Deep Blue and the meaning of it all - chess and the game of life. There was a time when I aspired to be a chess player - and tried to teach our sons. We purchased a learner set - large pieces on which their possible moves are printed. All went well until one day my elder son and I decided to impress my parents by playing a game during one of their visits. In order to keep Matthew’s interest I would let him win once in a while. And so I did on this occasion, delighting him and surprising his grandparents. Afraid he would become overly cocky, I challenged him to a rematch. However, a funny thing happened on the way to teaching humility. I was the person who learned it, because despite my playing to win this time, he beat me again, probably ending my fledgling chess career. It was hard to read my parents - embarrassed for their son or proud of their grandson. Like chess, life is complicated.
At least it was for world chess champion Garry Kasparov, defeated by IBM's Deep Blue computer after just 19 moves in the sixth game of their second match, one of history’s weirdest sporting events. "I proved to be vulnerable," he said after the match.
Much is being made of the meaning in this event - but why?
Are machines smarter than we are? Is this truly a revolution in consciousness, one of those historical watersheds in human evolution?
I doubt it. After all, chess is just a game we made up. And Deep Blue is just a machine we invented. There is a sobering cartoon depicting the limitations of our machines - a robot lies prone on the floor, vainly struggling to plug in to a wall socket. Our machines are only as powerful as we, their creators, want them to be. They are, to be sure, incredible inventions, but they are not human beings. And, as far as we know, we are the most amazing biological machines evolution has yet created.
The question is, do we define people in a functional or in a sacred way? Would we risk our lives to save Deep Blue? Of course not! Why? Because Deep Blue is a machine which functions, not a person who is. And while there are many differences between us and Deep Blue - for me the most distinctive is that human beings deal with meaning. We are the meaning seekers and meaning makers.
Those thoughts must have crossed the mind of the late poet-scientist Loren Eisley when he wrote his essay on "The Bird and the Machine." "The machine does not bleed, ache, hang for hours in the empty sky in a torment of hope to learn the fate of another machine, nor does it cry out for joy, nor dance in the air with the fierce passion of a bird."
I would go farther than Eisley. Even beyond the seemingly human emotions of Eisley’s birds, there is the human will to meaning. We insist on knowing what life is about. Why are we here? What is the meaning of it all? These questions are at the heart of the spiritual counseling that I do. They nag at me insistently as well, and unless I provide at least provisional answers, life for me is just not worth the living.
There are three kinds of meanings in my life - there is immediate experience that is a human good in and of itself, the so-called peak experience; there is the purposiveness of enduring suffering with grace and courage, what I call the valley experience. And there is investing oneself in a cause that transcends the self, which I name the plateau experience. More simply put, the meaning of life is to savor, to suffer and to save.
Nearly forty years ago in early September, just before my first year in seminary, a number of us from my theological school community climbed Mt. Marcy in the Adirondacks, the tallest peak in New York State. It was glorious, an "I love New York" kind of day; the sun was shining, the air was clear and comfortable; the company was congenial. On our way up we breathlessly observed a moose drinking from a mountainside lake. By evening, we reached a lean-to about two-thirds of the way to the summit, cooked our dinner over the campfire, sang and talked ourselves into exhausted sleep.
The next day we finished our climb, by dint of good luck, or the grace of God, (who knows?) on another spectacular day. We scrambled up the sheer rock surface that is the top of Marcy - above the tree line - and there beheld the Green Mountains of Vermont and even a hint of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, as well as the other peaks of the Adirondack range.
The near perfection of that day was only slightly marred when, in our enjoyment, we overstayed our summit visit and had to grope our way the last few hundred yards to the parking lot in the dark. It was a pivotal experience for me - combining the beauty of nature and the joy of human community with a reminder of my call to ministry. It had intrinsic value - it was good in and of itself - it did not necessarily produce anything. It didn't need to.
This was a peak experience, the analogy of mountain climb and peak being strictly coincidental.
Mountain climber Maurice Herzog, after he scaled Mount Annapurna wrote, "We dragged ourselves up. Could we possibly be there? Yes! a fierce and savage wind tore at us. We were on top of Annapurna - 8,075 meters, 26,493 feet. Our hearts overflowed with an unspeakable happiness. I was stirred to the depths of my being. That brown rock, the highest of them all, that ridge of ice, were these the goals of a lifetime? Or were they rather the limits of human pride?... we turn the page: A new life begins. There are other Annapurnas in the lives of people."
All of us I think have those peak experiences - large or small - moments of meaning which need nothing else - which simply make life worth the living in the present. The birthing of a new baby, a time of sexual intimacy, reading or writing a great book, being moved to near ecstasy by a piece of music, a sunset, or a rare meteor streaking across the evening sky - all are familiar examples of peak experiences. We tend to know when we have them. Life, infused with them, becomes its own reason for being.
Furthermore, these experiences can never be lost - can never be taken from us - a reality I try to point out during the sadness of a memorial service. While in the present we are bereft, and though the future will be different, we have the treasures of the past in our hearts - they can never be taken away. Savoring those peaks of human experience permeates life with meaning.
However, every peak has a valley. It is in the nature of things that human beings suffer - we experience pain - physical and mental, emotional and spiritual. That much is given. The author of the 23rd Psalm wisely wrote of the "valley of the shadow of death."
