What God Wants For Your Life

The workplace also crystallizes the challenge of wealth. In seeking to deal with wealth in ways that have spiritual integrity, it is important to acknowledge certain realities:

We all possess wealth.

Wealth is relative. There is no absolute dollar figure that measures who is wealthy and who is not.

Wealth takes many forms. It is not just about bank accounts. It is about relationships, education, and social location.

It is distributed unevenly by forces beyond our control, including geography, nationality, neighborhood, family of origin, education, opportunity, and random chance.

No matter how little you have, you are likely to have more than someone else.

The spiritual challenge of wealth is about whether you have wealth or not, nor is it about whether you will use your wealth in ways that are life-giving.

It is a question of how you use it.

As with every other gift at our disposal, power is best used when it draws us closer to God and others.

When using power, the beginning of spiritual wisdom begins with these affirmations:

We all have power of one kind or another.

Power is a function of relationships, experience, education, and a variety of other factors beyond our control.

Most of those factors are constantly in flux and so is the nature of the power we possess.

The question is not whether we use power or not.

It is a question of how we use it and the goals we seek to achieve.

As with every other gift at our disposal, power is best used when it draws us closer to God and others.

Another reality we are forced to confront when we ask what it means to be spiritual is the struggle with power.

That spiritual struggle is not — as some suppose — a struggle between those who foreswear power and those who abuse it. Such easy distinctions are made by people in deep denial about their own lives, never mind social realities.

Power takes many forms and is unavoidable. It is a function of social status, family roles, the classroom, boardroom, and garage. It is the traveling companion of money, social status, education, licensing, union membership, executive responsibility, age, experience, and seniority. From managers to mothers, tenured faculty to preschool teachers, older siblings to senior legislators power is a factor.

If someone denies that power exists or suggests that there is a system by which it can be eliminated, they are not being spiritual. They are being naïve. And they open themselves up to countless errors in judgment with moral and spiritual consequences for themselves and others.

The denial that keeps us from finding direction for our lives takes a number of different forms.

And almost all of us are stuck from time to time in one way or another.

This list is not exhaustive. It is offered to help you think about how you might be stuck:

Co-dependence: The non-stop “I can’t move unless you move, I can’t find healing unless you find healing” that keeps us from facing our own challenges.

Laziness: I’m not worthy. It won’t matter. Meaning, I don’t want to work that hard.

Fear: I can’t do it. There are too many challenges. Meaning I’m afraid to try and I am really, really afraid to fail.

Anger: The fury that is focused on the others who are to blame that absolves me from deciding what to do next.

Pain and depression: The hopelessness that deepens because I just won’t make a move.

Misplaced loyalty: I would act, but I need to wait for permission. Meaning I would rather give someone else power over my life (who likely has little or no real investment in it), than run the risk of making the decisions myself.

There are other forms of denial of course — and endless permutations.

But at a deeper level denial points to potential areas of growth, because it almost always points to a place where we need to learn how to trust God.

I enjoy working in spiritual direction with business people.

There is no more powerful combination than someone who is spiritually focused and outwardly motivated to achieve goals in a thoughtful, reflective fashion.

These are people who understand that the work world is not alien to spiritual values. It is an arena in which we hammer out our values in sharp contention with a world that is often indifferent, if not hostile to them.

They also understand that the sharp contention cannot be avoided. It endlessly reinvents itself. Looking for institutions and structures in which we are completely at home is a lost cause. Even apparently spiritual institutions are governed by motives and values that are alien to the spiritual commitments that they are designed to promote. That is life in the world.

Business people are just less likely to labor under the illusion that the world in which they work is that complicated.

Spiritual direction is not for people hiding from life, its challenges, or its complexities. People who are hiding from life need to work on their denial first, then they can begin to look for direction.

Spiritual direction is for people who understand that we are here to seek God in the middle of the complexity.

Our emotions can be important spiritual companions. Just remember, there is a difference between listening to them and being co-opted by them.

Disappointment, for example, measures the distance between what we want and what we have. It can also measure the difference between what should be and what is.

Seen in that light, disappointment can spur us to achievement and drive us to work for justice.

But disappointment can also point to other problems: unfair or unrealistic expectations, unhealthy desires, greed, and envy.

Measure the distance in your disappointment between

what you want and what you have
what you expect and what has happened
what should be and what is

Ask yourself:

Why does the distance disappoint me?
When I have accounted for the distance, what does it tell me about the needs of my soul?

Do I need to grow or mature?
Do I need to forgive?
Do I need to let go of unfair expectations?
Do I need to work or even fight for what is right?

There is information in disappointment. Learn from it, don’t be led by it. Listen for what God is trying to tell you in the middle of it.

My work often involves working with clergy and students preparing for ordained life. Many of the personal issues they face are no different from those faced by others. They simply have a different spin.

Years ago, for example, I counseled a 40-something priest. He had been married for 15 years.

The plans he had made to go to seminary were no surprise to his wife, nor were the moves that are inevitably a part of ordained life. But she secretly resented it. She considered herself the only one who worked during the years that he was in school (though seminary and part-time jobs thread through it represented a great deal of work). He had encouraged her to follow her own path, but she felt that she had been left with inferior opportunities for education. And although the moving actually increased her opportunities for professional development, she became angrier with every move.

What accumulated was an emotional debt that he could never repay; and the weight of it was as apparent in her public behavior as it was in private. She scolded him in public and complained in private. When the young priest attempted to address the issues, she curtly responded that she was “entitled to her opinion.” Over time, the prospects of ever changing the narrative that she wrapped around their relationship dimmed and his desire to even change them waned. Eventually, they divorced.

