South Australian Year 12 school exams are just around the corner. When I sat for my Year 12 final exams over 40 years ago the outcome wasn't particularly noteworthy. I had already peaked at school, a year or so back. The problem for me was that I couldn't see the point of what I was doing. Not that the benefit of schooling was lost on me. And I could see possible pathways ahead. And there wasn't and still isn't anything wrong with any of those pathways. It's just that I wanted the answer to the "Why?" behind the options of life. I lacked a comprehensive meaning to bind it all together, a meaning that could infuse my life and make a more complete (rather than relative) sense of any particular path I would take. A way of sifting what was on offer, and finding my place in a deeper and broader meaning.
It still reminds me of a few pages in Walter Kasper's, The God of Jesus Christ (1), on the ancient world's quest for 'the One' lying behind the multiplicity of the world around. Without a binding, unifying 'One' behind the multiplicity the plethora of 'stuff' around us teeters on meaninglessness, amounting to arbitrary and haphazard encounters. They might have a relative meaning, but without the meaning of a unifying force behind them, the bits of our lives eventually appear arbitrary or haphazard. Like the horizon which makes the foreground comprehensible, without a background of unity the multiplicity of the world 'would be nothing but a dust-heap piled up at random and lacking any order and meaning." (p. 235) That's what my future felt like, all those years ago. (I couldn't verbalise it like that back then.)
Another example. Sometimes a young person attempts to consume as many experiences as possible, hungrily, voraciously, as though in the cumulative consumption of each experience one will find meaning. Sometimes this happens at the other end of life, after a realisation that one's days are numbered. Not necessarily anything wrong in any of the experiences, but in the end, a life of cumulative, relative experiences or meanings is, in my experience, not enough. Living is more than discrete experiences, no matter how many and varied.
And if we were to think of this unity behind the multiplicity as 'the One' (and we wouldn't be alone in the history of religion and philosophy), we would not be referring to a numerical oneness. It is the oneness of unity, completeness, providing an overarching meaning and purpose. Unity, but also uniqueness, for there can be no other, no other source, no other comprehensive meaning, or else we are back to multiplicity. And this 'One' is universal in its completeness and uniqueness, 'the One' for all peoples.
The above is not unrelated to Jesus' use of Deut 6:4-5 in answer to a question about the commandments: Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. (Mark 12:29) But my discussion above is not the source of Israel's affirmation of the oneness of God. Israel encountered God, and through that encounter over the centuries came to see that the God of Exodus and Exile is also the God of creation: one, complete, unique, and universal, transcendent if you like.
But there is more to the story of this encounter. In Christ God revealed to us that 'the One' is love. The unity and completeness that is the source and ground of creation is love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (Not just loving, but God is love. See 1John 4:7-12.)
And encounter is where my story after Year 12 took me. I encountered God in Christ afresh, and over the years have come to discover 'the One' behind the multiplicity, the God who brings a unity and completeness, meaning and purpose to what is otherwise teetering on the arbitrary. It was if you like a journey from both ends, in the beginning the implicit search from the dead-end of multiplicity without unity, and then from the other end the active encounter with God in Christ (who is the unity implied in the dead-end).
My story is not unique. Many people feel the "dust- heap piled up at random and lacking any order and meaning." And ignore it, for they meet a brick wall. They need encounter. Others come straight through encounter and in that encounter, with the discipline of prayer, scripture, worship, and reflection integrate their past into a concrete meaning and purpose transcending any single experience or meaning. Coming to Christ can start either side, but always includes encounter, for it was only in encounter, cross and resurrection, that we learnt that God is love, and that love is the sole criterion for meaning and purpose, as Jesus says in today's Gospel reading.
1. Kasper, Walter. The God of Jesus Christ. New York: Crossroad, 1988
