What God Wants For Your Life

It is the graduation season and nostalgia is on offer everywhere.

A stroll through the past can be an occasion for thanksgiving and celebration — an opportunity to re-capture memories that might be otherwise lost. In that sense remembering the past with fondness can be a good thing — particularly in a world where we move on to the next thing with so much speed.

A stroll through the past can also be a summons to live purposefully and courageously in the present. Typically in biblical stories, when people are called upon to remember the past, the invitation is focused on what God has done — and, more often than not, it serves as a key to the confidence that God can and will act now.

At other places in Scripture, remembering is an occasion for repentance and amendment of life. The resolve to make a different set of choices from the ones we have made in the past.

But nostalgia — a painful attachment to or longing for the past — can also be spiritually innervating, robbing us of the strength to live in the moment and grapple with its challenges. It can be an escape into a past that never quite existed — a means of escaping the challenges, responsibilities, or pain that is a part of life in the present.

Nostalgia stirs warm feelings, but it can be the servant of fear — fear that shrinks from living in deep dependence upon God in the present. Nostalgia can be an attachment to the past that doesn’t learn from it, but clings to it as a defense.

When nostalgia tugs at our hearts briefly, it may be of little consequence. When it soaks up the present and seduces us to live in the past, it is worth examining spiritually. Do our memories serve us well, inviting us to live gratefully and fully in the present? Or are they an escape? If so, what does that desire tell me about what is missing from life in the present? And what can I learn from the past that allows me to move on now?

One of the common obstacles to spiritual growth is the energy that we invest in projecting and defending our false selves — the professional and personal pictures of ourselves that are not quite what we really are. Everyone does it to some extent and we do it for a variety of reasons: self-protection, ego-needs, guilt, fear, a lack of integration.

Of course how much we can be fully vulnerable and transparent with others depends on a variety of factors: the length of time we have known the people with whom we interact, the intimacy of our relationships, and the trustworthiness of the people with whom we are vulnerable.

But on the whole it is better to be as fully as possible the one person God created us to be.
The energy we invest in projecting false selves divides and innervates; and when we relate to God from so many different “selves” the Spirit’s work is divided as well. At its worst such projection ends in spiritual bankruptcy or mental illness.

“Be true to yourself” is more than a Shakespearian maxim. It is good spiritual advice. When we live from a single identity we make ourselves fully present to God.

Yesterday the dog ran from me, chewing away at something she plainly knew that she shouldn’t have. By the time I managed to catch her, it seemed to be gone and I assumed it was a stray bit of paper. But moments later she coughed up a mangled paper clip.

Anxiety and second thoughts often accompany new adventures, but they are also the companions of new mistakes. Distinguishing between the two can be important.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean that it is a good idea.

The dog’s furtive behavior wasn’t the behavior of someone on a new adventure. It was the behavior of someone doing something she knew she shouldn’t do.

Our emotions can be spiritual friends, alerting us to risks that threaten our wellbeing. Instead of ignoring them, running from them, or letting them wash over us, it is important to ask our emotions why they are there and what they have to say about the choices we are making.

The dog couldn’t do that, of course. But we can.

How do we go about making spiritually grounded choices? It goes without saying that some are more difficult to make than others and no template for decision-making can cover every eventuality. But a broad set of guidelines can be helpful.

First, recognize the differing character of decisions.

Some are inconsequential, everyday decisions that are domestic in nature and rarely have significance beyond the moment: a choice of breakfast food, the clothing we choose to wear for the day, the place we buy fuel for the car.

Some are moral choices. These have significant consequences and, more often than not, we know what needs to be done.
Others are life-choices: Choices that within broad moral guidelines range widely, but have the power to shape the way we live for months, years, decades — or for a lifetime: decisions about life-partners, education, and jobs.

Here I think that the guidelines Ignatius of Loyola offered are hard to improve upon. Will the decisions you make draw you more closely to God and others in love? Or will it drive you away from God and others?

The guidelines he offers have nothing to do with whether the decisions are easy or hard to make; whether they are enjoyable or challenging — they are measured by their spiritual consequences.

The great gift of being created in the image of God is our ability to choose, but often we run from the gift. We postpone making choices, sidestep the responsibility to choose, make excuses for choosing, or defer to others, forcing them to make choices for us.

The motives vary: We fear making the wrong choice. We run from responsibility. Or we simply lack the discipline, courage and energy to make them.

From time to time, it may be appropriate to defer making a choice: We may not have enough information. Other choices may take precedence. And it may not be time yet to move on.

But we cannot escape the gift of choice. By avoiding or deferring choices, we make a choice: We choose to remain stuck. We choose to ignore God’s claim upon our lives. We choose to live in fear. Or we choose to be the passive victims of the choices that others make.

