The world yearns for Light in darkness

HOPE – 2025 – Is there Hope in darkness?  -  Victor Frankle

I am of the generation of those young people who were inspired by the book by the Jewish psychologist Victor Frankl ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’.  In it he writes about his experience from inside the Auschwitz concentration camp a place that must have come as close as it was possible to hell on earth.  He spoke of the way people sought to survive by seeking to distract themselves.  Here, however, distraction and denial come at a prohibitive cost and are guaranteed to fail.

Sometimes it is said of religious people, they struggle to cope with life, so opt for a life of God and faith. On the other hand, Frankl’s observation was that those inside the camp with faith in something ‘outside’ (of both the camp, and the present moment) were the ones most able to hold onto life. Not the eating, breathing, and moving life on this earth, something beyond.

The Nietzsche perspective

Friedrich Nietzsche, a man thoroughly opposed to the God that Christians profess, puts what Frankl is speaking of as; he who has a why can bear almost any how. Nietzsche’s ‘meaning’ challenge applies to our lives as Christians. Frankl’s observation about many of his generation, and I am sure many of ours, was that

people have enough to live by but nothing to live for;

they have the means but no meaning.”

There is nothing to trust, nothing in which to have faith. 

What that means is that when we have no adequate resources the present can overwhelm us. 

There is no answer to the question “why”

For any who are tired of the shallow ‘whys’ that just do not seem to be able sustain our ‘how’, Jesus says, ‘man does not live by bread alone’, ‘but by every word that comes from above.’ Here-and-now (the ‘secular’), flesh-and-blood, we do not and cannot have all the resources we need to keep faith, hope, and love abiding. Living in the contemporary world of today, circumstances can sometimes be too harsh, bewildering, threatening, and dumbfounding.  It is not particularly helpful when Jesus pointed out how life’s road is long and narrow and few find it.   

Fortunately for believers, there is more to the world than just what is going on around us; what is happening to us at any precise moment.    We believe that Jesus’ redemptive work in this sorrowful, dark, and tearful world is one everyone is invited to be a part of no matter how soul-destroying our past or present. He has promised that in Him, death (the greatest threat to ‘why’) will die, will no longer define us. The resurrection trumps the grave every time and it is in His rising from the grave our hope is founded.  Where he was the "firstborn" we too will follow.

Elie Wiesel and his greater cause

For another Jewish man from the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, the Nazis’ atrocities assaulted his faith in a loving, just God, until finally his belief in God’s existence itself is extinguished. That end of believing came when he found himself a witness to the hanging of a child. Does he lose the “why” that enables him to bear the harrowing “how” of camp life?

Wiesel's experience does not suggest a dedication to a greater cause. His faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is challenged by the horrors of the crematoria. He survives camp life but only through brutality, through resourcefulness and desperation. However, these are only helpful if the individual person finds the inner strengths necessary to keep them burning within us. While caring for his father does motivate him during these trials, this relationship sometimes weakens. The oppressive environment created by the Nazis is so severe that Wiesel does not fulfill his father's dying wish to be accompanied in his final moments, due to fear of being beaten. The brutality removed from his life tghe only thing offering him a smidgen of hope and dignity. But even that idea was brushed aside by the drive to survive. And who are we to judge him?

Fascinatingly, despite the echoing finality with which Wiesel writes how he will “never forget those flames that consumed my faith forever”, he does still describe a belief in God in his Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (1986). When describing the persistence of brutality and suffering in the world, he remarks that he still has faith, “Faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and even in His creation. Without it no action would be possible. And action is the only remedy to indifference [to suffering], the most insidious danger of all” even for a man with a million and one reasons for giving up on God, something in his experiences reassured him that while God might appear hidden in times of crisis, the divine presence remains and God's track record encourages us to keep going.

Our God is indwelling: thus we have a reliable source of Hope

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl posits that God can be found everywhere, even in a concentration camp. This is a powerful part of the heritage of Judaism. When the People of God had been exiled to Babylon, they too wondered where God was. They despaired for their future as a people because a sign of God's covenant with them was the Promised Land. That land was now gone. Did that mean God had dumped them? That God no longer loved them? Hence the words of the hymn: O how can we sing the song of the Lord on alien soil Psalm 137).

The prophet Ezekiel addressed this concern in his own prophetic manner. In 10:1-22 he describes the throne rising from the Temple site in Jerusalem and heading east, towards Babylon. It was not just a throne, but a throne carrying with it the fullness of power and glory that was God's and God's alone. The message was clear and reassuring. wherever the people of Go gather, there too resides the Almighty in the fullness of his divine being.

Such is the very nature of God. This is the same God who creates and who sustains his creation. He is the God who called Abraham and made promises to him that were fulfilled when the Hebrew people entered Canaan. He is the God of David who empowered him to overcome Goliath, the God who forgave them repeatedly. God has not changed despite the myriad sins of his people. The God we find in Genesis chapter one is the same God we find bringing all things to a conclusion in the concluding chapter of the Book of Revelation. This unchanging nature of God is a guarantee of his trustworthiness.

He is always present and always reaching out, whether sought by individuals or communities (or unknown to them). This belief holds that God is never remote but always active, and especially transparent in acts of sacrificial love. From his experiences in the camp, Frankl spent his life promoting the belief that an inherent God, a God who is indwelling, is guiding us towards a conscious, personal relationship with Him, is accessible through prayer.   

Bishop Michael Hough                                  Number 4                                            January 2025