With a smart phone at hand, and a powerful search engine, we have banished the anxiety of not knowing. Now we can know any particular thing we care to know, yet knowledge of all things is still beyond our ability. But would even complete knowledge satisfy, or do we really long for a different kind of knowing?

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            We are talking these winter months, from January through the end of March, about the spiritual question of meaning, “Why does it matter?”

            Maybe the winter is a good season to ask that question.  It’s cold and dark.  It’s easy to feel a little depressed and despairing.  Although a Los Angeles winter isn’t as bad as a Siberian winter, we might find ourselves concluding along with some pessimistic Russian novelist, maybe nothing really does matter.

            On the other hand, as winter moves toward spring, we might be spending these several weeks imagining what the rest of year will be.  Dreaming dreams. Making plans.  In that case we might be asking the question of meaning the way Victor Frankl asks it, “What are you living for?”

            Our lives matter when we feel that we are connected to something larger than ourselves.  Because that thing matters and we are a part of it, our lives matter, too.

            If that something larger than ourselves has goals that it longs to meet, a forward direction, then the choices we make about how we lead our lives matter, because we can either help that larger thing achieve its goals, or we can work against it.

            Our lives matter because we can either be helpers toward the needs of other people, or a community we belong to, or humanity, or life, or God, or we can be obstructionists who block or work against the greater good.  What you do matters.  How you choose to live matters, because your choices can either help or hurt the achievement of the larger goals.

            Meaning in life comes from recognizing that there is something larger than yourself, learning or intuiting the goals of that larger thing, and then aligning your life to be a co-creator with that larger thing in achieving its goal.

            So the first step, which is really the first step of any spiritual life, is identifying some important thing larger than yourself, that also includes you; that cares about you, depends on you, as you also depend on it; something that has a hold on you, asks something of you, and suffers or succeeds by your actions.

            Something larger than yourself doesn’t have to be some cosmically-scaled thing.  It might be just a special friend, or a pet, even.  It might be just you and a partner, or you and your family, or your church community.  The larger thing might be all of humanity, or all living beings.  As soon as you can relate to something beyond just yourself alone then the spiritual journey begins.  Then, as we mature, spiritually, our sense of connection expands and the larger thing gets even larger.  We see that people and animals far distant from us are affected by our actions and suffer or succeed based on our choices.  The progress of spiritual development is measured by pushing out the boundaries of our meaningful connection with ever larger circles of existence.

            With a sense of something larger than us, and a sense of what that something needs, desires, hopes for, we can then make our lives worthy, by helping that larger thing achieve what it hopes to achieve.

            So the question of finding meaning in our lives, then, comes down to having a sense of what the larger goals of existence might be.

            To answer, “What am I living for?” in a way that makes my life personally meaningful, means answering the question, “What is existence for?”

            It’s not just the question of “Why does my life matter?”  But why does anything matter?

            If you’re very materialistically minded, you might quickly answer, “well it doesn’t really matter.”

            Rocks and stones don’t have goals, and neither do planets.  The earth doesn’t care whether we’re here or not.  The natural laws that govern physical existence aren’t for better or worse, they just are.  And if the universe is simply the same kind of physical thing that a rock or a planet is, then it’s silly to talk about they’re being any goal of the universe.

            And so, if there is no ultimate goal to align our lives with, then our lives have no ultimate meaning, either.

            But existence isn’t entirely material.  Existence is made of immaterial stuff, too:  like ideas, feelings, memories.  The Buddhists say that the ultimate form of existence is not physical stuff but pure consciousness.  Human beings have thoughts and hopes and dreams.  We have plans and motivations.  Animals, too, have goals and desires:  comfort, peace, health, joy.  Animals can conceive of better or worse lives.  Plants, too, in a limited fashion.  It’s actually not “all the same to the clam.”  You cannot reduce the spiritual idea of better or worse, right or wrong, down to a material object subject to physical laws.  But, if you’re theologically minded, you can build up those simple goals of life, like comfort, peace, health, and joy, into universals that all life shares.

