As a doctoral student at the School of Religion, Culture and Society, I have the opportunity to get involved in student life at the Catholic University of Linz through Erasmus+ study mobility. In this context, I had the honour of attending the lecture “Vergänglichkeitsbewältigung” by Dr. Elisabeth Lukas on 18 January 2024, which was given as a guest lecturer at the University of Linz by Dr. Klára Csiszár, University Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
Elisabeth Lukas’s lecture was imbued with the inner vitality of her personality, her professional knowledge matured in life experiences and the enthusiasm that characterised her during her young research years. With her presence and the personal examples she shared, the elderly speaker embodied what she taught: how to look back on a meaningful life and through it come to terms with the awareness of transience.
The lecturer began his presentation with Viktor Frankl’s fundamental thesis: according to Frankl’s theory, finding meaning is one of the cornerstones of a fulfilled life, even in the face of negative life events and unchangeable circumstances. This approach formed the basis of the themes explored in his lecture, Coping with impermanence. Luke challenged the traditional view of the flow of time, that time only flows from past to present and then to future. In his philosophical theory, based on Frankl, he argued that everything begins with possibilities, i.e. the future, the present is the reality when one realises one of several future possibilities of meaning and makes it real, the already realised possibility of meaning becomes the past, thus remaining immutably eternal, part of one’s identity.
In relation to the challenge of coping with impermanence, he stressed the importance of choosing an approach to the past. She illustrated the process of looking back to the past when accompanying the dying with the metaphor of mountain peaks and valleys. She emphasised that it is worth first mapping the peaks, the highlights, the positive life events, and looking back on them together. Then we can deal with the negative aspects of our lives, the valleys, in the process of dealing with them through repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation. He encouraged people to continually ask themselves what is the meaning of their life, and this question can be applied throughout the whole life journey. He encouraged his listeners to strive to choose the good opportunities in the finite time of their lives, so that in retrospect these realised opportunities for meaning predominate.
Orsolya Pál-Jakab (Dani)
III year PhD student
Related source:
Viktoria Puchner: Elisabeth Lukas zu gast in der vorlesung “pastoral der lebensübergänge.
https://ku-linz.at/universitaet/aktuelles/detail/elisabeth-lukas-zu-gast-in-der-vorlesung-pastoral-der-lebensuebergaenge (06/02/2024).
Photos by Josef Wallner and the Institute for Pastoral Theology of the Catholic University of Linz
