Is there any purpose in my life? (Why did God make me?)*  

Our lives seem to drag on aimlessly, pointlessly. When we are young we are filled with enthusiasm and vigor, and we are less likely to be aware of the emptiness that lurks just below the surface of our great plans and our passionate pleasures. Those over thirty know beyond doubt what the young perceive but dimly: we are all dying. Time goes more quickly, summers are shorter, the years roll around more rapidly, we are not as vigorous as we used to be, and our energies and strengths and ambitions begin to weaken. The body does not respond the way it once did. 

We watch the death notices more carefully, and we find ourselves attending more wakes and funerals. We are growing old, and death is much nearer than it was only a year ago. We had hoped for so much, we had expected so much, we had such bright dreams; now all that seems left is to grow older and then die. 

We try to pretend to ourselves and to others that we are "as young as we ever were," but the pretence is hollow. Our lives, which looked so long in anticipation, look very short in retrospect. We accomplished so little, and now it is almost over. What was it all about? Why bother to live at all? What was the point of the whole collection of events which was us? 

Life is filled with so many senseless events. Mindless tragedies fill our newspapers every day-airplane crashes, the murder of innocent children, insane terrorism, natural disasters. And much in our own lives seems without purpose or meaning-a rainstorm on a picnic or parade day, a bad cold when we are having a party, a handicapped child, the early death of a parent or spouse, a broken marriage, a car that won't start in the morning, a wrong number in the middle of the night, the loss of savings through inflation or depression, the misunderstandings and needless hurts of family life, the treason of friends, the envy of neighbors. Such tragedies, some large and some very small, seem to be without pattern or intent. Why do they happen? 

Life, too, seems devoid of intent and purpose. Why does it happen? 

Some scientists tell us that the whole universe is merely the result of random chance operating among atoms. About such an issue most of us are not much concerned, but when we look at our own daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly existence, such randomness and purposelessness is disturbing. When we were very young we thought we could plan our lives. Now we know that plans-large or small-almost always go awry. If there is any plan at all to our existence -and it is by no means clear that there is-then it must be Someone Else's plan. 

We try not to ask these questions about meaning very often. We try not to wonder about purpose and chaos because the question is so large and so frightening. It is much easier to go about the daily tasks of eating and drinking, working and raising children, paying the bills or not being able to pay them, occasionally relaxing. Then we don't have time to worry about meaning and purpose; but the question still weighs heavy. Is life really "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"? Is it really a meaningless interlude caught between two oblivions? Are we really subject to mindless, impersonal forces which care not at all about us? Are we really alone? 

It often seems to be so. Life is mindless, purposeless, random, absurd. We live out our days, trying to keep our heads above water, and then it all comes to an end and we are quickly forgotten. So let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow or the next day or surely the day after we will die. 

And yet.... And yet we wish it were not so. There is in the depths of the human personality a stubborn and ineradicable conviction that our existence does have meaning and purpose no matter how problematic or obscure that purpose may be. We are caught between the seeming mindless arbitrary cruelty that we see all around us and this intractable conviction of purpose, which will not go away even when we are convinced that it is nothing more than self-deception. 

Occasionally we think we have seen glimpses of what that purpose may be. For some people these glimpses are extraordinarily powerful. For a few brief moments the universe seems to flood into their personality, time stands still, and they feel they are lifted out of themselves, able to see the unity of the cosmos and their own place in it. Light, heat, warmth pour into them and they emerge with the unshakable conviction that everything will be all right. 

Such experiences, in which conviction from without speaks overwhelmingly to conviction from within, are not so rare as we once thought. Still, two-thirds of our number do not have them; yet we all catch occasional flashes which shake us out of the dull routine, the ordered chaos, the noisy desperation of every day-and they make us wonder. 

And wonder is the name of the game. It can be as elaborate as for the theoretical physicist who remarked that whatever is responsible for the universe seems to have known a lot of complex mathematical formulas long before we did. It can be as complicated as for the scientist pondering the immensity of space through which the light we see now has traveled since before the earth began; or as for the chemist realizing that inner space is filled with a dizzying array of tiny particles so small that if the atom were the size of the Milky Way, these particles would be smaller than the earth. Wonder can be as for the anthropologist realizing that if the age of the earth were one year, humankind appeared four hours before midnight on December 31, and civilization appeared just a half second before the stroke of midnight. 

Or wonder can be as simple as a glimpse of a starry sky at night, the smell of spring returning for another year, the rushing of a brook through a forest, the joy of exquisite pleasure with one's spouse, the rose and gold rays of sunset, returning- to where we grew up. Every interlude of wonder, simple or complex, forces upon us the same question: How come? 

The words are the same whether we ask them in times of weariness, disappointment, frustration, tragedy; or in times of joy, insight, contentment. But with an experience of wonder they take on a totally different connotation. Then we are trying to explain, not absurdity but an intimation of graciousness, a hint that beyond the limits there is something else. Why the beautiful mathematical relationships? Why space-inner and outer? Why time and our place in its continuum? Why the sky, the forest, the rushing brook, the sunset, our lover's body? Why our moral sense? Why our urge to self-realization? 

