Living Meaningfully: Growing Through Life's Transitions, Challenges, Changes and Losses

By Thomas Swears

We each will face times of transition, loss, challenge, and change in our lives. The goal of this book is to provide perspective and encouragement that will lead to living more meaningfully in response to the many significant events that will occur over the course of a lifetime. Among the themes addressed are life’s essential untidiness; memory; ordinary holiness; gratitude, love, and fidelity; work, leisure, and fallow times; wealth, beauty, and acquisition; comparison and competition;

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781640966741

Book preview

Chapter 1

Finding Meaning in Life’s Essential Untidiness

We must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been.

—Anonymous

People generally are more comfortable when the events in their lives are within a reasonable range of predictability and control because then they feel as though they can shape them into desirable outcomes. Such hopeful thinking is understandable, and indeed, much of life’s progress is predicated on it. However, not all of life’s experience falls within such predictable or controllable lines. In fact, much of it surely does not. Life can be untidy. How we choose to respond to its untidiness plays a significant role in determining the kind of people we will grow into across our lifetimes. There is something essential about coming to terms with life’s untidiness for anyone seeking to live authentically and meaningfully in the world. Because it offers rich opportunity for growth and understanding of who we are and who we can yet become, untidiness is not something to be either wished away or controlled. Rather it is something to be integrated more intentionally and meaningfully into our daily lives.

Some eighty years ago, Baron Friedrich von Hügel, in a letter of spiritual counsel to his niece, makes this point quite well when he says, Never try to get things too clear. Religion can’t be clear. In this mixed-up life there is always an element of unclearness.… If I could understand religion as I understand that two and two make four, it would not be worth understanding. Religion can’t be clear if it is worth having. To me, if I can see things through and through, I get uneasy I feel it’s a fake. I know I have left something out, I’ve made some mistake.² Although what Baron von Hügel says about religion is quite insightful, substitute the word life for religion and it remains equally so. His is both wise and needed counsel, especially so at a time when self-promoting experts and talking heads dominate so much of the public conversation ranging from politics to personal salvation. In contrast to such surety as they confidently offer stands the great mystery of life and death, of the existence of our own lives and our awareness of them, of faith and doubt, of joy and sorrow, of loss and gain, of suffering and pain, of love and hate, of selfishness and self-sacrifice, and all of it so profoundly real and often so deeply felt.

And yet we don’t comprehend any of it fully. It is important to understand that the tidy mind is not always the truthful mind. In our contemporary world of self-assured talk show hosts and bullish purveyors of the correct way of being patriotic or religious, it is more important than ever to realize that utterances that leave no room for doubt or place for question are the fruit of minds that are too full of unwarranted conclusions. To truly speak the truth is to be so much more than a purveyor of pious or biased information. It is rather to show the way to think and not to offer the results of your own thought as the only possible conclusion. It is to sharpen another’s perception rather than to tell him what to see. It is, for instance, to describe the love of God, not to define it.³ For example, I hope that at my funeral someday the preacher won’t feel compelled to say something like, He died believing in the incarnational reality constituent of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, but rather something like, He died believing, as he was able to believe, in the Bright Morning Star. The first description has theological acuity and technical exactness on its side, but lacks mystery. It is tidy, all right, but it lacks compassion and grace. The description of the Bright Morning Star is untidy by comparison, but it is also so much more hopeful, gracious, inclusive, and expansive. For one thing, the Bright Morning Star shines on everyone, not just on a select few who subscribe to a certain understanding of who is included in its shining. This more untidy understanding leaves room for a broader range of human need and response to it. The untidiness of the image is also its strength and its beauty. From the mystery of that image, we can all take some comfort and hope because it means that it is also shining on us. This is an example of describing something that is true, of pointing in its direction, rather than defining it. There is a truth in untidiness, a necessity in it, in fact, that simply is not available to the too-tidy mind.⁴

