The title of my homily – a short one – is meaning.
Meaning – understanding – figuring things out is one of
life’s biggest issues.
How many times do we ask, “What did she or he, mean by
that?”
Today’s first reading - for this 20th Monday in Ordinary time - has people asking Ezekiel, “Won't you tell us what all these things you are doing mean for us." [Cf. Ezechiel 24: 15-23]
Every time we preachers have to preach a homily, we read
the scriptures for the day and we try to figure out their meaning.
If there is any book in the Bible where this question
comes up the most, it’s the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel.
Down through the years I’ve heard commentators on Ezekiel
say he was deaf and did his preaching with short skits or plays – to get a
message across.
If we read the gospels, we meet people asking the
question over and over again, “What does this mean?”
At some time in life it’s worth reading Viktor Frankl’s
book, Man’s Search for Meaning [1946].
Here is a section of his book. Understand this moment in a concentration
camp, and then re-read the Prophet Ezechiel again. Both men lost their wives. I'm putting his long paragraph in poetic form to catch its power and beauty even more:
We were at work in a trench.
The dawn was grey around us;
grey was the sky above;
grey the snow in the pale light of dawn;
grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces.
I was again conversing silently with my wife,
or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason
for my sufferings, my slow dying.
In a last violent protest
against the hopelessness of imminent death,
I sensed my spirit piercing
through the enveloping gloom.
I felt it transcend that hopeless,
meaningless world,
and from somewhere I heard a victorious 'Yes'
in answer to my question of the existence
of an ultimate purpose.
At that moment
a light was lit in a distant farmhouse,
which stood on the horizon as if painted there,
in the midst of the miserable grey
of a dawning morning in Bavaria.
"Et lux in tenebris lucet" -
and the light shineth in the darkness.
For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground.
The guard passed by, insulting me,
and once again I communed with my beloved.
More and more
I felt that she was present,
that she was with me;
I had the feeling that I was able to touch her,
able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers.
The feeling was very strong: she was there.
Then, at that very moment,
a bird flew down silently
and perched just in front of me,
on a heap of soil
which I had dug up from the ditch,
and looked steadily at me."
Let me close with a jumping off from Descartes famous principle and change it to: "I search for meaning, therefore I am."
