The Peace of Purposelessness, Part One

Ditching the Will of God for Your Life

Ever since I joined the “Jesus Movement” in the 1960’s I’ve wrestled with the idea of “the will of God for my life”. I actually knew what it was in 1958, but then circumstances over the last six decades have been a roller coaster of doubts and hopes that what I KNEW was my “vocation”. Over the sixty years since being an altar boy with a “call to the priesthood” at St. Williams I’ve had to revise my vision of the will of God for my life as, at critical junctures, I encountered roadblocks to fulfill my “call”. Over the decades in my pursuit of fulfilling the will of God for my life, I converted to various churches, took a LOT of college classes, fell into different jobs and trades, and did a lot of lay ministries. I did a lot of stuff only to eventually figure out that my “vocation/calling” wasn’t “that” and had to re-direct, re-train, re-think, and re-rationalize what I currently thought it was. Over the years I’ve had growing doubts that I either had a clue or that God had a “plan”.

I live in Phoenix, the home of Grand Canyon University that has become a fairly major player in the Christian college scene. They have billboards all along the I-17 freeway through town that market their programs as “finding your purpose”. And that in a nutshell, I think, is the “spirit of the age” of our cultural Christian spirituality. The concept that you are potentially a “Bible character level” servant of God is foundational to evangelical Christianity. But, this isn’t a blog post about Calvinism, spiritual determinism or the influence of utilitarianism on Christian theology and even New Age spirituality, but it all boils down to this: You exist to be something and do something specific (and great) in the universe and apart from fulfilling that utility you are a failure (or sinner…). But, as important as this is, for some reason the deity that ordained all this leaves you pretty much on your own with few clues about what that is and how to accomplish it. Unless you’re exceptionally important and an angel appears to you and supernaturally reveals it, you pretty much have to guess, experiment, and discover what it is by trial and error (and in the process pay for student loans, live on minimum wage, pay child support, or lay awake at night beating yourself up for being such an idiot). Of course the easy answer for why you don’t know your purpose is the same one given to people who aren’t healed: If you only had enough faith… But I think most of my readers know that’s theological BS, so I won’t even address that.

I’ve always gone back and forth, soft and hard, on the concept that God has specific purposes for and directly intervenes to accomplish those purposes in our individual human affairs. There’s strong pressure to buy into the “God has a wonderful plan for your life” thing, and I did on and off and to some degree or another even when I suspected He didn’t. But, that is what you usually do when you are a “Christian” in any denomination: You second guess yourself and try to align your belief with the party line even when you don’t really believe it.

Thus, over the decades, viewing my life within the framework of “finding my purpose” I've made plans, gone to school to prepare, predicted the future based on data, prayed about it, felt the "Spirit move”, saw the hand of God in events and coincidences, made educated guesses, worked my butt off, sacrificed people and relationships, and rationalized the costs, punches, pain, and sacrifices that the serendipity of life, or the fallen world, or Satan threw in my path as the consequences of my spiritual purpose in the universe. And it all made sense.

Until it didn’t.

I always suspected that, out of the billions of people who have lived in history, only a handful (of pretty sketchy people) were “biblical characters” that shaped salvation history… and chances are, as sketchy as I am, I’m not a biblical character level human being. I don’t know exactly when “God has a plan for your life” stopped making sense, or more like it stopped making sense to put any energy or investment into trying to make it make sense. I think it was around the time (almost 20 years ago) when I faced the reality I was never going to be ordained to the priesthood, something I “KNEW” was my calling and purpose since first grade. That thought drove my life and I had spent decades in churches, ministries, cultivating relationships, and making preparations of one form or another to prepare for its inevitable, providential fulfillment. It never happened. I’ve ended up being a construction worker for the past 40 years instead. But even so, I found ways to spiritualize my life as a common laborer and make it “significant”. The reality is significance and “meaning” is a common human existential issue. We DO need to find meaning in life, especially a life that is disappointing because it was not as “purposeful” or useful or significant as we wished or hoped it would be. Lots of popular movies deal with the theme of “plot twists” of mundane lives re-lived according to the fantasy of having done something better but not knowing their mundaneness was significant in the big picture. “It’s a Wonderful Life” is probably the best.