Such a healthy untidiness of mind can be banished only at the expense of truth, and silence is the only sure way to avoid ambiguity in speech.⁵ Thus I have come, on my own life’s pilgrimage, to highly value the place of ambiguity in attentive daily living. For someone to say Unless you believe exactly as I do about this you are wrong is not only arrogant, but it is also cruel and impossible. No one can believe exactly as anyone else does about anything, and so such a statement lacks honesty, accuracy, and grace. Such attempts to be unequivocal and dogmatic on matters such as faith or truth fail not only on account of the vast mystery of the subject matter but also because the human heart and mind respond so much better to the language of metaphor and analogy and association than to the language of argument and dogma. All doctrinal statements are approximate. George McDonald expressed the essence of that thought in a passage from Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood when he observed that it is not necessary that the intellect should define and separate before the heart and soul derive nourishment. As well say that a bee can get nothing out of a flower, because she does not understand botany… The best influences which bear upon us are of this vague sort—powerful upon the heart and conscience, although undefined to the intellect.⁶

Often, the untidy description, such as the Kingdom of God is like a seed… a lost coin… a prodigal son, is so much closer to the truth being sought, which although untidy also has an inner clarity that is more inclusive, hopeful, and encouraging than a statement of fact would be. The essential untidiness of our lives touches on holiness and mystery and meaning in a way that only the language of ambiguity and metaphor can most fully describe. Because there is always an element of unclearness in any human life being courageously lived and honestly reported, to pretend that there is not is to live a life that is too narrow, too shallow, to dogmatic, and far too costly to the soul. Even things that seem simple and clear to us often are touched by mystery. Take, for instance, the simple three words, I love you. What do they mean exactly? Likely, they mean a thousand different things to a thousand different speakers of them and also something slightly each time the same person speaks them. Our words are always approximations of truth and untidy descriptions of reality, which even while it is being described is changing.

There is an essential untidiness about life that is not only uncontrollable but also necessary for the healthy nurture of the human heart and mind and soul. The bluster of the talk show host and the fearful arrogance of the fundamentalist in either religion or politics do a great disservice not only to individual human lives but also to the cultivation of the purposeful presence of love, tolerance, and respect in families and in communities as well. This, once again, is because utterances that leave no room for doubt or place for question are the fruit of minds that are too full of themselves and of unwarranted conclusions, seeking validation not through dialogue but through domination. In such a setting, truth becomes a casualty yielding to approval or control, and what is meaningful becomes far less important than what is right. In contrast, to seek meaning, to speak the truth in love, is to be so much more than a purveyor of unquestioned opinion or dogma, whatever its content. It is much more important, and freeing, to show people how to think for themselves than it is to offer the results of your own thinking as the best, or perhaps the only way, to see the situation.

There is wisdom in not getting things too clear all the time. There is a needed place for ambiguity and mystery in daily life, and even if we don’t think so or wish it weren’t so, ambiguity and mystery are there, nonetheless. Life Happens as a bumper sticker puts it these days. People die. Unexpected turns in the road appear. Unfairness rears its ugly head. A friend betrays. A long-desired goal, once achieved, seems hollow. Not to acknowledge such things as these is to live less honestly, less wholly, in the world than we are capable of living. In contrast, to acknowledge the presence of ambiguity and mystery in life is to open ourselves to the possibility of growth and meaning to be found in them. And for that reason alone, it is prudent and wise to discipline ourselves to an awareness of the presence of untidiness in daily life. Sometimes we experience that untidiness with a vague awareness of its presence, and at other times it can be altogether overwhelming. I, for instance, know the day when my childhood ended. It was August 11, 1966, the day my father died—clearly an untidy day for me. I can still see him a few days earlier dressed in a white T-shirt and green work pants, a Camel cigarette dangling from his lips trailing smoke, crisscrossing our backyard pushing a small Lawnboy mower. Later that day, he left for the hospital; and two days after that, he was dead. He did not survive an early attempt at open-heart surgery to replace a calcified valve. He was fifty-six.

I’ve always been considered old for my age, but I became even older the day my father died and surely so the next day when I saw him lying dead in a casket and me with precious few resources to help me deal with such a stark reality. It was the saddest, most bitter moment of my life; but over time, it became the single most life-changing, life-forming moment I’ve yet known as well. It became so because it placed the word mortality into my consciousness in a way it hadn’t been there before. If my father could die, then so could I, and in fact, so would I one day. That concrete, undeniable fact changed my perspective on everything and has continued to do so across the decades that have followed upon its dawning in my mind and heart: I won’t be here forever, nor will others whom I’ve grown to love and cherish.

