What Is Life?

A college paper a few years ago offered a prize for “the best definition of life” and many campus cynics had a wonderful time. Here are a few definitions which won “honorable mention”: “Life is a bad joke which isn’t even funny.” “Life is a disease for which the only cure is death.”’ Life is a jail sentence which we get for the crime of being born.” We can dismiss these as merely lively adoles- cent prancing.

Yet they may stand as an indication of a lack of sense of the high meaning of existence. They in- dicate a fact which has a bearing on both theology and psychology. It is hard to keep clear a sense of deep mean- ing in life unless it is put in a cosmic frame. That is just what Jesus did—set life in the fame of a conviction of God.

Such a conviction heightens and deepens the meaning of every experience of life. The absence of such a framework, the lack of an outlook and perspective which might throw a shaft of light on the picture of life and our place in it, is a major cause of the breaking down, the “tearing apart” of personality.