I’ll be offering reflections that expand on, unpack, or further explore ideas and themes I’m developing in essays, fiction, and other writing. My hope is to provide a more conversational and informal space to engage these topics in both audio and written form, and to publish new reflections regularly.

If interested, you can also find links to some of my recent published writing below:

The Anti-Narrative of Sin and Evil (Evangelization & Culture)

Perfect Days and Beauty in the Ordinary (Evangelization & Culture)

As always, I appreciate your listening and reading.

When I was in college and before my reversion experience, I had what I can only describe as an “anxiety of soul” experience. Really, I suppose, it was despair. I was flying across the Atlantic to begin a study abroad program. It was winter and it was completely dark outside. I remember looking out the window into the blackness and feeling the cold off the glass.

What if there really is no God? What if nothing really matters in this life?

I remember thinking that this plane could go headlong into the ocean right now and while our loved ones would be sad if we all died, in some greater sense, it really wouldn’t matter if God didn’t exist. If we’re merely part of a cold, mindless universe, then in a thousand years the fate of the people on this plane wouldn’t matter. This wasn’t a new idea to me or anything. I’d read philosophers, existentialist and atheist philosophers, who wrote about the absurdity of life and the great act of human creativity required to give your life meaning when there is no meaning to be found outside of ourselves. Obviously, some people can find a kind of freedom in that. The notion of a dead God, so to speak, can mean we are the ones with the power to choose and decide what makes for a moral or purposeful life.

I never found that notion to be comforting, or really convincing. Either there’s God, and things make sense and life is inherently meaningful (even if we don’t always perceive it), or there isn’t, and we can pretend that what we’re doing with our lives is important but, on the final account, it isn’t. In this latter scenario, we craft our own meaning as a form of delusion in order to get up in the morning. And then once we’re up, we busy ourselves with distractions and pleasures and whatever else to not think about it.

But I think the reason I had this anxiety of soul back then, and why it preceded my serious search into the existence of God, is because intuitively we sense that our lives should be meaningful, even if we intellectually don’t assent to any transcendent reality. I think that deep down, in our heart of hearts, there’s a voice that whispers, “My life must matter.”

Meaning is either given to us or we have to create it, but either way, we can’t survive without it. That’s why even people who intellectually reject God may still speak in terms of having a calling or purpose. They might say things like, “The universe is telling me this or calling me to do that.”

But if there’s no God, then no one’s calling you, or me, or anyone.

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Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who lived through the Holocaust, developed what he coined logotherapy, a theory focused on the importance of having meaning for human flourishing. Frankl observed while in a concentration camp, that some people endured better than others, and not always because they were physically stronger or healthier. Rather, it was because they had a sense of meaning beyond themselves. Perhaps they had loved ones they yearned to return to, a family or children they were committed to seeing again. Or perhaps they had some great scientific or artistic work they hoped to accomplish. Obviously, simply desiring to live for some greater purpose didn’t guarantee they did, but it seemed to Frankl that the people without meaning, the people who gave up or despaired, didn’t survive as well. The lack of meaning shriveled up their souls, and so their bodies soon followed.

More recently, Arthur Brooks has written a book titled The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, in which he also argues that we need meaning in order to live full and flourishing lives (and to not feel “emptiness”). He claims that meaning consists of three major components: purpose, significance, and coherence. Purpose refers to having something in life to which we’re striving, some important goal. Significance refers to knowing that what you do matters to other people—that your actions make a real positive difference in the world and others’ lives. And coherence refers to having a sense that your life fits together, that the events of your life aren’t random or senseless. In other words, it is a belief that your life has some intelligible narrative, at least in part, and that you have some role to play.

I want to focus on this last component: coherence.

Aquinas writes that sin darkens the intellect. One way of reading this is that the more we sin, the less we can divine the intelligibility of our reality. In other words, the more we give into sin the less coherent our lives become—and the more obscure our specific role in this life becomes. Of course, we don’t know clearly how our lives fit in God’s grand narrative, but there is a difference between having faith that our lives are meaningful, even if opaque, and the opposite. I’m a fan of Saint John Henry Newman’s prayer that reaffirms we do, in fact, have a mission in life, whether we know the details or not:

“God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.”

While we may never see the whole picture (at least in this life), God will offer us glimpses of our lives’ coherence. If we’re seeking Him, if we’re entrusting ourselves to the Divine Storyteller, we begin to develop the conviction that we have a role to play: that we have been created for some unique purpose grounded in love that reveals God to others in a singular way.

But not having this coherence of life, if you will, is one of the great tragedies of sin. We begin to feel that nothing ultimately matters. And if we don’t believe in God or reject Him, then the narratives of our lives will not and cannot ever be coherent in a way that gives us meaning.

There is a fantastic, haunting line from Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups related to this idea. One character in the film says, “You think when you reach a certain age things will start making sense, and you find out that you are just as lost as you were before. I suppose that’s what damnation is. The pieces of your life never to come together, just splashed out there.”

Without God, we’re left trying to piece together meaning ourselves, and there will always be pieces that don’t fit. There will remain suffering that remains senseless. Experiences that are never resolved. Relationships that can never heal. And because we don’t possess a supreme intellect capable of seeing the whole picture, we’re left with a terrible “anxiety of soul.” We’re left with despair.

But Christianity offers something radically different. Christ comes as the Logos, the logic of God, and the one who can take all of the disparate threads of our lives that don’t make sense and weave them together into a coherent whole. And the greatest testament to God’s power to do this is the Cross. From a merely human perspective, Christ’s death is senseless. This wise and captivating teacher, this man who is supposed to be the Messiah and usher the Jewish people into a new golden age, in the end, is brutally tortured, mocked, and killed.

To put it simply: without the existence of God, there’s no way to read the story of the Cross as coherent or meaningful. It’s just a tragic, senseless destruction of a life. But that seemingly meaningless occurrence becomes the defining event of salvation history. What appears as the ultimate “untethered thread” becomes the cornerstone of redemption for human nature. Christ reveals that every single detail or our lives, no matter how seemingly purposeless, can also be redeemed and fit into a coherence narrative of meaning.

It is the cross that shows us God’s authorial power, that reveals God’s infinitely creative capacity to imbue all of reality, no matter how dark or intelligible, with transcendent meaning. The Cross gives our lives direction, one that entails our own death and suffering, yes, but when united with Christ, concludes with the resurrection and everlasting life. Christ is the one who gives coherence, direction, and meaning to our lives. As Pope Benedict XVI beautifully stated: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

Thanks for reading (or listening).

Thanks for reading Ends in Mind! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

You can also find some of my published writing related to topics I cover in my Substack below:

Learn to See and Know God Dwelling in Others (Evangelization & Culture)

I Won’t Help Train AI (Evangelization & Culture)

As always, thanks for listening.

Thanks for reading Ends in Mind! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

You can also find some of my published writing related to topics I cover in my Substack below:

I Won’t Help Train AI (Evangelization & Culture)

On Contemplation and the Fruitfulness of Trust (Evangelization & Culture)

As always, thanks for listening.

Thanks for reading Ends in Mind! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

You can also find some of my published writing related to topics I cover in my Substack below:The Illusions and Addictions of Interactive Technologies (Evangelization & Culture)

On Contemplation and the Fruitfulness of Trust (Evangelization & Culture)

Learn to See and Know God Dwelling in Others (Evangelization & Culture)

As always, thanks for listening.

Thanks for reading Ends in Mind! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.