The Meaning Of Life (Preface)

I am a retired clinical psychologist and university teacher. I have written an essay on The Meaning of Life. I will post it here in sections. Today I am posting the Preface:

Three convergent threads in my current life led me to write this essay:

• I am at an age (66) where meaning in life is more than academic. Recently I had the thought: “What if it is a fact that when you die, you simply cease to exist? That at that point you will no longer be conscious and, more importantly, you will not even be aware that you ever lived. You will survive only in the memory of friends and relatives.” The thought was so horrifying that I became weak in the knees and had to sit down. I kid you not. A few days later I had lunch with a friend (whom I had gone to college with when I was 18-21) and told him what had happened. “That’s the first time that that thought occurred to you?”, he joked. I admitted that it was.

Until recently I thought that being a Catholic would serve as meaning in my life until my cremation but then about a year ago I had an experience that made me rethink that assumption. It was a week before Easter and, as always, Anne and I went out, after supper, to our annual confession (a Catholic’s “Easter Duty”). I began my confession with the usual preamble: “Bless me father for I have sinned. It’s been a year since my last confession. To put my confession in context, let me say that I am a retired psychologist. I am married and live with my wife. We have two grown children who live elsewhere. I should also tell you that I do not believe that Christ is God”. That preamble had always worked in the past in that it provided the priest with a context for what I was about to confess. Every confessor till then had carried on with the sacrament as if every second penitent admitted that they did not believe Christ was God. In fact, one priest – a Monsignor, no less – whispered: “Neither do I”! But the priest I encountered on this fateful day was a young firebrand from the Fraser Valley and he was not amused. He said, in what seemed like an unnecessarily loud voice: “Confession is not a form of free psychotherapy; it is for believers. Have a nice day”! I was properly humbled, got up from the “prie dieu” and walked back to my pew. He was right, of course – even if he was rude.

At that point I had two choices:

• I could stop going to church. But I would miss it. For one thing, I love the Catholic Mass. It is a beautiful ritual. High Mass, especially, appeals to me. The invariant formulaic prayers, the priest’s chanting and the choir’s response, the incense. In a world where everything else is so efficient, the Mass is a delightful return to a previous unhurried time. I even use the older forms of Mass prayers because they are less prosaic. The “Prayer After Communion”, for example, in the modern post–Vatican II formula reads: Lord Jesus Christ, with faith in your love and mercy I eat your body and drink your blood. Let it not bring me condemnation but health in mind and body. I much prefer the older more poetic form: What has passed our lips as food, O Lord, may we possess in purity of heart that what is given to us in time be our healing for eternity. I would also miss meeting many of my friends every Sunday because ninety percent of the people we socialize with are people our age who attend St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. Of course, I would also miss going to church with Anne.

• I could continue to go to church but ACT AS IF I BELIEVED. This is not
as hypocritical as it sounds. As a psychologist, I practiced a form of
treatment called Behaviour Therapy. Behaviour Therapy is based on the
assumption that if a person deliberately changes the way he or she behaves it
will have a profound effect on the way they think and feel. Persons
suffering from depression, for example, are advised to behave AS IF THEY
WERE NOT DEPRESSED. I would tell my depressed patients: “Imagine
that your are an actor trying to win an Academy Award for portraying the
role of a person who is particularly content, cheerful and excited. People
will respond to you more favourably, your thinking will become more
optimistic and you will feel much better.”

So, that is what I decided to do. I began to ACT AS IF I BELIEVED. I
prayed harder. I genuflected more fervently. I talked like a believer. I tried
to win an Academy Award for portraying a man who had a shot at
canonization! I haven’t become a saint yet but I have my hopes. In the
meantime, my search for meaning in life continues and writing this tract
may contribute to that search.

• A second thread of my current life that led to this book is my ongoing collection of what I call “Words to Remember”. Begun in October of 1969, “Words to Remember” is a spiral notebook in which I copy out passages from books I read. Some of the transcribed passages impressed me because of the content, others because of form, and still others as simply good examples of the writer’s work. Many of the passages are philosophic statements, mostly from novelists, about ultimate questions. I also have a computer file of my favourite quotes from the daily emails I receive from A.Word.A.Day, many of which also address ultimate questions. By the way, this is a wonderful web site: http://wordsmith.org/awad/. If you sign up (it’s free) they send you an email every day with an English word that you may or may not have encountered before plus a quote. The quote today (July 11, 2006) is “One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read” – John Kenneth Galbraith, economist (1908-2006). Anyway, I have been meaning to type my “Words to Remember” quotes into the computer file that contains my favorite A.Word.A.Day quotes and then organize all the quotes into a set of categories, e.g., philosophy, science, literature, humour, etc. The result would be “Ledwidge’s Familiar Quotations” of sorts. Writing this treatise will not only organize the philosophic quotes from both sources but also provide continuity between them – making the whole collection seamless. Well, seamless may be too strong a word! We’ll see.

• The third incentive to write this book derives from the fact that I have just finished writing my autobiography, a project I began in 1997. I had ten copies bound and I am very pleased with the result. But now that it’s over I miss the writing. My autobiography was a source of pleasure during the first four years of my retirement. During that time I often found myself bored and restless. The writing disposed of many an afternoon for which I had no other use. This new project may serve the same purpose.