Os Guinness and The Great Quest
“No thoughtful person gets far without corralling those questions to see if they can be broken and ridden.”
Growing up, I had two loving and brilliant parents. Yet, each was dysfunctional in their turn. They were children of the depression and young adults during WW ll, and both came from rare, for the time, broken homes that farmed them off for others to raise for much of their youth.
As a young man, I realized later that they modeled what they knew about family life. It wasn’t much. Although they disciplined my general behavior, I grew up an “intellectually” feral kid with little to no direction in academic or spiritual disciplines.
I was left to wander up and down the ideas and philosophies of life as I found them and as it fancied me at the time. The one benefit of an otherwise negligent way to raise a “young skull full of mush” is that I worked very hard from a young age. And at school, instead of the class subjects at hand, I read everything I could on my own; the classics, economics, and history. It merged to create a mindset and conservative nature by carefully observing the culture blowing up around me.
But, in truth, I was always intellectually uncomfortable and looking for something beyond myself to anchor what I could observe in this magnificent creation. Something was ajar; it didn’t all quite fit.
Os Guinness, in his new book (InterVaristy Press, March 2022), The Great Quest: Invitation to an Examined Life and a Sure Path to Meaning (here), was meant for the intellectually curious, the spiritually challenged, and folks who can’t put it all together to make sense. Aren’t they the most important questions of any serious person: Why am I here? What does my life mean? Is there something beyond this life? No thoughtful person gets far without corralling those questions to see if they can be broken and ridden.
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