Sometime in 1993, as I walked along a street in my hometown, Carndonagh, County Donegal, Ireland, a car pulled up alongside me, triggering sudden dread. The window came down, and I was met by the dark, inquisitory eyes of my father.
“Why aren’t you at Mass?” he asked.
I see myself, fierce and lean in a Slayer T-shirt, bristling with the rage of the nihilist. I longed to escape the claustrophobic small town and the towering shadow of the Catholic Church. For once I was impelled to tell the truth.
“Look,” I said, “I have no faith. I don’t believe in God anymore and can’t go on with the pretense.”
I was met with an imprisoning silence. But what my father said next astonished me. “OK,” he replied. “Just don’t tell your mother.”
But that young atheist soon recognized his error. Where there is human being, there is human spirit. The feeling of aliveness. The staggering complexity of personhood. The fundamental dignity that each person seeks in a cosmos that cannot know them. And where there is human spirit, there is the pursuit of meaning. If you live in a post-faith world, as many of us do, the question of our intrinsic meaning must be confronted. How are we to define our suffering? What might give our lives significance within an unresponsive universe? To begin this conversation, one must truly encounter the self. […]
The essential self is calling always for our attention, but its voice is stifled by the slam and tumult of modern life. Its voice cannot be heard amid the babel, and it is silenced entirely before the infinite scroll of the smartphone. I have been meditating for one-third of my life, and this essential self seems to me an aspect of mind that is somehow higher, wheeling soundlessly in a private sky. You must stop and look up in order to find it, although in times of crisis it has been known to swoop down and hoist you off your feet with its talons. […]
Today, life lived on the hamster wheel of distraction has created an absurdity within the grand absurdity of existence. Many people live with partial minds not even conscious of the problem of meaning. We are no longer alienated from the world, but alienated from ourselves. We should beware a culture that has exchanged meaning for information. When conversation with the essential self grows silent, pathology is invited in. We slouch about at a loss for something we cannot quite explain. A malaise sets in that is despair without the knowledge of despair. Some unseen, unaccountable pain must be assuaged and we grow consumed by anger and cast about for blame. The irrational erupts from within and seeks a target in society. The shadow of the irrational is now everywhere about us. […]
That which takes wing inside us must come to perch, but that which takes flight in fog and storm grows lost. Deep beneath the vast economic and political failings of our age there lies a spiritual crisis, a tectonic shift beginning to quake and tear at the bedrock of our ethical societies in the West. The modern age has created a religious problem that can no longer be answered by religion, nor can it be addressed by the current faith in techno-science. We live in an age that fears silence and does not contemplate the true cost of this fear.
— Paul Lynch, from “When We Fear Silence, We Abandon the Self. The constant distractions of modern life have become an excuse to avoid the search for meaning.” (NY Times, June 12, 2024)
Notes: Paul Lynch is the author of five novels. His latest, “Prophet Song,” won the 2023 Booker Prize. See excerpts from the Prophet Song here.
