146 Walk with Me!

Meaning: “conveying a significance that is not directly expressed . . .”

Now walk with me and we’ll talk about meaning as a personal quest and how besides influencing motives, understanding, thinking content and behavior, emotion and will; meaning-making can be a real challenge. Take a look at these challenges, Dear Reader:

1. Meaning can emerge slowly, appear instantly, or gradually come into focus.

2. Meaning can be happened upon, intensely pursued, refuse to be ignored.

3. Meaning can be elusive and indefinitely evade and escape our best efforts to grasp it.

4. Meaning can be hard to discern, multi-layered, obscure, confusing and complex.

5. Meaning can require repeated efforts at discovery over a protracted (decades, a life-time even) amount of time in order to accrue enough latent content to approximate and construct an inclusive statement, or description of substantial meaning, about anything.

6. Meaning shapes personal values and must be evaluated by using standards and measurements.

7. Meaning shapes personal goals and requires the fuel of intellectual curiosity.

8. Meaning can be used for or against people and situations.

Rubicon, an intelligence agency series (Sunday Evenings, 9 p.m., AMC), is a perfect picture of the challenges involved in meaning-making. It is a show rife with scrambled meanings, puzzles within quandaries, obfuscation entangled in dilemmas . . . I could go on and on. But, my point is that here is a group of very intelligent people who work for a living at finding significance that is not directly expressed. In fact, they must access and sift information from all over the world, vigilantly keeping an eye out for any suspicion of latent or hidden meaning deliberately being insinuated into seemingly innocent media and communications for nefarious purposes, and the clock is ticking!

Needless to say, these good people are afflicted with various stress-related problems—overstrained personal relations at home and on the job, drug abuse issues for which they are routinely screened, physical and mental health issues. But guess what! So are the backroom bad guys who have a habit of turning up dead, not from hostile action, but from suicide! Turns out they began their careers innocently enough but, failing to discern meaning and consequences properly, evolved into very bad guys, so bad they could not live with themselves.

The other “bad guys” are Terrorists. Now, we all know that terrorists have some of the most skewed understandings on earth. But the real “ouch” in this storyline is that the viewer is supposed to “get” the meaning that this dramatic fiction is a reflection of current-day American circumstances.

So, here is a series that exemplifies the difficulty in meaning making within and among homogenous groups (American good guys—and gals) and the difficulty in deriving meaningful observations and conclusions from diverse groups (terrorist bad guys and American bad guys). What a mess! And how typical in microcosm of the challenges abounding for one-and-all in trying to make coherent meaning out of what goes on in our world!

I think it is clear by now that meaning creates a climate in life, Gentle Reader. As time and meaning collect around us, meaning is capable of creating an atmosphere of gladness and anticipation, a sense of wonder and adventure, or an overcast of pervasive gloom and doom, cynicism and scorn, danger and disaster, to name but a few.

So, in an effort to address some of the challenges inherent in meaning-making and to encourage clarity and discernment in the meaning making process, let’s address just a few of the implication-ridden original findings listed above, specifically as they concern the Christian spiritual life (where, Scripture says, lies our great hope in this troubled world), since that is my diamond-of -the-first-water source and where I get the most meaningful understandings for my life. And let’s address a few of those implications one blog at a time.

To be continued . . .