Great scandals in the Church – children, young people, people exploited – emotionally, financially and sexually. Some cynics might say – so what’s new? Someone has just published a book about the meaning of life. Apparently he wrote to dozens of well-known people and asked them their opinion. Most of the answers apparently are trite. The more philosophically inclined questioned the validity of the question. One religious person said we are created with a God shaped hole and the meaning, or purpose of life is to fill it. It is interesting that there is no consensus – not just on what meaning life might have, but as to whether there needs to be meaning. I came across a quotation from Gabriel Garcia Marquez today –
Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers gave birth to them… Life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.*
I think we have to find, or to make our own meaning. I do not think there is a ready-made meaning, a template into which all can fit. We are so diverse, so wonderfully and bewilderingly different that there cannot be any simple answer to the question. God is part of the meaning, I am sure, but how we perceive God is different for everyone. One of the problems with the established churches is that they are too keen to supply a simplistic template into which we must all fit. I know it is difficult for an organisation, especially a hierarchical and bureaucratic one, to cope with diversity but such is the nature of the human beast.
*Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, trans. Edith Grossman (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 165.