What God Wants For Your Life

Albert Szent-Györgyi lived from 1893 to 1986. A Hungarian physiologist, who fought in the resistance during World War II and later moved to the United States, he is credited with discovering vitamin C. Commenting on his work, he was once observed, “Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen but understanding it for the first time.”

There are, of course, some ways in which his observation applies in a unique fashion to certain kinds of work. The discovery of vitamin C was a one-of-kind “discovery.”

But it occurs to me that in another sense, the spiritual territory that we discover within ourselves is another kind of adventure in understanding. The frontier between our own lives and the life of God is, by definition, an unexplored world for all of us. In broad terms some people have blazed trails for us that lead the way — St. John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila, Thomas Merton, and a long list of others.

In another sense, however, the journey for each of us has its own unique, autobiographical character. There are commonalities, but there is also endless variety.

In that sense, the adventure in understanding is one that is always opening up to us as we journey ever more deeply into God. “We know what we know, when we know it.”

That means that, if we are open to it, each of us is on a journey of discovery filled with fresh understanding and wonder. The spiritual life is not a long, slow, forced march. It is not a boring celestial choir singing 650 verses of “Just As I Am.” It is an adventure, filled with uncharted territory, endless possibilities for growth, and countless occasions for wonder.

Don’t drag, trudge, or march your way through the day. Go on an adventure.

To recap:

As I said yesterday, my wife and I recently watched the movie, “The Invention of Lying” last night, starring Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner. If you haven’t seen it, the premise is that the main characters live in a world where everyone tells the truth and no one lies. Part way through the story, Gervais learns how to lie and he uses his gift to reassure his dying mother that there is “a man up in the sky” and a life after death.

On one level, it could be argued that the film is hostile to religion. It is, after all, according to the film, a lie. And the description that Gervais gives of the man up in the sky to people is the worst kind of theology in many ways. Gervais himself also admits at his mother’s grave side that she is there, in the ground, not in heaven.

At the same time, when — thanks to his capacity for lying — he marries the character played by Garner, it is also clear that their happiness is insured by his capacity to lie. She is a lousy cook, but he assures her, the food is delicious and so does his son, who has also inherited the gene for lying.

It’s this other twist in the plot that struck me. The question that the movie seems to pose is this: “Is it right to lie in an intimate relationship?” On the other hand, these are not people who simply tell the truth, they are people without a cerebral cortex. They have no governor on their brains. They say whatever occurs to them. They consider their opinions, impressions, and experiences as the venue in which truth is found. And they seem to believe that whatever is on their minds is worth sharing.

This is truth without humility (or any other virtue), my truth as the measure of the truth.

Intimate relationships rely upon the capacity for honesty and candor and that level of confidence in another human being can create the opportunity for growth and mutual understanding that we cannot find anywhere else in life. But the kind of truth that the world practices before Gervais’ character learns to lie is far from that kind of honesty. It is truth telling that is brutal, disrespectful, life-denying, destructive and cold-blooded.

I dated someone years ago who was dedicated to this kind of truth telling. She called them the way she saw them. She asserted her right to call them; and she was also supremely confident that she was right — pretty much all the time.

There are at least two problems with this kind of “truth-telling.”

One, the person who takes this attitude also assumes a role that only God can play. We are all fallible and we are all imperfect. To confidently assert your right to judge another human being 24-7 is to assume a role that is not yours to play, no matter how often you are right — and no one is right as often as they think they are.

To own our humanity is to own our own faults, acknowledge our limitations, and foreswear the all-seeing, all-knowing role of God. Intimacy is not a license to run someone else’s life. It is, in some ways, a relationship that obligates us to exercise greater care in the “truths” we share.

In that regard, God is better at being God than we are.

Two, since I’m a first child, overly concerned about doing the right thing, and deeply in touch with my own imperfections, I didn’t really need another God, especially not that kind of God. What we tell one another should never be determined by what we think we are entitled to say or want to say. Intimacy grows when the other person’s needs are more important to us than our own.

