What God Wants For Your Life

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.”

Einstein said, “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”

Just because Einstein said it, doesn’t mean you need to believe it. Sometimes an idea seems absurd at first, because the idea is, well, absurd.

Don’t give absurd ideas a home. Especially not when it applies to spiritual ideas.

Just because they are described in a faintly tragic tone and uttered from behind a pulpit, doesn’t mean they are reliable. Sappy is not the same as subtle.

Just because the idea is lathered up in five syllable words doesn’t make it profound. It may mean that the person who said it just doesn’t understand what they are saying clearly enough to say it clearly.

Just because someone insures that every creed was consulted and every group left unoffended, doesn’t make it true. It just means its innocuous.

And just because someone says it with the certainty of Charlton Heston playing Moses doesn’t mean you can bank on it. Those folks are often wrong, but never in doubt.

Spiritual ideas — like any other ideas — have the power to enlighten and mislead, to heal and hurt, to grow or crush. Think about them, test them, and toss them out the front door if they don’t measure up.

Don’t give absurd ideas a home.

My wife, who does a lot of spiritual direction, is right. A good deal of what people reject from their religious up-bringing revolves around ideas that they developed when they were twelve years old.

But they often spend the whole of their adulthood reacting to what they thought they knew when they were twelve.

So, with certainty, they reject God, the church, sacraments — you name it — because at the age of 12 (maybe a bit younger or a bit older) they concluded that what their faith taught was what they understood about it.

Let’s be honest: Would you invest with someone whose economic ideas took shape when they were twelve? Would you let them fly the next plane you board? Would you get on the boat they were going to navigate? Would you let them treat you, your child, or (come to that) your dog, based on what they understood about anatomy, physiology and medicine?

When we examine the ideas that govern our lives, it’s worth asking, how old are they? If they are twelve, it might be time to tell them to grow up.

I have been asked by some friends to officiate at their wedding, which is something I don’t often get the opportunity to do.
There will be limits to what I can say to the couple. Long sermons at a wedding are never welcome or memorable. Couples invariably suffer from retrograde amnesia.

Whatever might end up in the sermon, the process of preparing always leaves me feeling there is more to say. It is hard to explain to couples — especially young couples — how significant the choice of a partner is spiritually. They are enthralled with one another, on their best behavior, blind to the tangled reality that is the other person, and distracted by the arrangements for the wedding itself. And, yet, they are about to make a commitment that will shape what they believe is possible in life.

Their partner will powerfully shape what they believe is most important. They will reflect back to them impressions of their value and worth. They will expand or limit their horizons. They will reinforce or erode their sense of being loved and cherished. They can free their partners or smother them.

It could be argued that we all should possess the strength of character to own those possibilities for ourselves before we ever enter into an intimate relationship like marriage; and there is a lot of truth to that argument. But a partner granted that kind of intimacy exercises enormous power and, at a minimum, the power to live into life’s possibilities.

That is a spiritual issue.

The possibilities of life are larger or smaller depending upon the extent to which a relationship like marriage nurtures the presence of God, the confidence that God loves us, and the courage to believe that God wants the best for us. It is the hope that grounds all other hopes.

Marriage partners can foreclose on those possibilities and often do: through relentless criticism, controlling behavior, and unyielding bullying. When they do they indulge in the oldest form of domestic terrorism.

They strangle the ability to sense the love of God. They leave their partners fighting to believe that they can be forgiven; and they make it difficult for their partners to imagine that their lives can achieve the glory God intends.
In other words, marriage loses its sacramental character.

Don’t marry a domestic terrorist.

A dear friend and colleague, Sharon Alexander, is now seeking ordination and is also a lawyer. She recently observed,

“at my firm the other lawyers always joked that I did not simply think outside the box, I didn’t even acknowledge the box’s existence in many cases – this helped me get through a lot of complicated corporate messes”

That is not only a wonderful personal characteristic; it is an important spiritual move as well.

I am not a great fan of the power of positive thinking or (as it is sometimes described in religious circles) the power of positive confession.

It strikes me that people who reflexively argue that you just need to “think differently,” live in denial. Or they are just fortunate enough to have never encountered an intractable problem — yet.