Just what are any of us to do with such untidiness in our lives, especially with our unsolicited awareness of the ultimate untidiness of our own mortality? Such self-awareness is fundamental to our full humanity, but it surely is accompanied by some very real, persistent angst at times, is it not? Just what is any one of us to do with such knowledge of mortality that is the bedrock reality of the final untidiness of human life? It is, after all, one of the two absolute common denominators we humans share: if we were born, then we will die. And furthermore, we all know it. Three simple words, we will die, constitute our most common and our most feared knowledge.

Nonetheless, they are accurate and true words, and not to deal with them is not to have fully and freely lived. The primary purpose of such knowledge is to make life more precious and to help us order our priorities in it accordingly, living more gratefully and generously each day so that when death does make its undeniable claim also on us, we will not have frittered our lives away on insubstantial things, but will have focused of the essential things: growth in love and wisdom.

Growth in love and wisdom is essential because if we take anything with us beyond this life, what do we think it might be? Surely not money, as the following episode recounts. A friend once told me of a funeral he attended some years ago in a small West Virginia town, where a successful local merchant had died. As the townspeople gathered at the funeral home to express their condolences to the family of the deceased, some of them got to speculating on how much the man had been worth and about the size of his estate. They asked one another, How much do you think he had? and How much did he leave? In response to the latter question, and with a twinkle in his eye, one of the older men present, a local farmer, replied, Why, all of it, boys. He left all of it. And indeed he did, as we all will. So, surely not money. Nor will it be achievement, recognition, or the honors bestowed upon us by others who too will die, with all of it, sooner or later, forgotten—particles of dust floating through time until time arrives at its own fulfillment. No, what is much more likely to be lasting is whatever it is in us that bears the image and likeness of the sacred in it, and what might that be if not love and wisdom? As the American folk singer Carrie Newcomer put it, What we do in love and kindness is all we ever leave behind.⁷

Possessed of such haunting, untidy knowledge, it is altogether fitting for us to ask and to attempt to answer such questions as these: What does constitute a meaningful life? When my own life is over, what will have been its essence? When it will have been fully distilled, what will remain? What ought to remain? What is the true lasting substance of any human life authentically, generously, bravely lived?

Wendell Berry, in The Memory of Old Jack, tells of what constituted the meaningful life of a lifelong farmer, Jack Beechum, through the remembrances of Mr. Beechum, who is now well into his eighties and is recalling a lifetime of living and loving and failing to love, all of it occurring within the narrow but deep confines of his farm and the small farming community of Port William, Kentucky. In one passage, Jack, who is living now in a nursing home, is thinking about some of the things we are discussing here:

For a moment Old Jack feels unsupported, as though he might fall one way or another out of the chair. That passes. He recognizes himself again. He is as he is and as he has been, remaining after departure and after taking away. He knows that as one of the inescapable themes of his life: the departure from him, from the beginning, of men and women he has loved, of days and years, of lightness and swiftness and strength. The other theme is faithfulness to what has remained. What has remained is the good darkness out of which all things come, even the light, and to which they all go back again. Too little respect is paid to that now, he thinks, but he has respected it. He has thought of it without ceasing. It has been the center of his mind. By that he has endured and come through. He has not looked back from it or dreamed of an easier way. Having put his foot into the furrow, he has not looked back, though he has known that it must deepen into a grave.⁸

Although I’ve never lived on a farm, I recognize something in Old Jack’s longing. I too have known and continue to know something of the two enduring themes that constituted the meaningful life he lived: the departure from him of the people he loved and his continuing faithfulness to what has remained. His is a life summary in three words that likely has meaning for many others as well: departure and faithfulness. Old Jack is not alone in having lost much that is dear to him and in his fear of losing yet more. And yet he continues to strive to be faithful to what remains to him to love and care for to the end of his days. When all the dross will one day be purged away, what will remain for any of us? What will be worthy of remaining? The remembrance of love and wisdom, of departure and faithfulness, surely are on a very short list of such things.

