The Apostles' Creed and the Meaning of Life

"Consider, O my soul, the circumstances of thy creation. (1) God created me out of His pure love. Had He any need of my existence, or could I be necessary to His happiness? "I have loved thee with an everlasting love" (Jer. 31:3). (2) God created me, and the decree of my creation is eternal like Himself. From eternity, then, God thought of me. I was yet in the abyss of nothingness, and God gave me a place in His thoughts! I was in His mind, and in His heart. "I have loved thee with an everlasting love." (3) God created me, and in creating me preferred me to an infinite number of creatures who were equally possible to Him, and who will forever remain in nothingness. O God, how have I deserved this preference! "I have loved thee with an everlasting love." (4) God created me, and by creation made me the most noble of the creatures of the visible world. My soul is in His image, and all my being bears the stamp, the living stamp of His attributes. (5) Las...

Without love nothing will be able to save people even if they possess faith, understanding, knowledge ... or any other gift. - St. John Chrysostom And so, we arrive at the first line of the Apostles' Creed: "I believe in God the Father, Almighty."  (If you want an introduction to what I'm up to here, it might help you to go back to the Introduction .)  Before we get to the specifics of the meaning of the first line of the Creed, it'll be worth first asking a question: How do we make meaning? It's a good question to ask, especially since the focus here is on what the Apostles' Creed says, as well as how that relates to the question of finding meaning in life. To get a sense of how we make meaning, it helps to turn to a story-telling principle explained by the playwright Anton Chekhov. The principle is affectionately known as "Chekhov's gun," because of Chekhov's use of a gun as part of his explanation. The general idea is those ir...

We're living in interesting and uncertain times. Political upheavals are accompanied by ideological battles and all kinds of economic instability, and many of us are faced with various existential struggles too. It's no secret that life is often very tough, and this makes it difficult to make sense of things; it's more than tricky to find our way through the world normally, and even more difficult to know what a meaningful life looks like when we are confronted with so much that doesn’t make sense. This raises the question: How can we make sense of 'things'? Remember Where’s Wally? You know, those picture books filled with drawings of massive crowds, where your job as the reader is to find Wally amidst all of that visual chaos? It’s not easy to find Wally, of course, but one thing’s for sure: to be able to find Wally you actually need to know what he looks like. There’s this story from communist Russia about a man who was reported to be stealing som...