Staying abreast of things

Therapy and the meaning of life.

I remember watching an episode of NOVA about human reproduction which showed sperm in the body of a woman during two phases of her menstrual cycle. During three weeks of her cycle the sperm swam furiously, but aimlessly. During ovulation, however, they looked more like swimmers in the Iron Man competition. They were men with a mission, mating with any object that impeded their course. My daughter remarked, “Some things never change!” She was righter than she knew. Although she jested only about male sexual predilections, her observation applies more broadly to the human condition.

What does it mean to be person? How do we come to question life’s meaning, to not feel at home in the universe which spawned us? Why do we protest against evil? How do we know evil is evil? Why do we do good? How do we know that we are, that we exist?

Who knows? (THINK)

Who cares? (FEEL)

Why bother? (DO)

The languid cries of the apathetic majority bespeak our unique, purpose-full position as God’s image bearers. Atheists cannot even decry man’s meaningless existence without borrowing from the lexicon of faith. As C.S. Lewis so aptly states, “Does the fish complain of the sea for being wet?”

Many people (perhaps most), would shrug their shoulders at such rumina­tions, yet their lives beg for answers to these very questions. As I have phrased them in the opening paragraph they sound like abstract philosophy, but they embody the issues of therapy. People in varying states of misery enter therapy because their lives drift (or race) aimlessly (or directly) toward more-or-less elusive ends. And like the best and brightest of sperm, most of them don’t think about what they do, or why.

I think, therefore I am? I yearn, therefore I have a soul? Such questions matter greatly, yet if I never asked them I could still know with my knower that I am real, that I have a uniquely human capacity to think, feel and act freely, and to imagine myself doing so. That humans are wondrously, scandalously different from all creatures is self evident.

GRACE:  first, last, and in between. God over, under, around, and through.

love

freedom

See how they love one another.