Meanings of Life

This book follows up an earlier work entitled 'Why Bother with Theology?' in putting forward an understanding of a secular spirituality in the sense of seeing more deeply into everyday life, including one's own. The four main themes - self and world, loss, love and fulfilment - are all interlinked meditations on the author's personal experience with apposite illustrations from novels, films and poetry. Alex writes sensitively and perceptively about life as mirrored in both experience and books. And he is more than usually familiar with books and their process as an editor himself who was unexpectedly made redundant three years ago. Here, as he also remarks elsewhere, loss is gain, since the experience allowed space for the thoughts in this book to gestate and mature. Two other themes are worth mentioning: the role of memory in love and loss, and the pathos of human existence when seen against the backdrop of deep time. However, as Alex indicates, fulfilment is at least partly the realisation of one's own oneness as a manifestation of kaleidoscope of creation in time, a sense of oneness that overcomes our physical distinctiveness.