That kind of unrealism is always disheartening to people who have faced profound, irreversible losses and I have always avoided offering easy answers for jut that reason. The death of a loved one, the loss of a job, and the devastating news of a life-changing diagnosis are all new boxes that cannot be completely ignored.

But there is a sense in which we are all called upon to not only think outside the box, but refuse to acknowledge its existence. For Christians, that is not the power of positive confession or positive thinking…

It is power that rests in the work of God.

It is faith in the work that God has done.

It is the courage to acknowledge that our surroundings might have changed, but they are not a decisive judgment on our lives.

It is the confession that declares, “on the third day…God did not acknowledge the box.”

A friend of mine who works in the business world observes: “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you. It’s what you don’t know that you don’t know that gets you.”

That’s true in the spiritual world as well. The assumptions that we make about God, the purpose of life, the character of prayer — and a long list of other matters — all powerfully shape the way that we live whether we know it or not.

WYDKTYDK is where you acquired the assumptions that you make about God. They could be things you were taught, but they could be things you have caught. It is not uncommon, for example, to project our early experiences of our parents onto God. That might not be all that bad if your parents were kind and nurturing. It is not all that good if your parents were abusive or cruel.

WYDKTYDK is how little our ideas have to do with what other people really believe. Being a priest, some people can’t resist telling me that they don’t believe in God. Fair enough… but when people say that they reject Christianity, I often find that what they have rejected isn’t anything like what Christians actually believe about God. There is nothing wrong with rejecting bad ideas about God, but what if the bad ideas are the only ones you’ve been taught?

“It’s not what you don’t know that gets you. It’s what you don’t know that you don’t know that gets you.”

Why me?

Why did this happen?

Am I just not a good person?

Is it just that God doesn’t love me?

Is God doing this to teach me something?

Most of those are common questions and there may be more people asking them now than at some other times. But they are actually fairly common and most people ask them sooner or later. Sooner or later success turns to failure, hopes meet with disappointment, health gives way to illness, life comes to an end.

To assume that the reversals and losses are our fault is often a mistake. To be sure, some of what happens to all of us is the result of choices we make and when that happens, it’s important to acknowledge that is the case. But just as often — maybe even more often — there is no connection between the things that happen to us and the choices we make. And to imagine that our losses are God’s doing, is to imagine a God who would be hard to worship or love.

What you need to hear and the inner conversation you might need to have could be much more like this:

“It is what it is.”

It’s not a referendum on my goodness.

It’s not a referendum on my worth.

It’s not a referendum on my skill, ability, or intelligence.

It’s not a blessing in disguise or God’s will.

“It is what it is.”

The only questions now are these:

How do I find peace?

And what do I do instead?

I am the king of the post mortem. I ask the “what if…” question more often than any other.

But there is a fundamental unreality about such questions and spiritual peril in asking it. The unreality lies in the notion that you can revisit a time and place from somewhere in the future and see it again as you saw it then. The spiritual peril is that we live in the past and neglect the present.

You know what you know when you know it.

The only spiritual mistake that you can make lies not in having made past decisions differently. It lies in not acting now on what you know. The key to spiritual growth and renewal lies in remaining open in the present to the possibility of living out of what we know now.

We are all tempted to manage the future. The boundaries between responsible planning and controlling behavior are difficult to discern; and most of us are tempted to account for as many variables as we possibly can — in providing for our own safety, our retirement, and (as they grow into adulthood) our children’s futures.

You see it in the struggles that parents have in crafting “adult” relationships with their maturing children and most of the conflicts that arise between them arise out of the failure to recognize those moments when the boundaries are crossed. You see it too in the anxiety that attends planning for retirement.

The difference between responsible planning and managing the future is easier to discern, however, if we grasp the fundamentally spiritual nature of the struggle. The key to recognizing the difference lies not in naming this or that action as one step too far, but in asking ourselves honest questions about the spiritual motivations that lie beneath the decisions we make:

Does the decision I am making arise out of the fundamental recognition that I am not God, but God’s child?

Does the decision I am making arise out of an awareness that I am a child among many children — each of whom possesses his or her own God-given right to make decisions for themselves?

Does the decision I am making arise out of the absolute limits that awareness imposes over time?

Finding spiritually healthy, honest answers to those questions can allow us to live with freedom in the present, instead of managing a future that is not ours to control.