The 19th century Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, referring to God and meaning during a deep depression, wrote that life is "not worth the tears of one child. I respectfully hand Him back my ticket." He aptly sums up the way we feel when in the grip of pain and loss. We feel we have hit rock bottom with no way out. There are days we do not feel it worth getting out of bed in the morning.
To live is to suffer. The only issue is how shall we meet our suffering? Pain is so difficult to deal with because we believe it to be senseless. Can we infuse it with meaning? I believe we can - and must. If we have a "why" we can endure almost any "how."
Strange as it may seem, suffering is a rich source of life meaning. It can bring meaning into our lives because it drives the inconsequential from them. It pushes us until our backs are against the wall, and demands of us an affirmation of our values; it enables us to look deep within ourselves to see the stuff of which we are made. It enables us to develop that inner integrity which says to us that we have been worthy of our suffering. We learn to live with our pain and transcend it with meaning.
The Viennese psychiatrist Victor Frankl articulated this intriguing source of life meaning when he described his experience in a Nazi death camp. Could there be meaning without survival? Was there any point in facing his fate with courage and dignity? Why go on when the future was at best uncertain and no one would know how he acted? Frankl determined that others might not know of his courage, but he would know, and that would be sufficient. He could retain his humanity until his last breath. Everything could be taken from him but one thing - the choice of how to respond to his suffering.
Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once described an elderly aunt with an inoperable cancer, but also with an incurable sense of humor. She wrote her nephew that people came from all over Indiana to comfort her in her last days.
"But several times," she wrote, "the room was filled with mournful and weeping people whom I had to cheer up."
Katherine Mansfield states the issue poetically: "Life is mystery. The fearful pain will fade. I must turn to work. I must put my agony into something, change it. Sorrow shall be changed into joy. It is to lose oneself more utterly, to love more deeply, to feel oneself a part of life, not separate. O life! Accept me - make me worthy - teach me."
The metaphors of mountain and valley experiences lead inevitably to another topographical feature - the plateau. Plateau experiences seldom have the drama, the agony or ecstasy of valley and mountain experiences, but they represent much of our lives. Plateaus are where we walk in the day to day of our living, where we spend most of our time and energy.
And so my third source of life meaning is my need to invest myself in something that lies beyond me. That something beyond may be involvement in the cause of justice; it may be creating something of beauty - a poem, a song, a picture; it may be the satisfaction of raising a healthy child or giving care to an elderly parent, or spending years with a faithful companion.
Here is meaning through action - creation - creativity: In the words of poet Antoine St. Exupery, "It is to feel, when setting one’s stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world."
I turn to history, to the Russian count become revolutionary who betrayed his class, to the great writer, Leo Tolstoy. He struggled with his affluence amidst the poverty of his people and how he should respond. "I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life....Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo or destroy?....Without an answer ...it is impossible, as I experienced, for life to go on."
I’m with Tolstoy. Unless I see purpose in what I do, I find my spiritual energies depleted. Unless I understand my meager attempts to save the world from injustice against a larger canopy of humanity and history, I simply do not have the zest to keep on doing what I try to do in the world.
I have been on the losing side in so many struggles for justice that there are times I am tempted to emulate Voltaire’s Candide, who seeing a world of injustice, simply went out to cultivate his garden. I confess there have been many times lately when I am on the brink of simply giving up because it is so discouraging. Even battles I think are won - now are being newly engaged.
At such times I need perspective. I think of Martin Luther King’s last public speech in Memphis, the evening before he was assassinated. He intoned the biblical figure of Moses who led the Hebrew people out of Egypt but never entered the Promised Land. "I may not get there with you," he said, "but we, as a people, will get to the promised land."
The words echo in my soul. And once again I know that unless I commit myself to causes that transcend me, unless I invest myself in that which is greater than I am, unless I join with like-minded people in the struggle for Beloved Community - I will play false to myself and will miss the meaning of my role on the earth. And I do believe that despite defeat and disillusion, that in setting my stone I am helping to build the world.
Deep Blue experiences nothing of this. It could no doubt beat me in the minimum number of moves, but there is no meaning in it. And so I conclude that if I am to survive spiritually, be fully human, I must act as if my life had meaning, even if I can find none in the universe. The will to meaning is a sign of health. We assign meanings to experience. We may not discover ultimate meaning, but we do create enough to get us through the day. To savor, to suffer, to save. This is what it’s all about.
I leave you with a story about computer mogul Bill Gates and his view of the game of life. Evidently his wife Melinda "is Catholic, goes to church, and wants to raise (daughter) Jennifer that way. ‘But she offered me a deal,’ Gates says. ‘If I start going to church - my family was Congregationalist - then Jennifer could be raised in whatever religion I choose.’ Gates admits that he is tempted, because he would prefer she have a religion that ‘has less theology and all’ than Catholicism, but he has not yet taken up the offer. ‘Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient,’ he explains. ‘There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.’"
To be sure, religion is not very efficient, but the purpose of life is not to be efficient. It's to discover in the end and along the way that it is infused with meaning. The question with which we began today's worship begs for our response. "What are we to make of this wonder while it is ours?" Deep Blue cannot answer such a question. Can we?
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