At 71, in retrospect having pretty much lived most of my “big picture” out and not planning on embarking on any new expensive quests to discover another purpose, I can't say that any of what I did or didn’t do, whether planned or not, really mattered in the grandest scheme of finding some “singular purpose” for my life. As simplistic and tritely “zen” as it sounds, there is some peace accepting the reality that if I hadn't done what I did, I wouldn't be where I am (for better or worse) and I just have to deal with my present moment. Life’s opportunities to accomplish significant stuff are dependent on lots of things falling into place (or out of place). If I had been a priest, I may not have been able to care for three dying parents and had the spiritual lessons and relational closures that came from doing that. But even that’s all “shoulda-woulda-coulda” prognostications. The whole idea of evaluating the circumstances and significance of our life in retrospect and trying to figure out if “this might have happened if that happened, and would it have mattered more (or less)” is simply second guessing that our life would have had greater significance through something we did not experience and did not live. The only thing that I do know and can know is: What I did, where I am, and what I’m doing now. If I live in illusions of a past I did not have and the choices I didn’t make and the possibilities of a different present and a fantasy of any kind of future, I open myself to false regrets, despondency, resentment, and possibly a self-alienation from the mercy of God for how I have failed in my real life. In short, it’s a delusion to think about the possible significance of anything imaginary.

So…I've come to the conclusion that most of life, in spite of all of our attempts to control it and create it, is managed by "muddling through". All of us are dealing with our present reality without eternal omniscience. We all face the reality of the fallen world with the limitations of our circumstances, our personal history/genetics/family/biology, and our current emotional/intellectual/spiritual place. And that does not even address the reality that we don’t really even know who we are, why we are who we are, and the impact of all that we are and what we have been through on everything we are now and are navigating in our present moment.

Whether or not we have thought it through precisely, everyone has an intellectual/theological “big framework” that helps us make sense of it all… until “it all” breaks out of that framework. Life happens, we get more experiences and it overflows our frame and we have to construct a bigger frame to contain the new, expanded “it all”. (I think that is the process in the current “deconstruction” culture.) It’s easy to connect the dots to make a picture that we have pre-determined what it should look like, until other dots appear and they don’t fit the picture we thought we were creating. And then there’s the problem that, because of who we are, we can connect the dots that are supposed to be the Lion King and make a duck-billed platypus out of them. That’s why we need someone we can trust who will tell us “those dots in your life don’t make that picture….” (but that’s another blog post).

So, when I believed the idea that "God has a wonderful plan for my life" this led me to the feeling that, because there was a divine “plan” or purpose, God kind of owed me some things (in spite of my belief that everything is of grace). I expected if He had a plan then He would give me some discernable, tangible signs, some degree of success at things that I did that I thought I was called to do for Him, and if not success at least some good spiritual feelings for all the hardship I endured to accomplish His will. And yes, hardship is a universal human experience. And hardship voluntarily chosen or consequential to doing the will of a deity is also universal. Hardship happens to the just and the unjust. But it is also spiritually universal that suffering self-assessed as a spiritual marker of being on “the right path” is a strong delusion. Encountering obstacles, resistance, having your limits tested or even being martyred are not necessarily signs that “Satan is trying to stop you from fulfilling your ordained purpose”. It could be that you are on the wrong path and have a martyr complex, the self-reward for pursuing our self-chosen purpose and delusional “will of God”.

So the problem was that the things I thought were the "will of God for my life" were mostly either at best an educated guess based on my self-assessment of talents, or what sounded like good advice from people I respected, and at worse, grand delusions that I proudly poured my efforts into in spite of my short-comings. My interpretations of events, coincidences, emotional leadings, relationships (and even some failures) as the providence of God at work in my life shaping my destiny were my own hyper-spiritualized revisionist history. I look back on the stories I told about God’s workings in my life and how those stories have changed over the decades as relationships, ministries, jobs, and circumstances succeeded, failed, and took tangential trajectories. The same event forty years ago was, at one time clearly the “hand of God” had become a self-motivated delusional choice because, in the end, the outcome was not what I once believed it was going to be.

