If you were to place a knife under your jaw and begin to slowly cut– with the intent of slitting your own throat, at some point before the deed was done your hand would stop. The searing pain, mingled with fear would make it physically impossible for you to continue–at least, unaided. Neither your physical body, nor your mind would allow you to continue on that unthinkable path.
So it is, when considering what it would be like, to lose a child. It’s simply impossible to accurately express the depth of that pain. There is a threshold, which your mind will not let you cross. Only by the blunt-force trauma of reality can that barrier be breached. Even then, the assault of reality must prove itself before the mind will allow that agony admittance.
In the same way, we are prohibited from truly grasping the atrocities suffered by the souls in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The mind simply will not permit us to grasp the sorrow of so many empty shoes.
In Viktor E. Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, the author, having survived Auschwitz, writes of his experience– not to record the atrocities, rather to answer the question as to why anyone at all would survive.
The preface to the 1992 edition explains:
“This book has now lived to see nearly one hundred printings in English–in addition to having been published in twenty-one other languages. And the English edition alone has sold more than three million copies.
These are the dry facts, and they may well be the reason why reporters of American newspapers and particularly of American TV stations more often than not start their interviews, after listing these facts, by exclaiming: ‘Dr. Frankl, your book has become a true bestseller– how do you feel about such a success?’ Where upon I react by reporting that in the first place I do not at all see in the bestseller status of my book an achievement and accomplishment on my part but rather an expression of the misery of our time: if hundreds of thousands of people reach out for a book whose very title promises to deal with the question of a meaning to life, it must be a question that burns under their fingernails.” [Emphasis mine]
Although the smoke from the Auschwitz crematorium has long ceased, evil still thrives in seats of power today. In the midst, is a new generation growing up in a culture that sends everyone home with a trophy. The relevance of Frankl’s work, and the lessons of the past may be the very thing missing to change the future.
You are cordially invited to walk with me over the next few Sundays, as we explore Man’s Search for Meaning.
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