Liza Field

Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.

Recent columns

• 'Pondering deficiency' gives us - and Earth - a bellyache
• Time is precious; how best to use it?
• Why does time seem to pass by faster with age?

Awe is a vital way of experiencing life. It acknowledges that we're creatures, we're anxious, we're fragile. But it also points us to the More -- the More of who we are and what we're participating in.

-- Kirk Schneider

They also serve who only stand and wait.

-- John Milton

In January, I raised the age-old question of life's meaning.

It's a question that can emerge whenever there's a quiet moment to think, or one is caught off guard by beauty or disaster, or the soul finally rises up in revolt against business-as-usual. "Why are we doing this?"

Several readers quickly sent answers.

"We're here to win souls to Christ." "To work out karma." "To save/serve/help others." "To find out who we are." "To have fun." "To love."

A tall stack of answers, indicating that people had thought about this ancient question a few times and weren't afraid to ask it. Or certainly to answer!

But which answer was "correct"?

For instance, if we're here strictly to serve others, how is this measured? Do only people living now count as "others," or those in the past and far into the future, whom one will never meet?

And what if one means very much to serve others, but actually annoys them? Or so terrifies them about hellfire (for their own good, of course!), they develop a lifelong allergic reaction to the word "God" or "religion"?

Then there are the Crusades, or Andy Jackson and the troops, aiming to save people by slaughtering them.

They also serve

I happen to agree that service is the only life that makes sense and generates joy. But I think that our glimpse of service -- or any other "why" -- is minimal.

Take the man who, having served his family for 50 years, experiences his wife's death. His grown children live across the country and he is currently too grief-stricken to go chat with his old gang at the diner. Suppose he can't physically volunteer, and finds the advice "have fun" to be utterly meaningless?

Has this person's brokenness no purpose, just because the former, at-hand, obvious form of "serving others" now seems vanished?

No, said Viktor Frankl, who survived the German concentration camps, where "purpose" was impossible to locate.

Frankl theorized that suffering -- or any kind of crack in the familiar context of meaning around us -- can open up a gash into greater meaning, not less. That greater, deeper meaning has existed all along, but no more visibly than a vast sky full of stars can be seen on a sunny day.

To ask "why?" implies something not visible anyhow, as "meaning" isn't a molecular object, nor a number, nor some words.

Inspiring awe

"That's why wondering makes people uncomfortable," said my student Aubrey Gore of Bland County, when the topic emerged in a philosophy class. "It's easier to keep the TV on. We don't like uncertainty."

In his 50s, working to help addicts recover, Gore has for years observed how humans self-medicate or drown ourselves in distraction, specifically to avoid such abysslike questions.

But why avoid them, I kept wondering last week? Who taught us this fear?

Then I caught a "New Dimensions" radio broadcast last Sunday, aired on WVTF. It featured psychologist Kirk Schneider, whose personal plunge into one of those "why"-provoking abysses inspired his book, "Awakening to Awe."

Calling for a return to "awe-based consciousness," Schneider regretted the "mass anesthesia" sedating our lifestyles today, inoculating us from uncertainty or wonder.

While constant entertainment, indoor life and rushing around may "anesthetize" us to life's insecurities, he said, these painkillers also keep us under a "hypnosis" that "blocks out our capacity to become exhilarated, to experience great joy."

The human capacity for awe, he says, then becomes "atrophied."

Years ago, my fledgling county conservation group watched a video lecture series called "Canticle to the Cosmos." Its narrator, cosmologist Brian Swimme, explained what scientists had learned regarding the profound, mind-blowing evolution of the universe -- and ourselves.

It was stunning to ponder. In fact, Swimme thought that "astonished" was the appropriate human response to reality. "Awe, wonder and gratitude," he noted, were emotions so particular to human consciousness, they were surely part of our main purpose here.

After all, we are made of the universe, walking around wearing it, creating with and reflecting on it. How bizarre and astonishing is that?

Very, says Fincastle poet Charlie Finn, who has been pausing in the forest for spells this winter, after splitting wood, to hear the snow fall and reflect.

In an address he gave to a Roanoke church group in January, to honor the new year, Finn observed, "We matter in the grand scheme of things. We are stardust coming to consciousness! Could anything more enhance our self-esteem, if we fully grasped it?"