The Meaning Of Meaninglessness

Pastor W. Robert McClelland had to endure the painful experience of

hearing his grown son curse God and cry out in angry rebellion at Him. His

son had worked hard for congressman Jerry Litton in his senatorial

campaign. When the polls closed that Tuesday night and Litton come

through with an upset victory, it was an experience of great joy. But as is so

often the case with life, it suddenly switched tracks and the entire Litton

family was killed in a plane crash on the way to the victory celebration.

You can put yourselves in the shoes of a young man who has just poured

himself out for a cause, and then seeing it all come to an end just as it was

beginning. The absurdity of it; the futility of it, and the total nonsense and

utter waste of it is hard to swallow. He was a Christian, but he felt like

Solomon in his very sub-Christian mind in this book of Ecclesiastes. His

preacher father did not like to hear his deep negative expressions, but he

knew in his heart he had felt the same way on another occasion. He was a

professor at a mid-western college, and the wife of one of his colleagues

became very ill. He and other Christian friends battered the gates of heaven

for her with prayer, and they spent hours at her bedside. The doctor said she

would not live, but she did recover and was home for Christmas celebration.

It was a great victory but she had a relapse, and on New Year's Day she died.

He was so angry at God that he refused to make excuses for God at the

memorial service. He said, "This is your doing God, you get yourself off the

hook. If this is your idea of wisdom, then you explain it."

He, like his son, experienced the deep dark feeling of meaninglessness. It is

that feeling that nothing makes any sense at all, and that life is a joke, but a

joke that isn't even funny. You feel like everything you do is as worthless as

rearranging deck chair on the Titanic. What's the difference when the ship of

life is sinking? This is not a pleasant experience, but it is a universal

experience, and at one time or another almost every Christian will get a taste

of this bitter stuff. Solomon had to eat it as a regular diet for sometime. Few

Christians will have to endure what he did, but the point is, his experience of

the meaninglessness of life is in the Bible because it is, was, and will be, as

long as history lasts, a very relevant issue.

Dr. Viktor Frankl, a leading psychotherapist in Europe for generations,

developed Logotherapy to deal with this very issue. He survived the Nazi

concentration camp experience, and he learned through it that those who

survived while others in as good health died, did so because they had meaning

to their lives. Logotherapy is healing through meaning. If you could get

people to see some rhyme or reason in the meaninglessness of life, they can

live happy lives, or at least survive. Meaninglessness is the number one

enemy of human happiness. Studies show that in both Communist and

Capitalist countries modern meaninglessness has multiplied. You might

assume that this is due to the masses of the poor who cannot get in on the joys

of affluence, but this is not the case.

This malady afflicts those who would feel right at home at Solomon's table.

A study of 100 alumni of Harvard who were successful doctors, lawyers, and

business men, 20 years after their graduation, made this clear. The majority

of them had the feeling of futility, and they wondered what the meaning of

their achievements was all about. The Bible deals with the real, and this

matter of meaninglessness is very real, and has been one of the major

struggles of mankind. Dr. Frankl calls it the existential vacuum. It results

from the frustration of not being able to find meaning even in those things

which are suppose to be the goals of life, such as wealth, fame, power, and all

the other things Solomon succeeded in gaining in great quantity.

The paradox is that the more man succeeds in getting all that life offers

under the sun, the more he questions the meaning of life. It is because when

he does not have them he can hope and dream that they would fill his need for

meaning, but when he has them he knows they do not, and he can no longer

delude himself. Success and progress, therefore, do not take away the

struggle for meaning, but they add to it. That is why the very successful often

battle with despair, for they have everything and yet they are empty of the