Yann Martel’s novel, Life of Pi, now a masterful film by Ang Lee, is about a boy who struggles to find his life’s meaning. As with all good personal search stories the metaphor is a journey. This one is from his family’s zoo in Pondicherry, French India, to Mexico via a shipwreck in the Pacific.
Pi is an inquisitive boy, full of personal challenges to understand how the world works and how to find his place in it. He embraces Hinduism, Catholicism and Islam, finding in each some solace for his spiritual hunger, but as with all spiritual journeys, in the end, it is about coming face to face with one’s self – alone. Only there can life’s mystery be held as a survival story where we play lightly with meaning and identity.
Richard Parker, the famous Bengal tiger of the story, does stand as an essential protagonist in Pi’s mysterious spiritual search, but he is ultimately still a tiger. What Pi hungers for is a sense of his place in the world. The green jungle island Pi and Richard Parker come upon in the middle of the Pacific is still a lonely place for a human being and a tiger because they are ultimately strangers. And so they escape the island in the search of real security and civilisation.
This charming and disarming story has many levels of meaning and many rich symbolisms. So at the risk of oversimplifying it, Pi finds meaning for his existence in creating his own survival story. In the dangerous journey of survival he finds himself distinct from the animal world – Richard Parker will never be a friend – he is a tiger. Pi is unsatisfied by organised religion and afraid of the power of the natural world. Yet somehow gently held by the mysterious ways of nature and the universe and by the Other, he is carried by the hope of finding meaning in relationship with other human beings. He hungers for relationship, for civilisation – no matter how challenging the communication. At least with human beings it’s possible in a way that will never be the case with Richard Parker, no matter how much they grew to understand their symbiotic relationship as castaways.
I have been wondering what story or stories we offer each other and how that story creates its own journey as we cross the tumultuous seas of heart transition. Yes, like Pi we may find some solace in religious practice and be carried by the great stories of religious traditions but we seek more, even when at first we don’t know it. For, like Pi, the spiritual search is maintained by the hope that we can find meaning for our lives as we come ashore and find conversation with those like ourselves.
Pi was not greeted with understanding as he told his surreal story of being shipwrecked and his survival with the animals, but with the need for an alternative story from his listeners. When the alternative story was told to the agreement of his listeners, Pi’s friend asks, “Which is the true story?” Pi replies, “Which one do you prefer?” It is this kind of communication he hungers for; it is here he finds hope in continuing his search. It is imperfect communication but it meets the need to explore in a never-ending search for the meaning of one’s life in the world.
How do we explore life’s spiritual hunger? Who is listening and how do we listen? In what ways can we be there to engage in the uncertain, improbable stories of the tumultuous seas of our lives? How do we listen to the unanswerable question about someone’s survival story/stories: which one do we prefer? What a sacred task it is – choosing how we listen to those seeking our company as they find meaning in the creation of their story. And indeed as we “choose” a story from their life – we are blessed with a new meaning in our own story.
