Who We Are

My Dear People,

As the last notes of Sunday's postlude hung in the air, she asked, "Have you ever read Viktor Frankl?," her eyes smiling.

Having just finished Man's Search for Meaning, the book clearly had made a great impression on her. The same was true for me, I told her. When I read the book, originally titled Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp, I was so moved by it that, as a school teacher at the time, I gave the book as a personal gift to all my graduating seniors.

In case you don't know Frankl's story, he was a Viennese Jew who was put into a Nazi concentration camp, along with his wife and extended family. He and one member of the family lived. His wife did not. 

As you would imagine, he saw and experienced unspeakable and barbaric things at the hands of his captors. Nevertheless, even while still in a concentration camp, Frankl experienced a radical reorientation of his life, coming to believe that the human experience is indeed a search for meaning, and that the ultimate meaning of life is love.

And yet, in the camps, while he saw many turn towards meaning and love, he saw others turn away from meaning and love.

As he said, "The last of the human freedoms is to choose one's attitude."

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An article in yesterday's Richmond Times Dispatch, opens with the lines, "Virginia Tech graduate Colin Goddard, vowing not to allow himself to be defined simply as a victim of gunman Seung-Hui Cho, told a national audience yesterday that it remains far too easy to obtain guns without identification or background checks."

How about those words, "...vowing not to allow himself to be defined simply as a victim..."

Like Frankl, Colin Goddard knows he is free to choose: free to choose his attitude. And so he chooses.

And so he is working on a documentary; and so he appeared on Oprah this week (the "national audience" referred to above).

He is free to choose, to choose his attitude. And he refuses to be defined simply as a victim.

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I am reminded of Jesus standing before Pilate, when Pilate says, "Don't you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you." And Jesus answers, "You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above." And later when Jesus, from the Cross, gives his mother into the care of the Beloved Disciple, and the Beloved Disciple into Mary's care. And, then, still later, when Jesus says, "I am thirsty." And then, finally, at the end of his life, when he says, "It is finished."

The Evangelist John wants us to understand that to see Jesus as a victim is to misunderstand his Passion. Jesus endures what he endures for the sake of love. He would not be defined simply as a victim. In the face of everything, he chooses: he chooses love. 

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Neither would Jesus ever have us define ourselves simply as victims.

In the final analysis, we are always free to choose, free to choose our attitude, as Frankl says.

Which is another way of saying, we are always free to take responsibility, no matter what happens: free to take responsibility for the lives we live.