Prep Cook, I

I am, by choice, a member of the Orthodox Church, though no longer active in it. I was a catechumen for a year, regularly attending classes and Church, and received the sacraments, and continued to attend for a number of years. I married in it. That marriage fell apart. I actually kept going for a few years after that, though less regularly. There are parts of it I still miss. The Divine Liturgy is a beautiful service, even in the smallest of churches. I like the ritual, as well. I miss the rituals of the various religions upon who’s doors I have knocked; sitting in the circle at Quaker Meetings, sitting facing a wall at the Zendo, standing upright at the Russian Church, all of these places were places of inner quiet of some kind, and that’s what kept me going to them.

If I look back on it, however, that was it. I never felt the presence of God, I never assumed God would answer a prayer, hell, I never really prayed. God should already know what I want, right? I liked the Orthodox “sinner’s prayer”, which is kind of a meditative practice more than a prayer, a way of keeping focus, and a way of remaining focused on a thing. That was more important to me than communing with God. As time moved on, the strictures of the church, and its condemnation of people who were doing nothing more than living their lives, much the same way I was, bothered me in some way, and I left; it was quiet and undramatic. I stopped showing up, and spent my time in other ways. And I felt no difference. The me that was attending church was the same me that didn’t attend it.

Fast forward a few years and I am in my living room, attending a meeting with a few fellow philosophy students, and damned if we don’t have that most cliched of philisophical arguments– “what is the meaning of life?”. I said I didn’t think life had a centralized ‘meaning’, and was immediately accused of nihlism, which kind of bugged me, and there was the notion that not seeing a central meaning to life would lead to a kind of pure hedonism, which also bugged me, albeit less than the nihilism one.

There were a couple of attempted answers, but the central question to me isn’t “what is the meaning of life” but really “what is the value of attaching a meaning to life?” Does the you who believes that family or God or your cat is a reason for being differ substantially from the you who believes in some other thing is the reason for being? I tend to side with the existentialists here: we’re a work in progress, not a completed work, and the meaning, if you want to use that word, is the same. There’s no underlying principle, and seeking one is a kind of misery we would do better to forget about. That, as Satre put it, even if God were to exist, it would make no difference. “…what man needs is to rediscover himself, and to comprehend that nothing can save him from himself…” Life is a set of actions.

And that’s the rub; I’m doing the philosophy thing where we get hung up on what we ‘mean by meaning’? If you want to argue that those set of actions bring meaning, you can, but I’d counter that the set of actions themselves are different for all; we have no ‘meaning’ because calling something unique to each person a meaning deprives the word of its meaning.

The question “what is the meaning of life” then rapidly becomes moot. The meaning of life isn’t something we need to bother with. It’s a pointless walk to a dismal place. How we live is the question, not why. When we embrace that notion, then the work can begin.