The Meaning of Life
One of the central themes I use in weddings and sacred ceremonies is what I declare to be the meaning of life. I say that it is very simple.
“We are here to learn how to love, and more importantly, how to be loved.”
My evidence is to be found at the end-of-life. In those last days and moments, I’ll no longer be worried about the things I worry about. I’ll not be worried about paying the rent, who is going to win the next election, or if I’m going to get the job. The only thing I will care about in my last moments, is the people I love.
“We are here to learn how to love, and more importantly, how to be loved.”
That doesn’t look so hard does it? Everyone has people in their lives they love. We love our animal friends, things we enjoy doing and good things to eat. There is music that we love and places we like to go. So we all know what we need to know about love, right?
And who doesn’t want to be loved? We have deep relationships with friends and lovers, and are devastated when they end badly. So what is the mystery? Who doesn’t know how to love and to be loved? Ah, if only it were that simple.
Stories of romance almost all have the same formula of:
“Boy gets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl.”
Feel free to substitute in your gender and/or other identity preferences here.
Romance always begins with both desire and doubt. There is no romance without desire, and until the relationship has had time to grow and strengthen, there is doubt. Having both desire and doubt presents a problem. Desire leads to attachment, which leads to frustration and disappointment when the object of desire is not attained or lost. Doubt makes it even worse because it brings insecurity, fear and low self-esteem.
We live in a world that is a never-ending assault on self-esteem. As soon as small children start school, they are graded against their peers. Athletic competitions result in one winner and a lot of losers. Only one team gets to win a league championship and all the others, along with their fans, are the losers. And even the greatest single individuals get compared and graded against others, that somehow, they still aren’t good enough.
Everything in this world gets measured, graded and compared to others. Everyone’s a critic, and because everyone and every thing could be better, and nobody is good enough. When isn’t there doubt? And when there is doubt, there are questions of self-esteem and self-worth.
The pothole in the road to love is the fear that you will not be loved, for whatever reason. It’s the same thing in job interviews. You want and need that job. You know that you’re fully qualified, but until you get the job offer, you worry that someone else will get the job. Waiting for a job offer exactly fits the Buddhist definition of suffering.
In this world, desire and wanting to be loved are accompanied by the fear that love could be lost or simply denied. Even when a love relationship is going well, there can be a nagging doubt that it could go bad. So you see, the meaning of life, learning to love and to be loved, isn’t so simple.
This is why I like to say that the first major step on the spiritual path is learning how to be loved. In order to love fully, one must fully know that one is worthy of being loved. This goes for loving another person, or for loving God.
There is a path to the realization of the worthiness of being loved. Even better, it is rational! Reciting affirmations about self-worth are just self-delusion. Praying for God’s forgiveness is no better. The path that many follow is to acquire a list of accomplishments, attain wealth, attain socially defined measures of attractiveness, or even just lie loudly enough that others believe the lies. Nobody can spend their way to full self-worth. Bragging, of any sort, is just someone’s way of saying that theirs is bigger than yours.
I have a rule about writing these blogs that anything more than a couple of pages is a drone. For me clarity comes from being succinct. I feel I’ve said here is enough to chew on for the moment.
Tune in next week when I will spell out the path to self-worth.
I write my blog for those who prefer to find and know spirituality on their own terms, without the demands from any religion. I write because I feel called to speak equally to both the heart and the mind, because neither love nor rationality has to supplant the other. If what I write speaks to you, please subscribe to my blog, which will always be without charge.