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This morning I shared in the sanctuary as the reader for Jacquelyn's talk on the meaning of life.
I also shared from a book I've had since 1992. It is called "More Reflections on the Meaning of Life" by David Friend and the Editors of Life. (the old magazine that is no longer around).
This book is a compilation of photo's and essays around the central question, 'What is the meaning of Life, or, 'Why are we here!'
There were a couple requests to share the poem, but I included the rest of it, too.
There is a picture of a Lighthouse Keeper leaning, hands in pockets, against the doorway opening, looking (to me) calmly and casually at a raging, frothy, in your face swirl of menacing water surrounding this Lighthouse. Like he is in a tornado of water and he is in the calm center of it.
He stands, exposed, in an open doorway appearing unperturbed.
Pure Awareness is unaffected. This picture represents that to me..
There is a beautiful poem, and commentary by Gloria Naylor, an American novelist and essayist, author of 'The Women of Brewster Place.'
I will share both the poem and the essay here.
A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
While my grade school friends were reading Kipling, I took pleasure in poems similar to the one by Stephen Crane cited here. Somehow, as a child, I had intimations of what I came to learn as an adult: The sunsets don't give a damn. They were as heartbreaking in their beauty illuminating the bleached skulls on the killing fields of Cambodia as they were reddening the sails of Newport yachts. The stars came out just as brilliantly on the ruins of a bombed church in Birmingham, Alabama, as they did for night skiers on the pristine mountaintops of Denver, Colorado.
The universe is a blank slate. And I believe there is no meaning to life. There are only valiant efforts to ward off the truth of an intrinsic void--individually and collectively--by coining a vocabulary of constructive behavior within the small unit of self, on toward the greater unit of a society. And at any given moment, on any point of this planet, that vocabulary is in flux and in danger of becoming babble. Suicide evidences an individual losing the language of life and witnessing this internal void; genocide and world wars evidence a collective loss of such language. Will there come a time when we forget how to speak altogether? The jury is still out.