So, now I’m old and I’ve become somewhat self-aware. I’ve known for a long time that most things in my life were motivated by some tinge of virtue and compromised by some tinge of sin.  And yes, sometimes sin became the motive and virtue was vestigial and there have been times I was able to rationalize sin as virtue. As I get older and older (and hopefully a bit wiser and wiser) I know that there is a tension between knowing I’m getting better at recognizing some blatant temptations to blatant sins but also realizing that the temptations to sin become more subtle and deceptive as I learn to avoid the obvious ones. I also see that practicing virtue becomes more difficult because I realize I am usually unable to see the light of pure virtue because of the darkness of pride in my ego.

But all that said, I still believe I am where I am by some kind of grace of God that accommodates my virtues and sins (regardless of my awareness of the difference) even as I speak.  The fact that I still have my faith however small or great in anyone's estimation (including my own) and that I still seek to do God’s will even though I’m more cautious about naming it, is evidence of that grace.

So, I'm finding that I don't have any more clue about what God is doing in my life, or where I'm headed, or what my calling is than when I was six or sixteen or even seventy. My life’s path in the last eight years has taken more switchbacks, detours and left turns for me to even begin to think I could have imagined any of it much less planned for any of it. I look back on the entirety of my life and none of it is anything like what I have imagined all along the way.

These days I tell people who are trying to figure out careers and relationships and education goals that I STILL don't know what I want to be when I grow up so they shouldn't worry too much about it. It is more important who you are than what you do, so enjoy where you are and what you are doing, or if you don't, change yourself or change your job... or… don't change because sometimes "enjoyment" isn't the measure of life and its nuances and necessities. Sometimes it is more grown up to stay put and man your post even if it's not what you wanted to do when you grew up.  In the movie "Gladiator" General Maximus asks his personal servant, Cicero, if he finds it hard to do his duty. Cicero responds, "Sometimes I do what I want to do; the rest of the time I do what I have to." There is a nobility to duty, but I’ve found that even manning your post can be virtuous duty or, because of who we have been formed to be in the present moment by life, a destructive dysfunction. In either case, in the long run, there will be a lesson to learn and a path to holiness and peace if we pay attention, do some damn hard work and endure a lot of pain.

So, the difference between six, sixteen and seventy something is I have more history now and a bigger picture and perhaps more wisdom. The “wisdom difference” is, because I have a lot of history, I find that I don't NEED to have a clue now, nor do I really want to have a clue. I'm perfectly OK with letting life play out and to just “be” in the present moment. Uncertainty, un-knowability, unpreparedness... they aren't tigers and dragons lurking under my bed ready to eat my arm dangling from the bedside.  I sleep comfortably with my life dangling over the edge of the bed and the tiger drooling beneath it.

So, for today I do what the day demands to some degree of competency and with some degree of passion and commitment. And if I cannot work up any passion and joy, I just do it because it needs to be done in order to avoid the sorrows of things left undone tomorrow, and I go to bed tired and sleep well. I don't get too concerned about "big pictures" of things, predicting the future, spiritualizing the past, or consequentially aggrandizing the present events or decisons. The only important thing to me is the word I speak to the person I'm talking to, the kindness I show to the person I encounter, the peace I bring into a room of people, the fulfillment of my duty to the person who pays for my time and talent as a handyman so I can eat and feed my family.

There was a woman who asked God, "What do you want me to do, what is your will for my life?" His answer? She said, "He told me, do your dishes. What a let down!” But that’s really the answer for all of us. "Do what is in front of you, and then the next right thing." Yes, even doing the dishes is spiritual warfare sometimes. And I’ve learned over 50 years of marriage and family that you can indeed lose your soul over a sink full of dirty dishes.

And, maybe that’s it. That’s really all we really need to get. Or, maybe even at my age, I may not have "it" down yet, whatever "it" is.  I just know at this point in my life I'm not as concerned with being a cosmic “influencer” making a difference in a big way as much as I am with just making it through the present moment gracefully with the grocery bagger with some kind of spiritual integrity and a clear understanding of what or who is really right in front of me, rather than trying to understand what is behind or ahead of me.

NEXT: How then do we make life decisions if “God’s hand” is not omnipotent and we don’t have a divinely ordained “purpose”.