Up and Out

Post 1 of a series on Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

A friend handed me this book.

I was in therapy at the time. More than one kind. It was good work, and I will not knock it, because it helped me and I am grateful for it. But it all pointed in the same direction.

Where do you feel that in your body?

What is underneath that anger?

What happened to you before this?

How does that make you feel?

Down, and back.

The problem was that I could not trust my feelings then. Half the time I could not even name them. That door was not open to me. Yet.

And when I did find it, it felt like it just moved. Or got deeper.

That was disheartening and disorienting.

It took years to get to the place where I could name the true feeling under the feeling. Then came the harder work of rewriting it.

Good work. Glad I did it.

Turns out my anger was unprocessed grief. And I had lots of it. Compounded by years of drinking or avoiding instead of feeling. Which is NOT a good strategy.

But.

What I could not reach was something else. A reason. A purpose. Something outside of me and larger than me.

Something more out than in.

Something in this moment rather than from the past.

Why I was looking in the first place

My brother was murdered. There were multiple trials.

It was by far one of the hardest things I have ever had to deal with. And it came at a really, really difficult time for me spiritually and relationally.

It felt like I was being assaulted on all fronts.

The church I was part of then had one explanation to offer.

God was doing this to me, or at least allowing it for some greater good. I actually had pastors and books telling me that God was smiting me. That all bad things were being done to me for my good.

After everything that had already happened, that did not compute. I could not hold a God who smites. And when I said so out loud, most of the people I had leaned on for years were gone within a few months.

Their theology didn't have room for any other explanation.

So I left, and I went looking.

I read Marcus Aurelius first. Meditations, the private notebook of one of the last great Roman emperors. What I took from him was small, and it loosened something in my chest. Good things happen to bad people. Bad things happen to good people.

Bam! My suffering was not a verdict on me.

That was life-giving.

Then a friend handed me Frankl.

The man

Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna. In 1942 the Nazis took him and his family. His wife died. His mother died. His father died. He spent three years in four camps, including Auschwitz, and came out in 1945 with nothing. He sat down and wrote this book in nine days.

He wanted it published with no name on the cover.

It has since sold millions of copies. When reporters congratulated him, Frankl refused the compliment. He said the sales were not an achievement. They were a sign of how many people are starving for an answer.

He is not chasing the question you would expect. Not why so many died. Why anyone at all lived.

His answer was not strength or health. It was whether a man still had somewhere to walk toward. A person waiting for him. Work unfinished. Something owed to someone. He quotes Nietzsche again and again: He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. He watched men lose the why and die inside a week with nothing changed on the outside.

That was the first thing anyone had offered me that pointed up and out instead of down and back.

The marble

Before the war, Frankl was offered an American visa. He could have escaped. But leaving meant leaving his parents to whatever was coming, and he could not decide. He wanted, in his own words, a hint from heaven.

Then he saw a piece of marble on the table at home. His father had carried it back from the ruins of a Vienna synagogue the Nazis burned. It was a fragment of the tablets of the Law, one gilded Hebrew letter still on it.

Frankl asked which commandment it stood for.

Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land.

He let the visa lapse. He stayed.

The commandment that decided his life is the one with a promise of home attached. He was handed an escape and chose to stay in his own house with his own parents, and it cost him nearly everything.

Where this ends up

I am Orthodox Christian now. I was not then. That matters to the story, because Frankl and a dead Roman emperor were waypoints on the road that got me here, not detours off it.

Everything I have comes from his people. Jesus was a Jewish teacher. The apostles were Jews. When I stand in church, I sing David's psalms, hear the prophets read aloud, and watch incense rise the way it rose in the Temple.

St. Paul says we were grafted in, a wild branch cut into a living tree, and he is careful to add what that means. The branch does not hold up the root. The root holds up the branch.

And it all points to one person. Jesus. Our Logos, our Word, and that word is going to matter a great deal in the next post.

Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote the foreword to my edition, and he closes with a line of Frankl's I have not been able to put down. Man is the being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz. He is also the being who walked into them upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema on his lips.

Two prayers. One doorway. Nobody in that room was arguing about whose story it was.

Or even if perhaps God was smiting them.

So let me say it plainly. I love this man. I love that he wrote it in nine days and then tried to keep his name off it. I love that he stayed for his parents. Truth is, he is somebody further up the road who turned around and left directions.

Reading his book and listening to his lectures have become an annual tradition of mine. I hold him near and dear to my heart.

This blog is called Getting to Hope because I do not think hope is a mood you can summon. I think it is a place, and you have to travel to it, and most of us are still walking.

I was not walking anywhere for a while. Frankl got me pointed up and out. The rest of this series is about what I found once I started moving.

Next: logos, logotherapy, and the Word. Where Viktor and I walk together, and where we part.