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Os Guinness lived for 10 years in the Buddhist culture, later sat at the feet of a Hindu guru after studying in a leading western secularist university (Oxford), and has written several books, including Long Journey Home: A Guide to Your Search for the Meaning of Life (Doubleday, 2001). He is now senior fellow at the Trinity Forum in McLean, Virginia.

One of the themes of this book is that there is a universal reality of spiritual journey. Most human beings will admit to being on some sort of journey.

The picture of journey is one of the most universal pictures of human life. You can go to almost all the continents, and you can run down all the centuries, and you see that this theme of the journey comes up. The Hebrew Exodus. Homer's Odyssey. Jump the years right down to Don Quixote and Pilgrim's Progress. Jack Kerouac's On the Road. We're all somewhere between the day we were born and the day we'll die.

But you say that's not all that's universal about this notion of journey. People are universally longing for identity, mission, and meaning.

Exactly. Having it all isn't enough. You take the events of September 11, and it's as if the façade of normal life was savagely torn off. And as many have said to me, "I was suddenly aware of the brevity of life and the reality of evil and trying to figure out what it all meant." So normal life in times of incredible prosperity raises questions about meaning, but things like terrorism and the strike we saw, and the death of thousands of so many innocent people has raised the same questions, but at a very deeper level.

It's as if suddenly it became crystal clear in one moment that we, as human beings, do believe that there is something Right and there is something Wrong. In one of your chapters, you say we are animals who ask. And after an event like this, people are asking very important questions.

That's right. And you can see that the evil was so obviously evil, you didn't need to have a theoretical or ethical discussion on it. Postmodernism—the idea that everything is relative—is just shown up as absolute nonsense. Intuitively the heart cries out, "This is absolutely wrong."

I love the story of W. H. Auden, who, in the 1930s, was an atheist who believed in a sort of relativism, came to New York and saw the documentary of Hitler's siege of Poland. He knew immediately two things. One, human beings were evil. But then he saw, secondly, he needed an absolute to be able to judge that they were absolutely evil. He said all his life as a European intellectual he'd been trying to destroy the absolutes. He left the cinema a seeker after an unconditional absolute, and came to faith.

That's one of the things that you get into later in the book: ultimately, whatever spiritual journey we're on, we want it to match up with reality.

The seeker, as it's used today, is just someone unattached. They're not Jews, not Christians, not Muslims, not atheists. They're just unattached. The real meaning of the word seeker is someone for whom life has become a question, and they're seeking for an answer. Any thought is arguable. But there are thoughts that can be thought, but not lived.

You say spiritual journey is universal, yet it is unique to each individual. For one person it's gratefulness. For C. S. Lewis it was joy. For another, it's the Holocaust and the reality of evil. And whatever the trigger, ultimately it heads the person toward asking big questions.

For many people that first phase, that time for questions is the key one. Because it's questions that constitute a seeker. Most people aren't searching. As Walker Percy put it, "The search is what everyone would undertake if they weren't sunk in everydayness." For many people, September 11 shattered the everydayness.

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July (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46