The purposeless driven life
When I was delivered into the hands of the doctor at Good Samaritan Hospital, at no point did my father turn to my mother and express his concerns over whether I would fall short of their detailed, itemized plan for me. They hadn’t given birth to a vocation—to a politician, or to an author. They had a newborn son. If one were to have the gall to ask a couple why they were bringing a child into the world, they might seem perplexed. Life is life—it doesn’t need justification.
Photo credit: Tim Andries
The number of sermons, chapels, and offhand comments I’ve heard on “God’s plan for my life,” rivals the number of the stars in the universe. Okay that’s hyperbolic, but I will say that it is a large number. I am often confronted with statements or questions like, “Are you following God’s will for your life?” or “Don’t pick up the pen, let God write your story,” or some butchered quotation of Jeremiah 29:11 regarding some detailed plan God has for me, yet for some reason has chosen to conceal it, forcing me to constantly question whether I am in fact “within his will.” There is a manic obsession within the church that centers on the achievement of each individual’s chosen and select purpose within their lifetime. And that one missed prompt or calling could mean a weaker purpose or less fulfilling life. I would call this the guilt of existence: we persist in letting God down merely through the act of living.
I would like to propose an alternative to this way of thought. Allow me to suggest that you actually have no purpose. Sorry that sounded harsh. No preordained path or mission that you are to fulfill. That, like a parent sees their child, God wants nothing more than the pleasure of watching you live.
But, wait. If there’s no ultimate purpose or goal that our lives are striving towards, how can anything in our lives possess any value? Once you let go of purpose, many will argue, you’re letting go of meaning altogether. Accept that the world has no reason for being here, and we might as well spend the rest of our days donning black, reading Camus, and coming up with excuses why we shouldn’t slit our valueless wrists, right?
Maybe not. Friedrich Nietzsche, easily one of the most influential atheists of the modern era and beyond, states in his 1872 work The Birth of Tragedy that it is “only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” For Nietzsche, the world is justified and has meaning not because it is working towards some end goal, but precisely because it is not. Thus, the universe is only understandable and valuable as an aesthetic phenomenon; like the greatest art, it is an end in itself and requires no teleological aim. The question Christians must pose to Nietzsche, then, is whether it’s possible that there is an artist behind the artwork. If so, we can maintain Nietzsche’s assertion that meaning does not flow from purpose, while still upholding theistic belief. Perhaps, Nietzsche’s vision is not as at odds with Christianity as he thought it was.
Terry Eagleton, with his usual charm, argues in Reason, Faith, and Revolution that “God is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it. Or, as one might say in more theological language, for the hell of it.” This view of God, while underrepresented, is hardly revolutionary. In scripture, it is hard to find a passage where God gives a clear reason as to why He created us and the universe. To be sure, the Bible communicates the trajectory towards redemption for humanity and the rest of creation, but this goal does little to explain why God made any of this in the first place.
Moreover, if the Bible truly does teach that God is love, why wouldn’t love be the primary force that drove creation? If this is the case, God did not make us, or anything, because he had to, but only because he wanted to. The fact that there is no ultimate point to creation should not render life meaningless, but make it all the more meaningful. After all, what could be more meaningful than having life breathed into you not because God needs you to work for Him, but because you are a free outpouring of His love and creativity?
In Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, an atheist, Rogojin, asks the protagonist of the story, Prince Muishkin, why he believes in God. His long and nuanced response ends with Muishkin describing a chance encounter with a mother and his observation of her interaction with her six-week-old baby. As the baby smiles up at her creator, Muishkin sees the truest, most powerful joy in the eyes of the mother. This joy, Muishkin explains to Rogojin, is “the whole essence of Christianity … expressed in one flash.”
When we meditate on the love a parent has for her child, the biblical metaphor of God as father becomes all the more apt. There are certain things – like expressing oneself artistically, or having kids, or desiring love – that we simply don’t need a reason for doing. Interestingly enough, these things are often the most precious, most meaningful aspects of our humanity. We should not be surprised that life just happens to be one of these things.
So stop. Stop toiling and aching over the uncertainty of whether your major is within the will of God. It isn’t. God doesn’t care. Well, he does but not because it trips up his plans if your degree is from one department or another. If the metaphor stands, God, as a parent, wants you to pursue what you love, that you might flourish. Abraham Heschel wrote, “The human situation is disclosed in the thick of living. The deed is the distillation of the self. We can display no initiative, no freedom in sheer being; our responsibility is in living.” Who you are and why God made you is not contingent upon your vocation, the person you choose (not) to marry, or any single act for that matter. It is in the act of living.
Find peace in that.
Ryan Froese & Michael Biornstad
Excellent.
refreshing.
Fulfilling and rich.
God wanted me to comment on this