Creating Meaning

What makes life worthwhile? How do we live meaningful lives? And is meaning discovered or created? The answer isn’t straightforward because it’s a bit of both. But I hope that as we explore this theme, it will become clearer and inspire your creativity.

We are all born into a world already filled with symbols, meanings, and stories. You weren’t born from nothing, nor do you arrive as a blank canvas. The family, community, nation, and world you became part of are all living narratives that provide the context for your own story, your own meaning-making process.

We spend most of our childhood trying to make sense of this complex reality, reorientating ourselves around every newly discovered fact. Trying to find our place in this world is a natural stage of growing up. But we only partially find that place. One of the reasons is that our world is not static; it’s a dynamic, evolving system. You are a movement within a movement, which makes finding your stable place rather complex. A second reason is that these pre-existing symbols and histories do not give me individual meaning. They provide the raw material of an interpretive framework and the possibility of personal meaning, but they do not tell my unique story. I cannot be myself without the relationships and histories that formed me. Yet, I am more than what brought me here. None of us are satisfied with knowing where we come from and that we exist. We are drawn forward into every new moment by the possibilities of being not yet realized. I am more than an actuality; I am also a possibility. And the possibilities of meaning, of being, is something only I can envision and realize.

So, how does this process of discovering and creating meaning work? What does it mean to the way I live? It means I must acknowledge the narratives that formed me and simultaneously refuse to be possessed by them. I am grateful for the influences that shaped me and reject their overbearing presence. I value both the whole and the part. I refuse to be dissolved into the whole, and simultaneously, I refuse to be an isolated individual. I am created in that movement between the whole and the part. I receive meaning from all that is happening around me, but I interpret it and add something uniquely ‘me’ to it. In that way, I create meaning – a story that has never been told before. I discover symbols, but I also reinterpret them and make new ones.

You find yourself at this particular point in history. The culture you are in has developed over a long period to become what it is now. Philosophers, poets, artists, and rebels of the past have formed the reality that is now taken for granted. The religion you were taught has developed over long periods and probably looks nothing like it did initially. And here you are in the midst of all these evolving stories. Will you be conformed to what is? Or will you offer this world something new?

Many of our audience are from a Christian background. Have you ever considered that Jesus did not simply confirm the religion he was brought up in but that he radically reinterpreted it? Consequently, he renewed it. To follow Jesus implies that I cannot simply settle into the religion and traditions I was born into, even if that tradition is based on interpretations of Jesus’ teachings. We must recognize what is valuable and break from what has grown old and stale. The first followers of Jesus had to come to a place where they distinguished themselves from the Jewish faith, for it no longer represented the living faith they found in Christ. It might be time for followers of Jesus to differentiate themselves once again from what is commonly perceived to be Christianity.

What was relevant and alive for generations past tends to become lifeless idols. “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” the angel asks in the book of Luke. Why do you seek life in repetitious rituals, attend yet another meeting to hear the same old boring interpretations/stories, and sing the same old songs to try and reproduce the goosebumps you felt 20 years ago? Rather, follow Jesus and overturn the tables of a religion that has lost its essence.

Despite the symbols and meanings that saturate your world, no one else has your perspective. No one else can interpret this world from your vantage point. And the possibilities that are open before you are yours alone to actualize or reject. The creative stream of this universe is made of many unique threads.

This universe has a direction; it is moving towards greater meaning and beauty. It is an unfinished story, and the end has not been determined. You have been invited to author this specific chapter.

The fact that an unimaginably large universe conspired to make life possible, to nurture an environment in which your unique subjectivity could emerge, says something about the nature of our cosmos. All the countless narratives and verses are somehow brought together into a uni-verse, a whole that makes sense. Yet our knowledge of it is never comprehensive – it remains inexhaustible. This possibility of greater beauty, this lure towards new value, is what I call God. This God is not some distant entity but a present possibility. This God is involved in every moment of becoming, from the birth of a distant star to the thoughts I currently entertain – the gravity of beauty is present everywhere.

God creates me in the way a poet weaves together the individual words and phrases to give them greater beauty and meaning than what they had by themselves. And God grows in the sense that each of our experiences become part of him, each self-creating phrase adds meaning and value to the whole.