Tangential to the end of my last post the question, "What is the meaning of life?" has been a sort of intellectual joke. People who try to answer it are immediately dismissed as either lunatics or idiots. The first foolishly believe themselves capable of answering such a questions while the other answers out of limited knowledge and offers faulty advice. Despite having become a bit of a gag for philosophers and intellectuals, there lies a significant answer to this question, but it cannot be summed up in an aphoristic one-liner. Here's why...

While reading on the basic premise of truth a few years ago I stumbled across the theory of correspondence. While exploring this I felt that little tickle at the back of my brain say, "This is important". A few weeks later it clicked that meaning and signification are connected via the relationship of correspondence. At that moment, I made the connection to our party question. Meaning, that is, the basic focus of the question, rests on connectedness. In pure terms, meaning and the signification that communicates its truth or essence are bound, and only real, through a connection, one to the other.

In similar fashion, to generalize here, all meaning, connects a thing to that which is means something. Making this more real world, the meaning of life rests on the premise, the reality of connectedness to life. Only by being connected to life can it possess meaning. Thinking back to Camus Sisyphusian character, he had disconnected from life. The scene where he describes the kaleidoscopic series of events and how numb he was to the reality of those passing days reveals he was literally out of touch with the life that surrounded him.

So, refocusing on the question itself, the meaningfulness of life to anyone depends on one's connectedness with life. Many times people are disconnected as a result of anger, disappointment, boredom. You name the trauma and the coping mechanism can be found. Most "meaningless" lives are really the result of trauma and how the soul manages to survive. What unhealthy means were employed to recover from the assault of life that led them to the point where they are. Most time it is the scar that lies at the heart of the meaninglessness and at the heart of reconnection with reality. Healing and love are the ways to discover the meaning of life by addressing the woundedness of the soul, but the meaning itself is what each individual needs to be in vital relationship with their place in existence.

What I find more interesting than this observation about meaning and connectedness to life is the Christian response to this truth. As I mentioned the other day, most Christians living in materialistic society are just as trapped in the dynamic of coping with survival as are non-Christians. Disallusionment easily comes to Christians who understand and know the promise of Christ's call, but who fail to realize its effect in their own lives. But, to those Christians, I ask, being honest with themselves, have they done exactly what Christ commanded? Look at the Gospels and Acts. Christ gives very simple instructions. The challenge is actually applying those instructions to our own lives.

So, when Christians complain about a sense of meaninglessness in their lives I quietly wonder if they are truly living the life as Christ called us to live instead of the pre-packaged, neatly-labelled Christian life we can buy from the world market these days. Christian life is messy, hard, difficult, filled with pain, uncertainty and great humiliation. But, at the same time, it is beautiful, unimaginably simple, life-giving and the most gratifying experience knowable to a human being. It is only by willingly accepting and acting on this understanding that the Christian can being to connect with the life they have had placed in their spiritual DNA. Without a response to Christ on Christ's terms, meaningnless is more guaranteed for a Christian than for someone who has not been filled with the hope above all hopes.