Long Journey Home: A Guide in Your Search for the Meaning of Life by Os Guinness

Seeing the subtitle of Os Guinness’ new book, Long Journey Home, I grew skeptical. The subtitle, A Guide in Your Search for the Meaning of Life, seemed, well, a bit ambitious. The meaning of life in 200 pages? Hmm.

However, after a couple chapters I was charmed out of my skepticism. Reading a book by Guinness is like watching an impressionist painter: Stories are layered upon stories like dabs of paint on a canvas. One moment you wonder, “Where is he going?” and the next minute you exclaim, “Oh, I see!”

Stories don’t illustrate Guinness’s points, they are his point. And, as anyone who has wrestled with the meaning of life will tell you, stories are what you need. Abstractions can leave you cold, but stories capture the particulars of real life. In the words of theologian John Milbank, stories are the only science of the particular.

Not only does Guinness’s penchant for storytelling qualify him as a “guide” to life’s biggest questions, so does his background. He grew up in Buddhist China, studied under a Hindu guru, is friends with some of the keenest secular minds of the age, spent several years working in Switzerland under the evangelical sage Francis Schaeffer and become a highly respected evangelical author and thinker. You name it, he’s seen it.

In Long Journey Home, Guinness summons his skill and experience to help people navigate life’s biggest questions. Section one is a picture album of famous seekers. W.H. Auden, Michael Foucault, Malcolm Muggeridge, G.K. Chesterton, and others are displayed in their deepest moments of questioning. A horrified Auden hears Germans scream for the blood of Poles. Foucault begins a trip atop a California cliff. m Muggeridge wanders into the deep waters of suicide. Horror, despair, and death all compel these driven personalities to become seekers.

Although seeking is in vogue today, Guinness sees a big difference between true and false seekers. False seekers just don’t want to be attached to anything. True seekers, he says, are looking for real answers. Here’s how he describes real seekers:

On meeting them you feel their seriousness, their driven restlessness. . . . Seekers are people for whom life, or a part of life, has become a point of wonder, a question, a problem, an irritation. It happens so intensely, so persistently, that a sense of need consumes them and launches them on their quest.

Now comes the tough part: the answers. Anyone can raise questions, but today, suggesting answers is akin to walking a minefield. Doubts lay buried underfoot, waiting to explode the arrogant and the naïve. Skepticism is one of the chief marks of our poets. “There isn’t any answer to the question,” sings Sinead O’Connor. “Don’t bother with anyone who says there is.” “There ain’t no real truth,” croons Richard Ashcroft, “we have existence and it’s all we share.”

Aware of the dangers, Guinness steps ahead. He confronts two objections head-on. First objection: Life’s smorgasbord has simply too many worldviews to choose from. Second objection: Although the details may be different, all religions are fundamentally the same. Both objections, says Guinness, are too extreme. The truth lies between.

Of the thousands of worldviews, most are variations of three “families of faith.”

(1) The Eastern faiths, which include Hinduism, Buddhism, and New Age, thought.

(2) The Western secular family of faith, which include atheism, agnosticism, and secular humanism.

(3) The biblical families of faith, which include Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Those are the options. Now, how do you query these “families of faith”? Guinness offers four suggestions. First, thinking should take center stage. “Hopes, fears, hurts, and other emotions play their part, but the second stage primarily involves ideas and beliefs and the difference they make.”

Second, the search ought not be overly “practical.” He quotes Chesterton to highlight the value of “unpractical” thinking.

There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: The fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. A practical man means a man accustomed to merely daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at all.

Third: stay focused, stay on task. Ask yourself, “Will this prove what I’m looking for?”

Fourth, search by comparison. “Occasionally a seeker will be satisfied with the first answer encountered,” Guinness writes. “More often, with so many guides and maps on offer, searchers must shop around . . . For the seeker, contrast is the mother of clarity.”

Beyond these four suggestions, Guinness is adamant that seekers answer one overarching question: Can you live it? The Eastern families of faith say that suffering is merely an illusion. Western secularism says life is determined only by random chemical reactions. Can you live with either conclusion?

Guinness tells the story of his friend Bob. Attending Harvard in the late 60s, Bob unintentionally started a riot after giving speech about campus housing. He was horrified. A deep suspicion awoke in him: “Maybe there is no real truth. Perhaps we just manipulate others to think so.”

Bob dropped out of Harvard the next day. He attended Woodstock, traveled Europe, read Albert Camus — all the time searching. A crucial moment in his search came while hitchhiking in Europe. He was given a long lift from a Cambridge don and his wife. Guinness picks up the story there:

The don was a philosopher, and Bob found himself pressing their conversation toward the logical conclusion of his own philosophical position, as if challenging the Englishman to put forward an answer that they both could believe. The more Bob pressed, the less he found. The Englishman saw no meaning in the universe and reduced everything to biochemical responses.

“So you mean,” Bob said, after hours of conversation between Madrid and Bordeaux, “that after all these years of marriage there has really been nothing more to your relationship than biochemical reactions and illusions of love and caring?”

“Yes,” said the don, “that’s right.”

His wife, seated next to him in the car, burst into tears.

There are two more sections in Guinness’s book: “A Time for Evidence” and “A Time for Commitment.” Get the book and read them. They are worth the time.

Long Journey Home succeeds as a guide to the big questions of life because it’s lively, wise, and gentle. But, perhaps more than anything else, it’s honest.

Guinness doesn’t paint a pretty face on a world that is often hostile and wounded. That honesty is invaluable because, when you get down to it, the biggest question in life may be, “Who can I trust?”

Read Guinness for an answer. Even if you’re a Christian who already knows where he’s going, you’ll probably learn a lot as you follow him on the journey.

To order a copy of Long Journey Home, click here.