Meaning Making
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
MEANING MAKING
“Mostly people will just imitate what they see.” This was a statement from a prominent theologian while making an argument for why the church should be intentional about the God they model. I could not disagree with it more. People are not simply imitators. Human beings are interpreters of their life experience for the sake of meaning. In the presence of God, human bein0gs are authors of their lives, even given all of life’s constraints.
Preachers and teachers within local congregations can benefit from identifying with great writers who seek to describe the human experience for greater reflection. One of those writers, John Steinbeck, is particularly inspiring for me. He crafts poetic thought into the mind of Okies in his 1939 novel, Grapes of Wrath. In so doing, he portrays the tremendous depth of human longing for examination of -- and commitment to -- the beauty that is their specific life. They are “types,” but they are imitators.
In the wake of the anniversary of the January 6th raids on the U.S. Capitol, we are asked to reconsider what ultimately motivates people. Fueled, enraged and violent, what ultimately motivates people to behave in such a way? We might decide that they are imitating a person. Or, maybe we will take a more complex and challenging view: they have hit a wall in the ability to make meaning from the circumstances of their lives, so they scale some of our most important walls. Consequences for those who acted out violence on January 6th are important, but so is the public imagination that makes meaning out of the event itself.
In his 1962 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Steinbeck said:
“..the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s [sic] proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man [sic] has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
If a writer has such a charge, how much more does the church of Jesus Christ? What should our view of humanity be if we believe that God arrives to the human circumstance to be deeply affected, even crucified by it? Our understanding of human beings will decide how we interpret and respond to the events of January 6th. Our interpretation is in part a measure of how congruent we are to the Gospel we seek to steward.
Neither science nor Steinbeck assert that human beings are mere imitators. Rather we are a reflective, meaning-making species. This is the church’s primary Christ-charge. What is more persuasive to the Christ-call than to experience your life as meaningful to God? Every week, clergy and staff members labor over another Sunday bulletin. The construction of a worship bulletin is all about how to fuel the human being’s construction of meaning (no matter how uncertain their circumstance) so they can fill their tanks on Sunday, offering glory back to God in day-to-day life. Here’s to that bulletin, the meaning-making framework, that is the recurring effort of every Ministry on Monday.
