Faith – The Character of Human Experience

March 24, 1963
Rochester

Faith is the character of human experience. This definition will not be widely accepted because it does not assume that a certain idea of God or a particular way of salvation is necessary to establish and maintain faith. Instead the proposal is that all faith is derived from human experience. What one does with human experience; how one handles human experience; the meaning one attaches to human experiences – these create faith. The character of that faith born of human experience is contingent upon whether one reacts to trouble with despair or hope; to achievement with pride or vanity; to the need for meaning by living either with persistent inquiry or apathetic despair.

Human experience does not create automatically the character or steadfastness we call faith. Human experience considered candidly provides no warrant whatsoever for uninhibited optimism in the power of human personality to progress steadily toward finer individual character or a perfect social order. Ecclesiastes, the preacher said (2/15) “I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me; and who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun.” Just as almost everyone has a feeling of regret that “we can’t take it with us,” so also there seems to creep into even our best deeds and better moments shadows of malice or envy, self-righteousness or self-pity.

Stanton Coblentz once said (THE LONG ROAD TO HUMANITY, p. 351), “at all times and in most circumstances, man is a contradiction, a sort of god and demon in one, who conceals a scorpion’s sting beneath angel’s feathers and has as many faces as the chameleon has colors.”

I have no doubt that most thoughtful persons today alternate between the poles of hope and futility when they are not buffeted by contradictory events into a neutralized confusion. A commentator in the Key Reporter observed (Winter issue, 62-63), “But something has gone wrong. The golden hope of the 50s has faded. The American state of mind is summed up on the wry humor of the nuclear physicist’s definition of the optimist as ’someone who still believes that the future is uncertain.’”

There has come to everyone who has known the last 20 years a knowledge that man will not necessarily hold back from exterminating whole peoples, will permit the expediencies of military strategy to overwhelm any restraints about burning out cities with all the men, women, and children therein; and even now tolerates the option of wiping out four-fifths of the population in order to achieve what he calls “victory.”

How can character which is strong, resistant and human develop in this world of our human experience?

“He who has a WHY to live can bear almost any HOW.” This quotation from Nietzsche epitomizes the story of Dr. Victor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the death camps. His story – contained in the little book, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, AN INTRODUCTION TO LOGOTHERAPY, is the pivot on which today’s sermon swings. The world reeled with shock and revulsion when the disclosures of the extermination camps and gas chambers were revealed some years ago. If a prisoner of such ghastly confinement could survive pain and despair almost beyond description – more than that, survive with the conviction that his experiences had taught him the way to resist the most disheartening of difficulties, then surely we should reflect on the message he speaks to the world.

MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING is an easy book to read, but the message it communicates is so blunt and rigorous that sensitive feelings will cringe under the whip of awareness of what man can, and will, do to man. Beyond the immediate impact, I believe that it is one of those books that the owner will pick up again and again. The scholars and authorities in psychology and psychiatry undoubtedly will offer the whole range of opinion about Dr. Frankl’s psychiatric theory, “logotherapy.” The average person among us who does not specialize in these fields can find in MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING the quality of resource needed for those days and hours when the pressure of anxieties seems great enough to rip the seams of self.

During the Nazi dominance in WWII, Victor Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist, was imprisoned for three years as a slave laborer in the concentration camps. With the exception of his sister, his entire family perished in the camps. The prisoner in the camps was soon de-humanized. the constant pain of starvation and cold soon overwhelmed most of the civilized virtues of compassion, honor, freedom. Among the prisoners was an unremitting fight for existence. Each day every prisoner knew the terrible uncertainty of whether or not his number was ticketed for the gas chambers. The author commented, “All that mattered was that ones own name and that of one’s friend were crossed off the list of victims, though everyone knew that for each man saved another victim had to be found....

... on the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means – honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles – whatever one may choose to call them – we know: the best of us did not return.”

Starvation, beatings, freezings, cruel labor, crowning indignities, disease and filth were constant companions. One pathetic incident illustrates the ghastly world of such prisoners. Dr. Frankl reports that, “I shall never forget how I was roused one night by the groans of a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or deleria, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.” (p. 27/28)

In the reality of the death camps which was far more ghastly than the most terrible nightmare, Victor Frankl found renewed conviction about several imperishable truths of human existence. It is these eternal verities that permit the assertion that faith is the character of human experience.

Early one morning (p. 35/7 ff) Frankl and his fellow prisoners were marching to the place for their labor. They were kicked, beaten, humiliated by guards. A fellow prisoner whispered to Frankl, ’If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.’”

This remark brought to Frankl the thought of his own wife. He imagined her image – heard her answering, saw her smile. "Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

"A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry, human thought, and human belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in love. I understand how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a period of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the images he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment....”

He goes on, “I did not know whether my wife was alive...; but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversations with her would have been just as vivid and satisfying, ’set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.’”

