Commentary of the Word

“Imagine all the people…” sang John Lennon. He imagined a perfect world: “Nothing to live or die for, and no religion too.” But Viktor Frankl, recounting his experiences in a concentration camp during the second world war, wrote, “One can endure almost any kind of how if one has a why.” He had seen people die, he said, from loss of meaning. In affluent countries the suicide rate is climbing drastically. When you have everything except meaning, you have nothing to live or die for; and that, far from being a perfect world, is an unendurable one. See how a person’s face brightens when he or she sees the meaning of something, even if it’s only the meaning of a joke, or a puzzle. Imagine what it must be like to know the meaning of life itself! (We all say we do, but we don’t really.) We would be transfigured.