If allowing that care and concern to modify what we say to one another is lying, so be it, I suppose — but I’m inclined to believe that it is simply the truth, tempered by love and humility. To cultivate the ability to give another human being that gift is not a bad thing.

Look for opportunities…they are there, today.

My wife and I watched the movie, “The Invention of Lying” last night, starring Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner. If you haven’t seen it, the premise is that the main characters live in a world where everyone tells the truth and no one lies. Part way through the story, Gervais learns how to lie and he uses his gift to reassure his dying mother that there is “a man up in the sky” and a life after death.

On one level, it could be argued that the film is hostile to religion. It is, after all, according to the film, a lie. And the description that Gervais gives of the man up in the sky to people is the worst kind of theology in many ways. Gervais himself also admits at his mother’s grave side that she is there, in the ground, not in heaven.

Now I am not yet sure how I feel about the film, but movies have the power to shape the way we think about the spiritual life, so it is worth making two observations about it. One about religion and God, the other (tomorrow) about relationships.

On God:

The film’s premise about religion is completely bogus. It assumes that for something to be true, there are only certain ways to know that they are true and the truth is all about what we can sense, that is, see, feel, hear, and smell. That’s why religion has to be a lie. But that’s a narrow construal of truth and the way we find it.

It completely overlooks the fact that many of the most powerful truths that shape our lives are truths that cannot be identified with our senses. For example, the love that two people have for one another is not something that can, as such, be sensed. All we can do is point to behaviors that suggest two people love one another.

The same is true of God’s love. For us to know something about God requires a different set of senses, a different way of knowing, and logically, while a knowledge of God has to involve human elements for us to understand it, it is also true that if God is not human, much of what it means to know God takes us into a completely different realm of being. The oldest lie about God is that what God wants for us can’t be anything but a lie.

Tomorrow…The Invention of Lying: On relationships.

I was walking the dog this morning and the nose was in gear.

Up in the air, working hard. So hard I’m amazed she doesn’t get a cramp in it, or a foreign object. We’ve jokingly described her as a nose with a transport system. That is who she is, what she does, and what she does when she is happy.

There are lessons here for all of us…

Find the passion that defines you.

Give yourself to it daily.

Don’t let others convince you that you should have a different passion.

Don’t let others take it from you by denigrating your passion or by substituting their passion for yours.

Don’t let circumstances keep you from living out of your passion, even if circumstances don’t allow you to give it expression in quite the way you hoped.

And remember, we were made to live our God-given passion, so delight in it.

If you don’t live out of that passion today, it will never be expressed quite the way it was meant to be expressed.

Tomorrow I will spend my day in a meeting at the National Institutes of Health, discussing a research design that physicians and others have developed in order to combat Sickle Cell Anemia. Sickle cell claims the lives of tens of thousands forcing patients to have repeated transfusions to deal with the disease; and even that standard of treatment carries with it additional perils — to say nothing of being forced to spend your life having the transfusions.

For victims of sickle cell life is never optimal. It is lived out on terms conditioned by the illness.

Often, I think, we are tempted to believe that in order to begin making spiritual progress, we allow ourselves to fall into the trap of believing that in order to begin, we need to have certain things in place: our health, financial security, more time — the list is theoretically endless. But Sickle Cell patients and almost all of us live life with less than optimal conditions and a certain number of inevitable limitations.

The very notion that we can achieve an optimal state of affairs that will then allow us to make spiritual progress is, in fact, a complete phantom. The circumstances of this day, no matter how desirable or desperate, provide an opportunity for listening, responding, and growing to the prompting of the Spirit.

Look for a place to get started. You already have what you need. You have today.

So how do we cope with freedom? A few thoughts —

One, grasp this: The freedom that you have is God’s gift.

That may sound fairly abstract, but acknowledging that our freedom is God’s gift and not a right, or our possession, is the key to using our freedom in ways that are life giving and healthy.