            And the truth is, we do think our lives matter.  even to the most materialistically minded, at least on a small scale, we do make decisions every day with a sense that it matters, at least to me, at least to my family, at least to my community, whether I do this thing, or that other thing, or nothing at all.  Because it matters to them, it matters to me. Because it matters to that something larger than myself, maybe even to the entire interdependent web of all existence of which I am a part, my life matters, too.

            The meaning in my life is simply a small and local example of a larger meaning, perhaps even an ultimate meaning.

            That’s why, when I’ve been talking about this over the last few weeks, I’ve been talking about the concept of ultimates.  What is the big thing, or things, that give meaning to everything and give us individually a sense that my life matters?

            I started talking about a sense of order.  That the universe is an ordered place.  And so, I respect order, and attempt to make order, and restore order, in my own life.

            I talked about service as an ultimate.  If existence is structured as an interdependent system, where every part supports and sustains the other parts, then, my acts of service to others, contributes to the ultimate goal of the universe.

            Or, when I make a little beauty in my life, or recognize and appreciate the beauty I experience in my life, I honor the ultimate beauty that lies behind all existence.  That matters.

            Today, I want to talk about an ultimate that lies close to my own sense of meaning in life:  the ultimate of wisdom.

            And I also want to share a little warning about attaching the meaning of lives to ultimates that applies to all the ultimates.

            So wisdom.

            I’ve always been a smart guy.

            And I’ve always attached a lot of pride to being smart and being recognized as smart.

            My parents were both educated people who taught my three brothers and I that being intelligent was praiseworthy and learning was a worthy goal.

            I did well in school.  I read from an early age.  I wasn’t much for sports and physical activity as a kid, so I gravitated to a life of the mind.  That’s where I found my worth, and my friends, and my meaning.

            I like to think I’m more of a well-rounded person now.  But it’s still in my mind, rather than my body, where I find my deepest satisfaction.  I like knowing things.  Just for the sake of knowing.  And I like when I’m recognized as a person who knows things.

            I will admit that I have, on occasion been in a situation where I’m out with friends and they’re all discussing some trivial question, and I will surreptitiously take out my phone under the table and google it, and then announce the answer as though it were something I just happened to know.

            So that’s the sin of pride.

            But my real satisfaction is not in showing off my knowledge, but simply having knowledge.

            Questions make me anxious.  Answers soothe me.

            For instance, I have very little patience for television shows that present some mystery and then withhold the facts as a way of building suspense.  If the truth isn’t revealed by the end of the second episode I give up.  And then I’ll usually look it up on Wikipedia so I can regain that cool confidence I find in knowledge.

            I’m a big fan of Snopes.com.  The facts matter to me.  Did that person really say that?  Did that really happen?  Is that true?  I want to know.

            I read the New York Times every day.  And the Washington Post.  And the Los Angeles Times.  I dread being the person in any conversation who doesn’t know what the others are talking about.

            In the New York Times yesterday, for instance, the first article that caught my eye, or rather caught my mind, was titled “The Quest to Find Rectangles in a Square.” (By Siobhan Roberts, Feb. 7, 2023).  I know, exciting, right?  That’s the kind of thing that intrigues me.  And the subtitle was even bigger catnip for me, “A puzzle posted in an online community unlocked a wormhole within the basic shape.”

            I had to read that article even before I scrolled down and did the Wordle, which is another puzzle I must solve every day.

            Here’s what the article was about.

            A mathematical physicist at the University of California, Riverside named John Carlos Baez posted on a social media site devoted to mathematics the fact that, “there are three ways to divide a square into three rectangles with the same proportions!”  He includes the exclamation point, so you get what kind of people we’re talking about.

            He then asked how many ways can you divide a square into four similarly proportioned rectangles.

