I enjoy funerals — is that wrong? While we grieve the loss, we celebrate the unique good in a person’s life and, even more, the promise that this good will be purified and magnified in eternity. From funerals, I love to gather insight on what really matters in life — and on what only seems to matter. I am always reminded that there are as many paths to life’s meaning as there are individual persons.
By this I do not at all mean that the meaning of life, the character of a good and moral life, is relative to individuals. There are eternal truths that come into view through any individual life that is well-lived, and in some ways more strikingly through lives that are full of big — and, in retrospect, rather obvious — mistakes. To some extent, we all learn the hard way what matters — service and faithfulness to family and friends, and the inward peace that can only come from respecting some law above our own whims and desires.
In this sense, the lives of celebrities such as rock stars can be instructive in much the same way as funerals; I used to be quite amused, as well as edified, by those MTV documentaries that seemed always to follow the same script:
1) Talented youth achieves fame and fortune long before he has a fraction of the wisdom needed to makes sense of or manage his success.
2) Young rock star responds by using up money, other people (especially women) and his own emotional and physical health and an astounding rate.
3) Young star may notice friends and associates are dying or otherwise ruining themselves by living the same kind of lifestyle he is living, but not enough to interrupt the reckless flight from reality.
4) Fast forward two or three decades. The star or former star is somehow among the survivors. Amid the massive wreckage of a life without principles, our star has outlived his most destructive vices, having made enough money to afford the rehabs and the second, third and fourth chances that few ordinary people can hope for. The elemental passions having subsided, and it begins to dawn on our fading star that the meaning of life lies elsewhere — perhaps in the disciplined practice of a musical craft and the beauty it affords, but especially in the steady and reliable love shared with friends and family. The meaning of life is there in the ordinary affections and loyalties that the frenzy of wealth and fame and lust had concealed. Our once-raging icon now utters homely truths you might expect from Ward and June Cleaver.
To some extent, we all learn the hard way what matters — service and faithfulness to family and friends, and the inward peace that can only come from respecting some law above our own whims and desires.
Most people would never survive such spectacular vices with anything left to salvage, but all of us learn from our mistakes and from the refining fire of the ordinary tasks and trials of life. Funerals give us the opportunity to share a bit of this learning and to contemplate our own moral and spiritual growth against the background of our own certain death.
Pre-Christian philosophies, such as Stoicism, like Eastern religions, tend to see time as a Great Wheel going nowhere: all things must pass, and in the perspective of eternity, the individual and his or her path of learning amounts to nothing. The philosopher Seneca compared his beloved Paulina to a leaf on a tree: She would die and would be replaced in another season by another leaf. The individual means nothing in eternity.
Modern individualism, with its ethic of “authenticity” seems to say the opposite: Every person decides the meaning of life for himself. But without any perspective of eternity, the creation of meaning is groundless and ephemeral. We may take pride in raging against the dying of the light, but all is vanity. Nothing really matters after all.
We modern individualists are heirs of Judeo-Christian civilization, whether we know it or not, and our sense of the real significance of each person’s quest for meaning is derivative of the biblical idea of the divine significance of every child of God. Only within the biblical perspective does the individual quest for meaning intersect with eternity.
This is the beautiful truth that emerges from funerals and even from rockumentaries. Our individual existence is meaningful because our principle of eternity, our God, acknowledged or not, is a person.