As Easter approaches and the war in Ukraine continues, TIM COSTELLO reflects on the importance of meaning…
Melbourne, Australia
Easter is the high moment of Christian reflection. It is when we focus our minds on the deepest essentials of our faith. These essentials are about life and death.
In real time we are watching as the massacre and destruction of Ukraine continues. How desperately we pray for a ceasefire and a re-emergence for that nation. In the midst of it all we seek to make sense and meaning of the experience of living in these times. And in the midst of this mayhem the Christian story and its essentials of suffering, death, despair and resurrection ground us, and remind us of our common fragile humanity.
A family walks amid destroyed Russian tanks in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on Wednesday, 6th April. PICTURE: AP Photo/Felipe Dana/File photo.
The truth that we as Christians know is that when secular society says that humans are pleasure-maximising machines or profit-maximising machines, Scriptures teaches that humans are primarily meaning-maximising machines. It is meaning that is the fundamental drive. Only in the Cross and Resurrection can I process what I am seeing and make meaning.
Freud said it is sex and death that drive us and Adler said it’s anxiety but then comes Viktor Frankl. He survived Auschwitz with a different analysis of the most fundamental driver. He wrote that in the camps some died with equanimity because they had meaning and still held faith. Others lost hope early and died, panicked and terrified.
“In real time we are watching as the massacre and destruction of Ukraine continues. How desperately we pray for a ceasefire and a re-emergence for that nation. In the midst of it all we seek to make sense and meaning of the experience of living in these times. And in the midst of this mayhem the Christian story and its essentials of suffering, death, despair and resurrection ground us, and remind us of our common fragile humanity.”
Frankl reframed his experience and said, as a scientist, that he had decided he was going to find meaning by pretending that he was observing, noting, and reflecting on behaviour as if it was a terrible experiment in human attitudes in an utterly powerless situation. Even in unimaginable hopelessness and cruelty, this realisation gave him survival possibilities.
As one of the few who made it out alive of Auschwitz, he raised some profound questions. He said that the few who survived Auschwitz had only wondered about one question while there – would we survive? Frankl wrote that after Auschwitz, the survivors faced an even bigger question: ‘survived for what?’ The purpose they then found, he said, was fundamentally important to counter survivor guilt.
Observing and finding meaning, I think, has always been part of my Christian faith.
Last week I felt a profound sense of psychological pain watching the nightly news centred around the atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine. But, as someone seeking meaning who is endowed with faith in a God I believe is still in charge, I am drawn deeper into the meaning of Cross and Resurrection.
Of a God who suffered and died, who was humiliated and stripped of all rights. A God who hasn’t given up on history, who hasn’t abandoned the world, who hasn’t said it’s too messy, who hasn’t said – as some believe – ‘I am just going to save a few and give them a ticket to Heaven’. God who loves creation: because He made it; because humans carry the image of God and all of creation carries the stamp of the Maker; because He loves it. God loves the world. He gave His Son to deal with the barriers of evil, neutralising it through the Cross. Such evil things as Roman militarism that thought it had triumphed over Jesus. And, yes, the militarism of Putin that wants to triumph over the Ukraine.
One of the fascinating things about faith and a God like this is that you are a slave to hope. You can’t leap into despair. Engagement means caring about the world God loves.
In terms of finding meaning and purpose, I think it’s appropriate to address the question: ‘Who am I?’ But to recognise it’s not the question God asks. Back in the Garden of Eden God asked a different question – ‘Where are you?’ So it is not ‘Who am I?’ but ‘Where am I?’ As in where am I in the context in which I find myself and what does it require of me? It’s an interesting way to frame it, isn’t it?
We don’t choose a lot of things that happen to us in life – an accident, cancer, a redundancy or a divorce when we trying to save a marriage. Ukrainians did not choose an invasion and crimes against humanity.
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But the question is, even in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, ‘Where am I?’ What is now asked of me? How do I respond, even though I didn’t want those circumstances?
That’s the thing about hope. It responds differently to despair – ‘You know, I was once healthy, I was active, I was employed, I was married but who am I now?’ Or, better to say, ‘Where am I?’ How do I answer that? How do I find meaning in building something new, letting life into the dark and challenging situation I find myself in or that I see in the life of others.
For me, in the light of the Ukraine crisis, this means advocating for visas to Australia for Ukrainians and getting aid to those working with the refugees like World Vision. I can do that.
The Pope reminds us that this violence extends from Syria to the Rohinga in Myanmar and that our refusal to acknowledge the violence within human hearts must be addressed. This is in the Easter message. Good Friday is there in full view. But it is followed by death losing its sting, and new life breaking with the dawn.
And that’s where faith is so important. Faith is about this story, the narrative of where I am, as well as how I chart a way forward that remains hopeful and open to God’s world, to others, and to being my best self.
Tim Costello is a Sight columnist and Sight Advisory Board member, executive director of Micah Australia and a senior fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. He was formerly chief executive of World Vision Australia.
