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The Illness of Meaning Rev. John Michael Hanvey is part of the THOMAS Team
Are there journeys without destinations?’ Asks the poet R.S. Thomas and so too do many others. Not everyone can feel that they are eternal and there can always be that tugging feeling that everything might be futile and heading for annihilation of being. Have you ever asked yourself why you get up in the morning and what or who it is that keeps you going? One of the more disturbing discoveries in my own life journey, is that the box full of answers I was given many years ago is now empty and there is for most of the time a dark veil in front of my eyes and feelings. It’s a sort of curtain that seems not to move at all. I stare at it often and look for even the smallest sign that there might be movement behind it. I actually force myself to look at it, glare at it even, because my gut reaction is to fill my thinking and my questioning moments with as many distractions as possible. Of course there could be a way out of these dark feelings but we must not take it. The recent spate of suicides amongst the young in a small Welsh community is disturbing. The increase of inner-city violence and the general loss of an objective moral code in a society where relativism, individualism and rampant secularism increases is a cause for deep concern. The illness of meaning, which is what I call all of this and more must not make wimps out of us, or dupe us out of our spiritual heritage, where facing the darkness is part of the deal. What does it mean and why have been questions on my lips since I can remember? and I freely choose to wrestle with the dark shadows. Sometimes I get glimpses, brief understandings, suggestions that maybe the dark veil I stare at has movement behind it. The whole thing that we are involved in here at THOMAS is I believe also about the illness of meaning, where drugs etc. have been used not just to feel better, almost all the world does that with alcohol, but to obliterate, wipe out and sometimes not to wake up from. But here we see young people staring hard and fast at that dark veil wondering, even hoping, that there must be an eavesdropping higher power who just might be interested in what is going on, on the other side. It’s a place where people dare to start out yet again on that journey where the destination is not always at all clear and where, unlike fairy stories, there might not be a happy ending. But no matter where all the negative voices come from we must set out on this journey where there is always possibility, rather than certainty and where the whole of creation cries out to us that we belong and have a place and that one life is enough to discover it.
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