Every once in a while you read something and words jump out from the page and grab you and never let you go. That happened to me about 15 years ago when I read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. I know I am not alone in claiming this book as one that helped to alter my view of life. It was recommended to me by an old Scottish Baptist preacher as a book that changed his life. Frankel was a Jewish psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps and he writes about his attempt to find meaning in the midst of such humiliation and death. Here are the words that grabbed me and still have hold:
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. 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 ourselves about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life -- daily and hourly.
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I just Googled Viktor Frankl and he wrote the book Man's Search for Meaning in 1956...I think I know where JFK got the inspiration for the line..."ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."
ReplyDeleteI always found Frankel very obscure. The problem with the world is that man DOES NOT bother to ask himself about the meaning of life and leaves it go at that. G.K. Chesterton when responding to an artilce in a London newspaper about whats wrong with the world exclaimed with a two word answer..."I am". We are sinners period and identifies us and who we are in the context or God's creation. Thus knowing that meaning does not come from a finite being finding meaning in his world, but in His connection to an infinite being...(God).
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