What do such moments of love and wisdom, of departure and faithfulness, look like in daily life? Reynolds Price’s character, Roxanna Slade, in a novel of the same name, describes where we might begin to look for the presence of such moments in anyone’s life, including our own. Roxanna is a woman well into her nineties when she is telling the story of her own eventful, often untidy life. At one point in her remembrance, she says,

The problem in trying to tell the story of a human life is easy to state. People’s lives—from the wildest lover’s to the bravest scout’s—are uneventful for way over three-fourths of their length… most things that happen to a person leave no more trace than last month’s raindrops… I’m almost convinced that, if you tell the absolute truth about the five or ten moments that mattered in any one life, then you’ll have shown how every life is as useful to the world and to the eyes of God as any president’s or pope’s. Or so I believe and I doubt I’m lying.⁹

Here again is an honest attempt at the distillation of a meaningful life according to its most defining moments, which all of us have had if only we would recall, value, and name them. What do such moments look like? They differ, of course, just as the shapes of our lives differ from another. But they share this common ground: they are meaningful and they are memorable. By way of illustration, here are some such moments of my own: my father’s untimely death; the phone call from a dear family friend telling me of my mother’s sudden death a few years later; a spring day on the banks of the river that flows through my hometown where I asked a lovely young woman to marry me and she said yes; the early morning hours of August 26, 1987, at Gate E-2, Philadelphia International Airport when, after she and I had rocked an empty cradle for seventeen years, our daughter arrived on a flight from Seoul, South Korea, and was placed in my wife’s arms; and October 17, 1999, in Hefei, China, when our second daughter stepped out of an orphanage and into our lives and our hearts.

What does constitute the living of a meaningful life? Surely love and wisdom, departure and faithfulness, are numbered among such things in the end, as was true for both Jack Beechum and Roxanna Slade, and as will be true for the rest of us as well. Willa Cather once observed, There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.¹⁰ This speaks of the common ground of our shared human experience of departure and faithfulness, of love and wisdom. And yet there is also another sense in which each human story is absolutely unique and precious among all the stories that have ever been told, all the lives that have ever been lived: no one else previously, now, or ever will carry in the sacred chamber or his or her heart quite the same weight of sorrow, quite the same memory of joy, that you carry in your heart. No one will ever again know the sadness and longing of your departures, the deep and lasting satisfactions of your love and faithfulness. In you alone does the burden and the joy of such knowledge and memory abide and remain.

Intuitively knowing the importance of love and wisdom, of departure and faithfulness, is one thing, but acting on them in meaningful ways—honoring them by the actual conduct of our lives—is another thing altogether. At times, such honoring can become a channel of grace and a thing of beauty. One such time is described in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, in which there are three black sisters, May, June, and August. They were named for the months in which they were born. June is somewhat distant. August is competent, loving, and strong. And May is somewhat off, not quite right as the saying goes. As it turns out, these three remarkable women live in a house they have painted pink. One day, August is walking in the woods behind the house, talking with a friend. The friend asks August why, if her favorite color is blue, she painted the house pink. August responds,

That was May’s doing… I had a nice tan color in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink… I thought, ‘Well, this is the tackiest color I’ve ever seen, and we’ll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May’s heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it… You know, some things don’t matter that much… Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person’s heart—now, that matters. The whole problem with people is—

They don’t know what matters and what doesn’t [her friend interrupted].

August responds, I was gonna say, the problem is they know what matters, but they don’t choose it. You know how hard that is…? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.¹¹

The real problem is knowing what matters but not choosing it. That has a pretty clarifying ring about it for many of us, I would think. August’s friend interrupts her as she does because she thinks she knows how things really are: people make bad choices because they don’t know what really matters and what doesn’t. The friend doesn’t have it quite right; August, however, does. She has lived with enough pain and disappointment in her life to know that the real problem is that we often do know what matters—we just don’t choose it. How many times have you yourself done that very thing—to save face, to make an impression, to gain an advantage of one kind or another? And at what cost are such choices made? August surely understood the difficulty of making such choices: I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.¹² You just don’t see that many pink houses around, do you. Why? Because although we often know what matters, we far too often do not choose it. Living in an actual pink house is not, of course, the literal issue.