In his widely-read testimony, Man’s Search for Meaning, famed psychiatrist Viktor Frankl remembered a terrible day during World War II. He was on a work gang, just outside the fences that hid the horrors of Hitler’s infamous Dachau death camp. “We were at work in a trench,” wrote Frankl. “The dawn was gray around us; gray was the sky above; gray the snow in the pale light of dawn; gray rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and gray their faces.”

Frankl told how he was ready to die. It was as if the gray bleakness had claws, and each moment they dug deeper and colder into his soul. Why go on? What could be the purpose in “living” if, indeed, he was even still alive at this moment? There was no heaven, no hell, no future, and no past. Only the clutching grayness of this miserable momen…