A generation ago, Max Webber, the eminent sociologist, wrote in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

With the progress of science and technology, man has stopped believing in magic powers, in spirits and demons; he has lost his sense of prophecy and, above all, his sense of the sacred. Reality has become dreary, flat and utilitarian, leaving a great void in the souls of men which they seek to fill by furious activity and through various devices and substitutes.

Theologian Paul Tillich believed the characteristic experience of his day to be one of disruption and meaninglessness.

More recently, C. Longley, in the foreword to Jonathan Sachs' Faith in the Future, says:

Western civilisation suffers from a strong sense of moral and spiritual exhaustion. Having constructed a society of unprecedented sophistication, convenience and prosperity, nobody can remember what it was supposed to be for.

Whatever else the events of the twentieth century may have achieved for the human race, one of the effects has been to leave multitudes of people with little sense that life has any overall meaning or purpose. Victor Frankl, the eminent psychiatrist who became Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology in the University of Vienna, spent three years in the Auschwitz concentration camp. In his book Man's Search for Meaning he describes his experiences and his observation that those inmates most likely to survive were those "who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill." They had a purpose for living. He concluded that, in addition to Freud's 'will to pleasure' and Adler's 'will to power', human beings have a 'will to meaning'. He developed what he called 'logotherapy' to help people find some meaning in life. Commenting on Victor Frankl's work, Arthur Koestler wrote:

It is an inherent tendency in man to reach out for meanings to fulfill and for values to actualize...Thousands and thousands of young students are exposed to an indoctrination...which denies the existence of values. The result is a worldwide phenomenon-more and more patients are crowding our clinics with the complaints of an inner emptiness, the sense of a total and ultimate meaninglessness of life.

Meaninglessness leads to boredom, alcoholism, juvenile delinquency and suicide. According to Emile Durkheim, in his classic study of suicide, the greatest number of suicides are caused by anomie, which could be rendered 'normlessness' or 'meaninglessness'. And 'anomic' suicide takes place when somebody either has no goal in life or pursues a goal they can't reach, whether power, success or prestige.

A young Australian, Tim Corney, writing in Zadok Perspectives about the hopelessness of Generation X, "the children of the most divorced, most mobile parents this century", writes:

As I walk the streets of my city, the spray-can voices shout out in polychrome unison the disillusionment, boredom and helplessness of a street culture that has stopped trying to make sense of the world.

These are just a few of the many examples we could give. But if they accurately describe the sense of meaninglessness that many find in today's world, where can we look for some answers? What is life meant to be all about? Where can a true and satisfying meaning to life be found? How can we find a great purpose for living? The purpose of this booklet is to provide some answers to these questions.