You are entitled to your opinion. But life-giving marriages are not about countervailing claims. They are about a shared spiritual journey, mutual investment in the spiritual and emotional growth of another human being. They are about a capacity for adventure. They are about forgiveness.

A relationship burdened by emotional debt is a relationship in trouble.

Life’s most intimate relationships are opportunities for spiritual deepening. The sacramental nature of marriage, for example, depends less upon the liturgical rites that initiate it, than it does on a couple’s ability to nurture spiritual growth in one another.

So, a marriage devoid of that concern is likely to offer something well less than is possible and, worse yet, runs the risk of actually undermining the spiritual development of the men and women involved. For that reason, what might seem trivial or domestic in its nature actually has spiritual implications.

Take, for example, the way in which the roles of men and women are often shaped by the divine right of helplessness invoked by some men and women.

Countless relationships and several books on marital bliss make it clear that more than a few marriages are shaped by the assumption that men are exempted from, if not constitutionally incapable of shouldering a wide array of responsibilities: domestic chores, child-rearing, the active shaping of home life, and on-going responsibility for nurturing romance are a few of the wide-ranging categories that come to mind.

The net result is that, more often than not, women are burdened with taking the initiative along a wide-range of activities. The excuses given for this helplessness range from debatable assumptions about the differences in gender to the rather more aggressive claims to being the one who “makes more money.” Conversely, some women invoke the divine right of helplessness with regard to money, leaving their husbands to dictate financial decisions.

There are, of course, variations on this theme; and it is probably less common among younger generations — although it finds new permutations with each change in generation as well.

The net result is that both partners are robbed of opportunities for spiritual growth. Women saddled with the responsibility for things at home labor under both the number of tasks involved and no small amount of anger and bitterness over being treated like indentured slaves. Men assume the role of little boys evincing a strange mix of entitlement and dependence that robs them of deepening their own spiritual lives.
Conversations about rights and gender equity obscure the spiritual losses, stressing instead the legal nature of the relationship between men and women. But for people who understand themselves as children of God, something far deeper is at stake.

Marriage is a relationship that mirrors our relationship with God and it is meant to nurture it.

Neither the claim to a divine right of helplessness, nor the counter-claim to equality quite succeeds in acknowledging what is at stake, nor what is lost when the sacramental nature of the vows no longer make a claim on the lives of both husbands and wives.

Marriage partners who know this do not need to invoke their rights — they know what a gift they have been given.

In the run up to Toy Story 3, we’ve been watching Toy Story 1 and 2. The great thing about both movies and (according to the reviews) the new one as well, is their candor and directness. They may have a cartoonish quality and the characters may be toys, but the movies speak all the more powerfully about out lives as a result. They sneak around, under, and over our defenses.

In the jealous face off between Woody (the cowboy action figure) and Buzz (the space action figure), the movies make a number of those points. Woody, you will recall notes that Buzz can’t really fly, he falls.

That observation and others, along with his own encounter with the limitations of being an action figure bring Buzz to the brink of despair. But when he finally owns the goodness of his own existence, Buzz lives into the truth with pride.

Carrying Woody on his back as they sail through the air trying to return home to their owner, Andy, Woody observes, “Buzz, you’re flying!”

Buzz responds, “This isn’t flying, it’s falling — with style!”

Today is my birthday and I haven’t been a huge fan of any of them on this side of the 50-divide. But I am learning that there is a place for living gratefully into the days we are given as the children of God.

And it beats the alternatives:

We can measure ourselves against the un-realism of youthful expectations.

We can beat ourselves to death (almost literally) over could-of, should-of, and would-of in endless post-mortems over decisions made.

We can let anger and despair rob us of joy in what we do have.

Or we can celebrate what we have and remember that we are loved — by God and by a handful of people who know us as we are…”falling with style.”

Most of us live a schizophrenic existence. We can talk at length about our prayers, church, and our relationship with God, and wax eloquent about our spiritual lives. But the rest of life —- our work, relationships, and a long list of other decisions — are devoid of a spiritual orientation.

There are a variety of reasons we live in this fashion. Some of it has to do with our materialist view of the world and the value we attach to what we can see, feel, hear, and smell. We are inclined to believe that what we can measure is real.

Some of it has to do with our utilitarian bent. What we can use is what matters. And back of those tendencies is a long list of historical reasons for why we are the way we are.

But there is also a fundamentally spiritual explanation for the way we live as well that has as much to with the way we choose to live, as the way we are taught to live.

Bernard of Clairvaux is helpful here in outlining the choices we can make.

Some, he notes, are weighed down by the material world. They are possessed by it, driven by it, dominated by it.

A second group of people live in wonder of the world around them — often exploring and measuring it. Ironically, Bernard observes, they can also have the greatest contempt for the world around them.

The third group asks what divine purpose the world around might have and then choose to live in accord with those purposes.

For those who are genuinely devoted to living a spiritual life, it is this third choice that provides the key. If we begin to ask ourselves how our work, relationships, and daily choices serve divine purposes, life begins to acquire the spiritual character we long to find. It is not a matter of bending the world around us to our needs, it is a matter of the way in which we choose to view the world.

The schizophrenia is of our own making. Everything has a spiritual dimension, if you are willing to see it.

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon for Pentecost 3,3-4 (with thanks to my wife the Bernardine scholar for bringing this to my attention!)