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By Jerry Eaton, LMSW
Executive Director
Catholic Charities

Life is a complete experience. In life there is great joy and great sorrow. We all not only know this, we experience it. Often when we experience what seem to be overwhelming difficulties we question the fairness of life, and the meaning of life. These questions aren’t mere philosophical thoughts that we ponder without feeling. The feelings, in fact, bring up the questions as a reality of practical day to day life when we face the tragic circumstance.

A psychiatrist named Viktor Frankl was a survivor of the concentration camps during the Holocaust, and was in the death camp at Auschwitz. He survived but both his parents and his wife died while in the concentration camps.  Frankl survived to publish his most famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning.  

One of my favorite quotes from the book is, “Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of being human.” In the death camps, “Everything can be taken from a man or woman but one thing; the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance, to choose one’s way.”

These aren’t mere words of a great intellect, but instead the words of a man knowing firsthand and, with great depth, almost unimaginable suffering – how we wish the holocaust was unimaginable instead of real. Frankl also writes in his book, “ Let us be alert in a twofold sense: since Auschwitz we know what man in capable of and since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”

We all experience many good things and many bad things in our lifetimes. The death of a loved one, the death of a marriage, the loss of a job, a flood, a tornado, health problems, relationship problems, individual problems, unfairness, abuse, indifference, etc - are all examples of the bad things and many of the bad things that happen are beyond our ability to control or change. We are sometimes surprised by the depth of the impact on us and how it hangs on with us day after day. It is like carrying an extra heavy weight around that we can’t get off of us.

It isn’t just what happened, it is how it changed us and the way we think and feel. In the tornado we lost everything, but so many people were there to help and were so good to us, and it takes time for the shock to wear off. It may be weeks later that we miss our home and miss simply being at home. It is the same in a flood, with the loss of a marriage, with the loss of a job and income, the death of a loved one, health problems, etc.

We may do just fine with some of these things and be surprisingly overwhelmed by another, and there can be a cumulative effect as well as things build up that aren’t really dealt with and suddenly a small thing happens and we don’t know why we are so shaken. We wonder how anyone can help us when they can’t change what has happened, and that is really what we think we need to have happen.

Imagine the experience of the Holocaust and what went through the minds of the people in the camps. Imagine the very real level of despair, anguish, fear, anger, and hopelessness that had to be faced. There were as many ways to handle it as there were people in the camps because each human experience is unique and so is the meaning of each experience in our lives.

Frankl says, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” We can choose to grieve our loss, we can choose to use our experience to mature to become a better human being, or not.

The successful approach to dealing with the difficulties, the despair, the anguish, the loss, to the issues we face in life leads us where and to what? The unsuccessful approach to dealing with all of this leads us where and to what? What is the meaning we derive out of what has happened and how do we use this meaning and for what purpose?

This isn’t a simple intellectual exercise devoid of profound emotion – it is one of the most meaningful experiences in our lives - Meaningful, with what meaning in our lives?