Life’s Purpose We often hear that there is no use in working to improve our life, to fight evil, or to establish justice, because progress will occur by itself… Life has no meaning without purpose. To lack purpose is to deny the existence of God, and to admit that our life is an evil, stupid joke.

Giuseppe Mazzini
Cited in Calendar of Wisdom

In many ways, my sense of purpose has been my guiding intention throughout my life. And yes, I will readily admit to an imperfect understanding of its many dimensions, wrinkles, and curves; however my assertion that my life has an intrinsic value and
holds an unfolding, deepening and possibly “unfinishable” purpose are two of the most crucial and foundational reasons I get out of bed each day…

As you can readily recall, I have spoken about Teilhard de Chardin many times… I feel this is because the idea of teleology and purpose have been so meaningful for me. He was one of the few theologians who spoke about this urge, drive, mission, or purpose so eloquently and convincingly for me.

One of my earliest, and I would say, central life Myths was the circumstances of my birth…
Given the limits of medical approaches, I was considered to be still born, as I did not begin to breath or animate in any way, and I was actually placed on a back self, presumed dead!

That is until one of the attending nurses had an intuitive flash where she picked me up and placed me in a nearby ventilator/incubator, and after a little while (?) I began to breathe on my own!

So the Mythos around my unusual birth, and my struggle of coming to life, was relayed to me many times over the course of my early life. That re-telling has become a lifelong source of wonder and curiosity, and grace.

There have been many attempts at explaining this… From psychics and devout people who talk about reliving or reconciling previous karmic circumstances, and from the faith perspective, the gracious intervention of The Holy Spirit.

So, of course, it was a fortunate and intuitive action in the relative chaos of a difficult birth situation, while others say it was a beneficial unexplainable mystery, and so on…
However, one attempts to explain it, I attribute my overriding and maybe overwhelming desire to have a good and noble purpose to my life from that experience. (Incidentally, that nurse who had a flash of insight, to rush me to the incubator, in a few years, she became my aunt!)

Another speculation that I have spoken about is the willing embrace of chaos within a grand or ultimate sense of a Holy Order to the universe and to all existence.

Within any structure that is enlivened, that is grand and unfolding, dynamic and ever moving, there has to be a chaotic and creative process within it that allows for everything from genetic differences to planetary evolution. Variety, differentiation, “uniqueness”, all depend on a certain amount of rule breaking, mistakes, or variables in chemistry, physics, and unexplainable results.

All life and its dynamism and grace unfolds along patterns that are not rigid and unmoving or unchanging, but in the “Grand Scheme” of things, there is an order that abides.

Lastly, in first receiving a Congregational ordination, and then ten years later, receiving of Holy Orders as a non-Roman independent priest, attests to my sustaining premise and outlook that our lives are comprised by symbolic and meaningful acts that relate and reveal the story and the purpose of our lives.

Granted, I chose a formal and traditionally religious designation or identity, but that does not negate or detract from the larger reality that we are all storytellers and that there is, even if we resist knowing it or never do fully comprehend it, a purpose to our lives and to the choices we have made all along the way.

Many of us have chosen such contracts and commitments. Not the least of which would be to parenting and marriage, or to the ethical expectations of professional careers. Each contains a story of its own, an integrity and most likely a mishap or two of its own!

We write each chapter of our lives, whether consciously or unconsciously, each day. We seek to fulfill or realize this sense of order and purpose in our lives through the choices we make, and the actions that result from those choices:
knowing, in full humility, that our understanding of those choices and those results can be largely unknown, unanticipated, alarming, and mysterious for us! That is another reason for believing in forgiveness, which is its own storyline!

I would envision a time when each person, through their spiritual search and religious education, would see themselves as being under Holy Orders; that each of us were called to live out a noble and uplifting purpose; to live in service to humanity and to the planet in ways that are diverse and necessary, and each of us will be able to attest to the meaning of a life well lived, and a world that is well-loved!