Have you read T. S. Elliot's masterpiece, The Wasteland?  Written in the shadow of the destruction of World War One, The Wasteland brings Greco-Roman, Christian, and eastern imagery, thought, and mythology together into profound observations on the meaningfulness of existence.  It's worth reading again and again and again.
     As I read a recently published book on T.S. Elliot's early life, I thought of The Wasteland often.  Though I have read it many times, reading this book spurred me to do so again.  Coming on the heels of another book (on which I blogged recently) I read about the atomic bomb and Nagasaki, it caused me to ponder, once more, the ubiquitous revelry and yet hollow maw of existence.
     Western Europe fought its war, yes, successfully turning back the predations of an empowered Kaiser and his German armies and restoring most nations to their original status.  Some political entities, of course, never reappeared, including the Ottoman Empire.  Yet out of this empire's ruins emerged new nations.  Moreover, seizing the time, Vladimir Lenin led the Bolsheviks to victory in Russia, a feat whose effects are still with us today.
     Materially, I suppose, most (and I use this world guardedly) of the world is relatively better off today.  Politically, too:  most, but certainly not all nations enjoy a greater semblance of freedom than they did at the turn of the twentieth century.
     Spiritually, however, little has changed.  We remain beings on a journey in search of meaning.  As Elliot noted, meaning will be always elusive, hidden and buried as it is beneath lingering years of cultural neglect.  And despite what many think, war doesn't enable increased meaning; rather, it pushes it further away.  As Jesus once said, everyone is trying to force his/her way into the kingdom of God--but none will find it this way.
     Violence, be it cultural, economic, social, or political, will not produce real meaning. Sometimes meaning has to find us.  Not without irony did Jesus say to the Jewish rabbi Nicodemus, "Unless you are born again, you will not see the kingdom of God."
     Put another way, sometimes meaning is something that, outside of us acknowledging our human limits, in every way,  we cannot now imagine.  Sometimes meaning surprises us:  in the best of ways.
     Like God.