive. He was surrounded by suffering and despair of all kinds and was stripped of all dignity and strength. To go on living seemed masochistic and even ridiculous.

      More than once, Frankl asked himself, Does all this suffering and dying have a meaning? In fact, does life under any circumstance have a purpose, a reason to be?¹ Frankl was not asking an academic question. He was looking for a reason to go on living. He found that reason in what he considered a uniquely human gift. We may be robbed of all freedom and hope but one thing cannot be taken from us—the ability to stand above tragedy and to choose how we relate to it. With our ability to

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