by Gabriel Johnson
But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (all quotes in this article are from Man’s Search for Meaning)
I sat in the rain on a bench outside an emergency shelter. Everything I owned was drenched. My ten-year battle with alcohol addiction had left me here. Ten years earlier, I was moving into a modern chic apartment with views of downtown Houston and beginning law school. Now, I couldn’t even get a cot at an emergency shelter in St. Paul—I had arrived too late to get a bed. I had nowhere else to go, so I’d just sat down on that bench.
The door to the shelter opened and a kind-looking person stepped out and headed straight for me. They sat down next to me, and my heart filled with hope … until they said that their policy was that people not staying in the shelter were not allowed to sleep on the premises. My heart sank even deeper.
Then they said I could stay on that bench, under an awning, but only until the rain stopped—then I had to leave.
The rain didn’t stop until the next morning.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
The next day, I was able to get a bed in the emergency shelter.
A few days later, a chaplain spoke with me and led me to the addiction recovery center affiliated with the shelter. I was accepted, and my time at that recovery center transformed my life. My faith in God, my belief in myself, and my purpose in life were all restored during my time there. It is a happy story, and I wanted to share that early to avoid anyone feeling down while reading this. God knows we have enough to feel down about right now.
But this is about the three days I spent in the shelter before that happy journey began, reading Man’s Search for Meaning.
To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas…it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.
The heaviness of the emergency shelter’s lobby was suffocating. It was full of people suffering severe mental illness, pain from physical injuries, or internal fights with demons. Already feeling miserable and in the late stages of withdrawal, I had to get out.
I heard there was a library nearby, so I headed for it. The street to the library was almost 45 degrees uphill. I trudged up the hill in clothes that were soaked from the night before. Somehow, I was able to get a library card and searched the internet for “books that will change your life”. I have nothing against self-help books, but most of the results had covers of authors with bright faces, perfect teeth, and a promise that if you follow their fourteen-point plan, you too can become a successful self-help writer.
Then, I found Man’s Search for Meaning. Those familiar with the book, or reading it now as part of our Lenten Read, know Viktor Frankl is not a self-help guru. Frankl lived through the worst life has to offer and somehow came out the other side.
Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it…the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.
Frankl did not provide immediate solutions or easy answers on how to turn my life around. He told me to find a “why” to live and pursue that “why” with everything. In that pursuit, he said, you “can bear with almost any ‘how.’”
The shelter was better than the bench. The bench was better than the train. And the train was better than wandering the city aimlessly. I had seen the worst, and it was over. Any anxiety or nightmare I feared in my life before was not as bad as the previous week, and I had survived. My life had completely fallen apart, but Frankl said that brought freedom: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Before this, I had let everything outside of me (family, money, respect, religion, etc.) choose my path. With nothing to lose, I was free to do anything. I was free to be me.
So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!
A year later, I was working at that treatment center. Every need I had was met. Relationships with my family were better than they had been in a long time, and I had a new family of Minnesotans who had helped me in my worst and loved me through it.
I looked back and asked myself “How?” None of it was my effort. I showed up at the emergency shelter and waited. Yet, everything in life had been restored to me tenfold. It wasn’t one kind person’s efforts either. If the person working the shelter had told me to leave, if the chaplain had been too busy, if the recovery center had been full, none of this would have happened. So, how? The only commonality between everyone involved was Jesus.
I say Jesus, and not God, because God for me at that time, and sometimes still today, carries the connotation of religion, rules, and judgment. This wasn’t that. Those people were acting out of love. Love for a man who had so loved them, he sacrificed his life to show them who God really is. A man that gave all so that all could participate in that love. That man’s love, supernaturally dispersed to and from each person in my life, is what carried me through. That kind of love is what can carry us through any “how’’ we are facing today. And that kind of love is only done in community.
For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