            Here’s a quote from the article.  “Among the first to take the bait was Rahul Narain, a computer scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.   There turned out to be 11 solutions — 11 ways a square can be divided into four similarly proportioned rectangles. The solutions gradually accumulated with crucial input from Ian Henderson, an independent software developer in the Bay Area, and Daniel Piker in Bristol, England, who works as a design systems analyst developing software for architects at Foster + Partners.  And a lot of other people also helped, Dr. Baez said. “That’s why it was fun.”

            You can decide for yourself whether dividing squares into rectangles counts as fun.

            I confess to being completely lost around math problems.  But what I related to in the article was noticing the ways that the mathematicians talked about the problem.  No practical application that I could see.  Just knowledge for the sake of knowledge.  Meaning-making, just because knowing stuff is inherently worthwhile.

            For instance, Mr. Picker said, “I thought it was kind of cool that there was something so simple that apparently hadn’t been looked at before.” 

            A woman named Lisanne Taams, “posted an 11-part thread — with technical passages composed with LaTeX, a scientific typesetting language — showing that this humble geometry puzzle is connected to more serious and formal mathematics.  In other words, she came up with a proof that the ratio of the long sides to the short sides are “algebraic numbers,” a major topic in number theory.”

            Another woman named Sarah Hart, a mathematician at Birkbeck, University of London — whose book, “Once Upon a Prime,” which explores connections between mathematics and literature, comes out in April — called this rectangulation recreation “awesome” and “lovely.”

            Do you see how all the ultimates eventually relate to each other?  Here, the ultimate of wisdom, relates back to the ultimate of beauty, which we talked about last week.

            “What makes a problem lovely?” she said. “That’s a tricky one.” For Dr. Hart, it helps if the problem is easy to describe, and easy to play with. “ It’s beautiful, at least she sees it this way,  if “you can get your hands dirty straight away with simple examples” And then it “becomes deliciously complex and challenging.”

            So, of course, the mathematicians didn’t stop there.

            How many ways can you divide a square into five similar rectangles, or six?

            Well to ease your anxiety the answer is 51 for five rectangles.  245 for six rectangles.

            But why stop there?  For seven rectangles there are 1,371 possible solutions.  And for eight rectangles there are 8,506.

            And for nine rectangles?  Well, the article stopped there and I skipped down to do the Wordle.

            But here is the danger that I spoke of when relating meaning in our lives to ultimates.

            It’s that wormhole we start down where, if I know there are three ways to divide a square into three similarly proportioned rectangles, then I immediately want to ask what about four, or five, or six, or seven, or eight.  Every piece of knowledge is only ever a piece of the ultimate puzzle.  And very often, answering one question only leads to new questions that we hadn’t even thought to ask before we had answered the first question.

            If the ultimate of wisdom is about the universe knowing itself, then we have to concede that we will never know it all.  No mere accumulation of facts is ever going to get me there.  No matter how quickly I can google under the table, there will always be questions unanswered, facts I don’t know, questions I don’t even know enough to ask.

            So what I want, is not knowledge per se but wisdom.  Insight that comes not with endless striving and obsession, but knowing mixed with a sense of humility and a resonant sigh of, “enough.”

            If disorder, or the unmet needs of others, or instances of ugliness, or mystery stories leave you anxious, then life is ever going to leave you anxious.  Any approach of a finite human being to an ultimate is eventually going to come up short.

            So our life’s meaning, then, cannot be predicated on reaching the ultimate, whichever ultimate it is that we reach for, but rather on our progress, however small, toward the ultimate.  Ultimately, our satisfaction must be in surrendering to our limits, not in overcoming them, resting in gratitude for having been able to do our part, and then letting the something larger than ourselves continue from there.

            So Rilke says, “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”  “The point is, to live everything.”  So, “Live the questions now.”

            And Timothy Haley says, in the words of our meditation today, “We know we are on our pilgrimage here but a brief moment in time.  Let us open ourselves, here, now, to the process of becoming more whole–of living more fully, of giving and forgiving more freely, of understanding more completely the meaning of our lives here on this earth.”