The Search for the Answer

To the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything

This week I delivered a talk -- or sermon, if you will -- at the Unitarian Universalist Church I've been a member of for the past two years. The topic was "Literature and Spirituality," an idea I'd been kicking around for months. For my text, I chose a book that might, at first glance, seem to have nothing at all to do with spirituality and Soul Quest. I thought I'd share my musings with you for a lighter look at the search for meaning.

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams is a truly remarkable book. It has affected the way I see the world, and the attitude with which I approach life's daily problems. The book starts like this:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has -- or rather had -- a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

The copyright of the article The Search for the Answer in Meditation is owned by Roxianne Moore. Permission to republish The Search for the Answer in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Go To Page: 1 2 3

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic