S. MEANING AS RESPONSIBILITY (4)

There is yet a fourth question to which we'll give greater attention later on.  It has to do with one's response  to everything that is.  It's a follow-up question to the other three.  After asking, "Who am I?", "How do all things cohere?"  and "Where am I going?" I must ask, "How do I respond?  What ought I to do?  What is expected of me?"  This is the ultimate question.  Only to the extent that I'm clear about my identity, my purpose and my relationship to whatever isn't me, can I then get any clear idea of where I ought to go with my life.

To some people the word "responsibility" seems awfully heavy.  I've gotten a kick out of the name of the Catholic Church in Garrison Keeler's Lake Woebegon as "The Church of Our lady of Perpetual Responsibility."  But it needn't be a heavy word.  The word simply means "the ability to respond."

I believe one could describe the relationship between meaning and responsibility almost in terms of a formula, which I'd like to set out as one of those Rules for the Road:
                THE HEIGHT OF ONE'S OBJECT OF RESPONSIBILITY WILL DETERMINE
                THE DEPTH OF ONE'S SENSE OF MEANING IN LIFE.
If the response of one's life is only to his own desires, (s)he shouldn't be surprised that his sense of meaning in life gets pretty shallow.  (Sometimes it's hard not to get trapped in sexist pronouns.)  If (s)he begins to respond to the needs and interests of, say, a spouse and family, one's sense of meaning deepens.  If the response of his life is to a larger group, a movement, or even the universal human community, her sense of meaning deepens still.  My personal bias is that if I try to make my entire life a response to the will of God, I'm blessed with the deepest sense of meaning possible.

I framed this idea of the relationship between meaning and responsibility as the central thesis of my doctoral dissertation in 1965 and I thought it was a pretty original thought.  Then awhile back across I came across a statement by Vaclav Havel(the Czech president to whom I've referred before) in a message he gave to the U. S. Congress a few years ago:
"We are stall incapable of understanding that the only genuine core of all of our actions - if they are to be moral - is responsibility.  Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will  be properly judged."
Vaclev Havel receives a Tim Holmes award!

He might have gone on to say that adopting that ultimate object of responsibility will also lend the ultimate sense of meaning.
Even though we need to continue to pursue all four of these "meaning questions" simultaneously throughout our lives, there is also a certain sequence to the questions, the answer to one helping shape the answer to the next.  My strong suggestion in  these pages is that we take this quest for "the meaning of life" in all four of these aspects  very seriously and constantly, not as an "existential aerobic workout," but as a natural, important and fascinating pursuit.

So here are a couple of  questions for reflection:
        To what or whom do you feel most responsible at this point in your life?

        Is that answer satisfying to you?  



EXTENDED READING FOR THOSE INTERESTED:
(Chapter Two of my book, The Academic Mysteryhouse, ((Nashville: Abingdon Press, l970) expands on the thesis of the last few pages.  -[Send me a message and I'll scan it for you! -The producer]

        
        TOOLS AND APPROACHES - S