RIGHT OF CENTER: FINDING A RESOLUTE FAITH

How mankind faces adversity and suffering today as opposed to 150 years ago says a lot about the decline of the West as a political and philosophical beacon to the world.

I recall a horrible accident on an interstate highway near Chicago last year in which a man and woman lost several children on their way to a church outing. The couple grieved and yet expressed a hope that sustained them through the ordeal and confounded the media who were covering the story.

That hope, essentially, was this: Man controls his own destiny only to the extent that he is responsible for how he acts and reacts in the here and now. All else must be left to another realm of our reality. The young couple whose children were just killed had an external reference point: a loving and sovereign God who is able to bring triumph from tragedy.

Then only a couple weeks ago a local family lost their 13-year-old girl in an automobile accident. The grieving father only hours after the fatal accident bore witness to the same hope in front of thousands at an evangelistic crusade.

The reason so many in the media, along with psychologists and many intellectuals, are confounded by such resolute faith is that it has been dismissed in our post-modern American society. In America today, man is the center of the universe, and when events out of his control cause pain, suffering and conflict, typically he tries to escape. When parents lose their children, they are supposed to run to therapists, who, primarily through manipulation of language, help them to "feel" good about a bad situation. In everyday crises of character, there no longer is such a thing as a moral failure, only a repressed pathology brought about by some past abuse or a bad gene pool.

But happiness is not the final aspiration of man. The pursuit of happiness is. There is a fine line. As with many such lines, where one stands presuppositionally determines on which side of the immense fissure he stands when facing adversity and suffering. It's important to realize that true happiness can never be achieved by will. The will can only pursue happiness, which then ensues.

Victor Frankl, the former Auschwitz prisoner who wrote the classic "Man's Search for Meaning: Experiences in the Concentration Camp," said in a recent interview with "First Things" magazine that "everything can be taken away from man but one thing -- to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." Frankl's "logotherapy" views suffering not as an obstacle to happiness but often the necessary means to it.

Frankl goes on to say that other psychologies begin by asking, "What do I want from life? Why am I unhappy?" Logotherapy asks, "What does life at this moment demand of me?"

Our forefathers, who faced unimaginable hardships in an untamed and harsh land, understood that liberty, responsibility and the pursuit of happiness all were inextricably linked. So do the Chicago minister and his wife and the Southeast Missouri family touched by tragedy.

Unfortunately, too many in society today have believed the lie that happiness isn't transcendent, that there is no eternal reward for faithfully toiling in this existential world. Faced with the emptiness of their psychology, it's no wonder they choose to escape from the realities of pain and suffering, and search for contentment where it can't be found.

~Jay Eastlick is the news editor of the Southeast Missourian.