We don’t think very often about it, but the best of gifts is also something of a trust — we honor the giver and the giving in the way we use a gift. If your mother gave you a cherished crystal bowl, you wouldn’t intentionally drop it or feed the dog out of it unless you were trying to send a very different kind of message.

To use our freedom with reverence for the giver and the giving is to honor both.

Two, use your freedom in ways that accord with what you know about the will of God. Boundaries are not restrictions or an infringement on your freedom. They are there to promote a life-giving environment for the exercise of freedom. The Olympic athletes that we watched a couple of weeks ago accomplished what they did because they observed a practice schedule, ate wisely, and worked on their technique. From all reports, Bodie Miller’s performance in this Olympics exceeded his performance in earlier competitions because he acknowledged the boundaries.
Three, take responsibility for your freedom. Its exercise does not depend upon others, God is not responsible for how you use it. You are.

Far too many of us wait for permission, blame our choices on others, or choose by not choosing. Taking responsibility for our freedom is not something we can escape.

Four, be creative. Life is a canvas —- not paint by numbers. God delights in what you can do. If you worry about painting in the wrong place or outside of the lines, you will paint very little and leave a far smaller canvas behind.

So, why is freedom scary? There are, no doubt, a number of reasons and they vary from person to person.

Some struggle with the fear of failure, even when they are succeeding. Some tire and fray at the effort of performing because they are fairly sure that the love or regard that others have for them are dependent upon their last performance. And others hide from their freedom, afraid that if they exercise it they will run the risk of making a mistake. When we exercise freedom we also make commitments and decisions that define us and our future. The sheer uncertainty on the other side of such choices can leave us paralyzed and keep us from making any choice at all, or it can paralyze us mid-stream. “Why am I out here?” we ask ourselves.

At a more basic level, however, I think we also find freedom scary because we are uncertain about what to do with it without God’s help. When we make choices we have the same experience, that our dog had that I mentioned yesterday. “I’m out here, I’m not supposed to be out here, and it’s dark. Help!”

Some thoughts about how we cope with our freedom. For now it might be worth asking what kinds of fear keep us from exercising our freedom.

Our Gordon Setter, Hilda, got out of her kennel last night. We evidently failed to secure the latch and she stood downstairs in the middle of the room barking. The bark wasn’t a confident, ferocious bark, it was a frightened, startled bark — the kind of bark that says, “I’m out, I’m not supposed to be out, it’s dark, and my people aren’t out here with me. Help!”

Freedom can be a scary thing.

To one degree or another, I think we all find it that way and we run from it. We allow other people to make decisions for us that only we can really make. We blame others for the decisions we make. We avoid making decisions (even though to not make a decision is to make one). And even when we do exercise our freedom we sometimes assign the responsibility for it to God, luck, or blind fate.

Abraham Maslow, the great Jewish psychologist, called it “the Jonah syndrome.” Late in life, he wrote, “We fear our highest possibility (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that we can glimpse in our most perfect moments….We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before the very same possibilities.” I think he is right. I think Hilda is right.

But freedom is one of God’s great gifts to us. So why should it be scary?

Some thoughts about that tomorrow. For now, this question: Where and how do I run from the freedom God has given me?

Much of what we see or expect in life is shaped in the first place by our horizons.

I’ve lived much of my life in the northeast. When I moved to Texas I was struck by the change in horizons. There is a lot of sky out here. Neither the terrain, nor the trees do as much to limit the horizon as they do in Pennsylvania or Washington. Changes in the weather are visible from a long way off.

The differences have less to do with what is actually there in the way of sky and more to do with where you stand.

The same could be said of the spiritual life. What we can see in the way of potential for our relationship with God is shaped not by what God is willing to give us, but by the place where we stand. If the horizons of our relationship with God are limited by guilt, anger, or resentment, then we will see less, expect less, and believe that less is possible.

One of the most striking summaries of the Christian message is this:

“God loves you more than you love yourself and you are meant for glory.” What a difference in horizons when you stand there. You can see so much more of what God wants for your life.