Meaning 2 (#8)
As I was preparing my participation to a workshop that will be given this week in Montréal by Robert A. Neimeyer, I read this in Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss (American Psychological Association, 2001 – 2013 for Kindle edition)
“Any narrative, to be intelligible to its author or its audience, must draw on a discursive framework of pre-established meanings that provides a socially sanctioned system for symbolizing events. Stated differently, individuals make meaning by drawing selectively on a fund of discourse that precedes them and that is consensually validated within their cultures, subcultures, communities, and families.”
Québec (the French-speaking province of Canada) was still under the strong influence (even power) of the Catholic Church during my childhood (fifties and sixties).
In my previous post titled “Meaning”, I explained how a part of myself never totally gave up the intention to impress my parents with symbols of intellectual fame coupled to financial success in order to take account of my family values. But another part of myself had given up and was searching another solution. My extreme sensitivity to significant others’ eyes in a context that for different reasons didn’t match up to this quest ended up in a strong feeling of loneliness. While writing this, a Charlie Brown figure in a comic strip came up, saying something like “nobody understands me”, a human tragicomedy.
So, I drew selectively on a fund of discourse that preceded me and that was consensually validated in my culture, I became part of the large family of the children of God and the Virgin Mary. And since God is everywhere all the time, I could be interacting with Him at will. Consequently, I was not alone – loneliness is for me, and for many, a very unpleasant situation (research has confirmed this). And, since expressing openly love was a taboo in my family (associated, I think, with vulnerability feelings and therefore threatening), I was at least constructing it in this immaterial relationship. I was experiencing love toward God while constructing a reciprocal response from this symbolic figure; I wasn’t alone anymore.
During my childhood (and many years after), I had important obsessive/compulsive traits with perfectionistic and punitive (towards myself when I wasn’t perfect) characteristics. So my whole constructed relationship with God became entangled in rigid and rule-governed expectations; there wasn’t that much space left to breathe.
This looked strange to my parents and brothers who, while being practicing Catholics, remained fundamentally down-to-earth people (thank god!). But the context of the time wouldn’t have permitted them to contest my religious fervour that had become my anchoring meaning.
And, given my rigidity of the time, there was only conclusion possible to my life meaning search, I had to become a priest. From priest, it moved up to Jesuit when I discovered Teilhard de Chardin (I was then in my late teens). Jesuits looked to me as the intellectual branch of Catholicism and I had the impression that I would have the chance to study and travel all my life (another part of myself hadn’t given up either). My goal then was to get four doctorates: Biology, Anthropology, Psychology, and Theology/Philosophy (perfectionistic?). Another form of my “Quête du St-Graal”.
Finally, all this construction collapsed when I got eighteen. It was a tragedy. I lost an extraordinary system of meaning (with centuries of elaboration). I think that the main reasons for this collapse were:
1) My psychological sensitivity and my need for coherence observed with consternation incoherencies in the behaviors and discourses of priests and practising Christians.
2) The conceptual framework of Christianity (and other religions) appeared to me full of flaws – I was then reading existentialist philosophers.
3) The attraction to women became too strong.
In fact, I remember extremely well the exact moment of the final collapse. I was reading “L’Étranger” (The Outsider) from Albert Camus. At the end of the novel, Meursault the main character, has been condemned to death and is waiting for his sentence to be executed. In prison, a priest is pressing him to believe in God so that its incoming death gets some meaning; Meursault is atheist. Meursault resists but the priest becomes so exceedingly insistent that Meursault ends up reacting with anger:
Then, I don’t know why, something bursts inside me. I started shouting at the top of my lungs and swore at him and told him not to pray for me. I grabbed him by the collar of his cassock. I poured out all the feelings that surged up from the depths of my heart in waves of anger and joy. He seemed so sure of himself, didn’t he? But not one of his certainties was worth a single strand of a woman’s hair… (Translation from Sandra Smith, 2012 – Penguin Modern Classics)
I remember the shock – my world felt apart. A simple sentence, “no one of his certainties was worth a single strand of a woman’s hair”, had widened the rift that blew up the coherence that had given meaning to the first part of my life… Back to square one.
So, meaning may take many faces. This is the constructivist view. Meaning may be the childish hope to win a Nobel Prize and possesses a red convertible Corvette so that you could see sparks of admiration in your parents’ eyes; or it may be the belief in a sacred Person that has created the universe and is the meaning of that universe… or…
In my upcoming posts, I’ll come up with my actual constructed meaning and with my reflections on what we globally call spirituality.
pcousineau
pcousineau 
J’ai un diplôme de premier cycle dans un domaine connexe à la psychologie. Mon commentaire, lyrique et élémentaire à la fois, pourrait sembler inopportun… Comprenons ici dans les points de suspension à quel point mes schémas d’imperfection, d’exclusion et d’échec se sont réactivés en écrivant ces lignes.
Côtoyer l’élite intellectuelle, même par procuration, me donne l’impression de m’éveiller dans la pénombre d’un cachot où une fenêtre encadre un ciel d’un bleu si vif qu’il en blesse les yeux. Il en faut du temps pour s’acclimater à la complexité des concepts évoqués dans ce blog.
Pierre, j’apprécie beaucoup que tu partages ta réflexion avec nous. J’apprécie encore plus quand tu incarne tes propos dans ton expérience de vie. Au détour d’une ponctuation bien placée ou d’un simple exemple, tu fais preuve d’une douce auto-dérision (ô combien drôle) qui me rassure sur ton humanité. (J’ai tendance à déifier les gens que j’admire, ce n’est pas vraiment surprenant, n’est-ce pas ?)
Bonne continuation !
« S’acclimater… [à] un ciel d’un bleu si vif qu’il en blesse les yeux» constitue une très belle analogie à cette fantastique quête qu’est celle de la connaissance qui nous permet d’augmenter nos espaces de liberté pour graduellement s’approcher de « ce ciel d’un bleu si vif » reposant quelque part en chacun de nous. J’y reviendrai dans ma série sur “Meaning”.
Merci Isabelle