The failure to honor the gift God has given us could prove to be the only wrong choice we make.

Devoted to what we can measure as a means of determining value and truth, we have accumulated the largest amount of information ever available to the human race. We collect and organize vast amounts of it. That is an exceptional achievement and it has its contribution to make.

This is the age of information.

But it’s in no danger of being the age of wisdom.

Wisdom asks

• what a fact might mean,
• which facts are important,
• and what the facts might demand of us.

The ancient Hebrew approach to wisdom also asked those questions from a very particular point of view — one that took seriously God’s existence, our mortality, and the importance of living our lives in full recognition of both.

Wisdom harnesses information. Without its discipline, information has the power to confuse, overwhelm, deceive, and mislead.

It’s a carnival game…players are given a large wooden and rubber mallet designed to bump of mechanical moles as they poke their heads out of a series of holes. Wack the mole, win a prize.

It’s also a popular form of pastoral counseling and a favorite of those who feel that their Christian responsibility is discharged by identifying and wacking the sins of others. Wack a sin and win God’s favor.

The problem with the latter game is that it makes for lousy pastoral care. When someone else struggles, the first question to ask is this: What does the situation say about the needs of your soul?

There may be an appropriate place for repentance and amendment of life to come. But the first challenge is to name the emptiness or struggle that leads to sin in the first place. The goal is healing and healing can only take place after the deep nature of the wound is discovered.

Spiritual wack-a-mole may make the guy with the mallet feel better, but it does very little for the friend in need.

Vertigo is more than a physical sensation. The disorientation that is part and parcel of the sensation is also an excellent metaphor for the disorientation that is all too common in the complex world in which we live.
Making decisions marked by grace, wisdom, and integrity are a challenge.

In abandoning the cultivation of virtue we often focus instead on the variables in the decision making process; and, at first blush, there is a good deal to commend that approach. If we are going to make a decision that will work, we need to understand the complexities involved. But in isolation, the situational approach to living becomes a series of negotiations and compromises without soul or heart.

By contrast, those who argue for the primacy of virtue argue This is not to say that variables and the complexity of the choices that we face do not matter. It is to say, however, that taking action in the world around us is grounded in a radically different way when we appreciate that making moral choices is finally an inside job.

The character of our discernment and the strength of our courage depends upon who we are. And it is the only way to cure vertigo.

An on-going debate in the Medieval world was over the relationship between outer grace and inner virtue.
Some argued that cultivated behavior could nurture inner virtue. A near modern equivalent might the notion, “Act your way into a new way of feeling.”

The difficulty with this approach, of course, is that for it to work there needs to be a fundamental commitment to interior transformation. There also needs to be some measure of interior virtue for it to work. Disciplined or committed people, for example, may transform their lives by beginning with outward action. People who are neither disciplined nor committed, or whose virtue is subverted by depression or guilt will often talk about such changes, but it is difficult for them to ever turn the corner. And, of course, there is another category of human being who acts the part in order to win followers or widen their influence who never intended to cultivate virtue at all.

Other Medieval thinkers argued that genuine transformation is an inside job. Only a commitment to the cultivation of virtue can lead to outward transformation. The gracious human being can be counted upon to act graciously in a way that the person who is apparently gracious cannot.

It is not enough to claim inner virtue, of course. Inner virtue has to be given outward expression. But, of the two, it is the inside job that proves indispensible. In that sense, the cultivation of virtue is a spiritual enterprise. We can’t (as some motivational experts argue) look into the mirror and say, “Everyday you are getting better and better in every way” and have it happen.

Instead we need to listen attentively for the movement of the Spirit in our lives — movement that shapes our motivations, our way of being in the world, our values and passions. When that happens, then, as Paul put it, the Spirit yields fruit, fruit that is (by any other name) a list of virtues: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance.

It is moving from that inside job to a life shaped by those virtues that we become the children of God.

My wife’s hairdresser engaged her in a conversation about purgatory recently. She’s a good Catholic girl and she’s against it.
“It’s too much like hell,” she said, “and I can’t believe that God would just torment people because they didn’t get life quite right.”

It is, as my wife pointed out, a common, popular, and completely misguided notion of what the doctrine of purgatory is all about. (It’s also a product of medieval spirituality — but that was a bit too much for a conversation in a salon.) Rightly, she also pointed out that purgatory isn’t about punishment. It’s about healing. Think of it this way, she said, “Would you rather your doctor just quickly stuck a bandage on a compound fracture and sent you on your way, or would you want him to set the bone and close the wound?”

Whether you believe in purgatory or not, her picture of it illustrates several important spiritual truths:

God does want to heal us.

He wants the healing to begin now.

It’s an on-going process in this life.

And it continues as necessary in the next.

As I said when she told me the story, “Some people just have more homework to do in heaven than others. But God loves us all.”