Another necessity to survival is the knowledge that man lives only by looking to the future. Those who marched hopelessly to the concentration camp were without hope. When the present was almost unbearable, they looked backward into the past, somehow hoping to rob the present of its terror. But those who did that declined and died. The author observes (p. 72) “Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as of no consequence.... It is a peculiarity of man that he can live by looking to the future. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence....”

When disgusted by the necessities of struggling for miserable existence – should he trade his last cigarette for a bowl of watery soup? How could he get a shoelace? Would the foreman be brutal that day? The doctor forced his thought to the future. He pictured himself (p. 73) “standing on the platform of a well-lit, warmed pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience for comfortable upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp. All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of suffering.”

Time and again he verified the fact that the prisoner who had lost faith in the future was doomed. “When hope was given up, life was given up.”

Out of such real, concrete encounters with the realities that brought death or sustained life, Dr. Frankl wrought out his theory for the cure of disordered personalities. He brought his patient focus on the future and the assignment to be done, the “meanings to be fulfilled.” Believing that man’s search for meaning is primary, not secondary, he considers the faith that meanings exist the spiritual dimension of living.

He has no panacea to provide universal meaning. He uses the analogy of the chess game (p. 110). “To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion, ’Tell me, master, what is the best move in the world?’ ’There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence.’”

“... each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; a life he can only respond by being responsible ... responsibleness (is) the very essence of human existence.”

Robert Browning, who was not quite so naive and sentimental as we might believe, once said:

“Life has meaning
To find that meaning is my meat and drink.”

Throughout this entire unforgettable disclosure of that life is worth living for there is a discipline which should be recognized. Not self-fulfillment, but life fulfillment is the cause which gives strength to people whose burdens are heavy. This is a truth which has been known again and again. Lincoln knew it during the cruel years and agonizing decision; Washington knew it at Valley Forge; the apostle Paul knew it when he endured shipwreck, beatings, and rejection. The modern poet, John Ciardi suggests it in the lines (SR 3/23/63 p. 78)

“Given a picture-window
citizen, make sure it looks out onto
some
thing, which is to say out from
something, preferably, I suggest a
self.”

Does this help us? It would be an immense pretension to suggest that any one of us lives under the immediate threat, the cruel experience, the indescribable physical sufferings and intense mental agony of a prisoner in the death camp. Thank God, right now such extremities are spared us. Yet every one of us is under sentence of death; though the day and hour are not given to us to know. We live under threat, not to recognize this in our kind of world is the cruelest fantasy of all. Modern American man with his cars, careers and comforts is not spared the obligation to carve out meaning for his strivings, goals for his investment of the years of his life. Our need for meaning is no less urgent.

Each of us knows the human situation with first-hand experience. Whether its alternations of happiness and sorrow, fulfillment or frustration, strength and weakness have a constant web of high character depends on the meanings and responsibilities which we weave into the astounding tapestry of events in time. Conviction that our lives have meanings toward which we may reach is the faith that is the character of human experience.

The old Hebrew scripture of Daniel contains a classic illustration. Daniel is not historical nor factual literature, but imaginative and symbolic, written in the 2nd century B.C. when the Hebrews were severely oppressed by the Syrian monarch Antiochus Epiphanes (167 – 164 B.C.). ... fervently hoping for a day when, aided by God, they would triumph over their enemies.

The third chapter tells the fantastic story of Shadrach, Mesach and Abednego. Commanded to worship the golden image set up by King Nebuchadnezzar, the three young Jews refused. They were brought before Nebuchadnezzar and threatened “... if you do not worship, you shall immediately be case into a burning furnace; and who is the God that will deliver you out of my hands?”

Then their famous answer “If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace; and he will deliver us out of your hand O King. But if not be it known to you O King that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden images which you have set up.”

Their life or death depends on a tyrant king, but the meaning the young men placed on human experience was beyond Nebuchadnezzar’s power to corrupt or destroy. This is an illustration of the scripture our heritage of the same truth for living that Victor Frankl found in the death camps. The difference is not in physical endowments or favored position, but in the intangible quality of life we call meaning.

We may be places in situations of despair, gloom – even oppression. Both whether or not we survive such extremities as well as the quality of our survival, depends on the meanings we believe life has and the direction that lives should follow. Those who have goals which demand of them that they resist and conquer present calamity and strain are those who can press through fiery furnaces of physical and moral ordeal. The difference between the hopeless and the hopeful is found in the meaning of life that is faithfully held.

Thus I believe that faith which lifts our sights beyond a present difficulty to a vision of what bing a better person demands of us – this is the character of human experience. This faith is not the closed book; not one of tight creed; not any one economic system; not any one church or nation. This faith is waiting for the seeker who persists in the struggle to find meaning for himself in the nature of human experience, in a mysterious, creating cosmos. The search, and devotion to its goals, comprise the character which will infuse our human experience, with power to resist all the influence which depress our spirits or threaten our ability to cope with the march of the astonishing events of personal and social life. We can find meaning. Such a faith is the character of human experience.