The Meaning of Life.....well just excerpts from the book.

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So I have been doing a fair amount of reading recently, and one of the most interesting reads has been Terry Eagleton's The Meaning of Life. It's a great read: quick, interesting, and accessible.


Here are some quotes that I've particularly enjoyed. Along with a quick update of what my life has been like since I've gotten back from the Holidays:

I've continued setting up Individual Meetings with members of a single Presbyterian Congregation. The meetings are around 30-45minutes in length. They focus on simply trying to get to know the other person: to hear and understand what gives them energy. It involves trying to get the other individual to also think critically about the congregation's role in its surrounding community. I really enjoy these meetings, particularly because I get to spend so much time simply listening to others' stories and experiences.

I spent the weekend in Houston, seeing an old college friend. Touring a new place, and new city was fantastic. I feel lucky to be in such close proximity to three large metropolitan areas: Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. I have the great chance to get to know all three of these areas and their respective multifarious cultures. Instantly, you can tell the difference between San Antonio and Houston, and Houston from Austin and Austin from San Antonio and so on. Hopefully, pictures will be coming soon.

For the past couple of months, I have been participating in the local poetry slam here in San Antonio. It's a great way to push myself creatively in writing, but it also has put me in contact with a great new community: Young individuals from all areas of life; I feel much more connected to the city because of this group. I look forward to every weekly slam.

I'm in the process of applying to Grad schools and seminaries. I still have yet to take the GRE, but am planning to soon. This takes a lot of time, and energy, but it is fun (crazy I know) to learn all these new words for the vocab section of the GRE.

I'm reading a couple great books: Half the Sky (a must read!), Heart of Christianity, and have recently returned to a favorite poet of mine: Robert Bly.

More updates to follow...but here are some of the quotes from the Eagleton book:

Happiness is sometimes seen as a state of mind. But this is not how Aristotle regards it. "Well-being', as we usually translate his term for happiness, is what we might call a state of soul, which for him involves not just an interior condition of being, but a disposition to behave in certain ways...if you want to observe someone's 'spirit', look at what they do.

Happiness for Aristotle is not an inward disposition that might then issue in certain actions, but a way of acting which creates certain dispositions. ... Happiness or well-being for Aristotle, then, involves a creative realization of one's typically human faculties. It is as much something you do as something you are. And it cannot be done in isolation.

(Eagleton compares the human search for happiness to loving)

Sacrificing one's happiness for the sake of someone else is probably the most morally admirable action one can imagine. But it does not therefore follow that it is the most typical or even the most desirable kind of loving. It is not the most desirable because it is a pity that it is necessary in the first place; and it is not the most typical because, as I shall be arguing in a moment, love at its most typical involves the fullest possible reciprocity.

For Aristotle, being human is something we have to get good at, and virtuous people are virtuosi of living. ... You cannot be brave, honourable, and generous unless you are a reasonably free agent living in the kind of political conditions which foster these virtues.

and finally...(Eagleton briefly looks at a commonality in all of humanity: mortality. And how that might bring people together.)

Besides, to be conscious of our limits, which death throws into unforgiving relief, is also to be conscious of the way we are dependent on and constrained by others. When St. Paul comments that we die every moment, part of what he has in mind is perhaps the fact that we can only live well by buckling the self to the needs of others, in a kind of little death, or petit mort. In doing so, we rehearse and prefigure that final self-abnegation which is death. In this way, death in the sense of a ceaseless dying to self is the source of the good life. If this sounds unpleasantly slavish and self-denying, it is only because we forget that if others do this as well, the result is a form of reciprocal service which provides the context for each self to flourish. The traditional name for this reciprocity is love. ... The meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way. It is not metaphysical, but ethical. It is not something separate from life, but what makes it worth living--which is to say, a certain quality, depth, abundance and intensity of life. ... Eternity lies not in a grain of sand but in a glass of water. The cosmos revolves on comforting the sick. When you act in this way, you are sharing in the love which built the stars. To live in this way is not just to have life, but to have it in abundance.

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Comments

[Shirley]

Printing overlaps
Hi Aaron, Most of this I couldn't read because the letters were on top of each other. Perhaps it is my computer but if not it needs to be corrected as what I did read was important.Shirley