Why anything at all? Now we can ask in awe. 

God is humankind's attempt to explain experiences of wonder and the awe which results from them. Since the wonder experiences hint that whatever is at work in the universe is both purposeful and gracious, God, we assume, is the purposeful and gracious one who is responsible for the universe and for our life. 

There are many possible different interpretations of who God is; for humans must wrestle with the paradox of the graciousness and purpose they occasionally experience and the evil and absurdity which seem so typical of life. Fundamentally, religion is an attempt to harmonize graciousness and evil. God is the center of religion, and our image of God summarizes our response to the puzzle of absurdity and graciousness, of chance and awe. 

Some versions of God see him as benign but forgetful; humans must remind him of his promises and sometimes wake him up from his sleep (Egyptian). Others see him as crotchety and difficult, easily offended by those who violate his plan, and quick to take salutary vengeance; humans must constantly placate and calm him (Babylonian). Still others think that God is fundamentally uninterested in the universe he has created, leaving its governance to irrational, or at least nonrational, forces he has set in motion (Greek and modern deism). And still others find substitute gods in the pursuit of freedom or social justice or a better life for all here on earth-a pursuit which is usually seen as part of some inevitable forward movement of humanity and acts as a substitute for a divine plan (Marxism, scientism). 

It was to tell us about his God that Jesus came. At the core of the Christian experience of Jesus is an experience of the God Jesus claimed to represent in an absolutely unique and special way. And-one must say it with all due reverence -the God of Jesus is Something Else altogether. He is the same God the Jewish people encountered at Sinai-the God who on his own initiative entered into covenant with his people, the God who liberated his people from slavery and oppression, the God who passionately loved his people as a husband loves a wife even when she is faithless. He is the absolute Lord of all creation on which all other powers and forces are dependent; yet when he said in the Sinai experience "I am Yahweh, your God," he made covenant with his people. Uninvited, unasked, and frequently unwelcome and unwanted, Yahweh still made a commitment to his people, and he would remain implacably faithful to that commitment, whatever might come. He had freed them from slavery in Egypt, brought them through the waters of the Red Sea, led them by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. He committed himself to give them their own land and then the whole world. In return he demanded their faithful love. He was a jealous and passionate God; he did not want a faithless or frigid people who went whoring off after false gods, but he would be faithful to his people whatever they did. 

So the experiences of Exodus and Sinai produced for the Hebrews an encounter with a Gracious Purpose, which they perceived as unilaterally liberating His people and then entering into a passionately loving commitment to them. The Lord of the universe had sought them out, freed them, and then yoked Himself irrevocably to them. It was an incredibly daring and even outrageous notion of God, for it argued that the purpose of the universe could be described as a passionately loving and liberating commitment to a people. 

The early Hebrews saw Yahweh as making a covenant with the whole people, but as time went on, their religious thinking developed and they perceived that Yahweh was in fact commiting himself not only to the people but also to individual persons. He passionately loved each individual. The plan and purpose of life, then, as experienced and wondered at by the prophets, was a love affair freely entered into by the Lord of the universe with the individual human person. Whatever evil might occur, and however unfaithful the person might be, God's implacably faithful and passionate love would still be there. 

Life, then, in the Hebrew world view, was a response to a love already freely given and never to be withdrawn. Whatever defects this articulation of the wonder experience may have had, it was certainly not lacking in optimism. The God of the Hebrews may be too good to be true, but at least He is a God who is worth believing in. The universe may not be animated by passionate love, but it would be nice if it were. The graciousness we experience in times of wonder and awe may not be all that gracious, but surely it could not be more gracious than the Hebrews thought it was. 

Jesus was very much a product of the religious currents of his time-however far he may have gone beyond those currents. He insisted that the rigid legalism which had grown up in the relationship between God and his people was absurd. You didn't earn God's love; it was a free gift to be responded to by a free gift of everything that one was and had. Jesus also believed, as we shall see in the next question, that in him and with his coming a new and decisive phase in God's relations with humans had begun. Jesus' followers would think of him as the new Adam, a re-creation of what was essential, a new humanity, a new Moses presiding over a new exodus of liberation and a new Sinai covenant. God in Jesus was renewing his passionate commitment to his people-now not merely a collectivity but a community of individual persons. While Jesus may not have used this precise terminology, there is no doubt that he believed that in him a new age of the world had begun. 

Essential to the beginning of this new age was a deeper and qualitatively new insight into the depths of God's love. We can begin to grasp this insight if we look at the parables of Jesus. Here is where we are in most intimate contact with his world view. It is especially in the parables that Jesus shares with us his own wonder experience of his heavenly Father. Two parables will suffice-the story of the crazy farmer and the story of the loving father (or, as we inappropriately call the latter, the Prodigal Son). 

The men the farmer hired at the last hour of the day were loafers who, because they were lazy, lounged around the marketplace during harvest time when the work was plentiful. They probably did very little work in the short time they were in the fields. They were so ill-tempered that they were prepared to argue with the farmer if he didn't pay them enough. Much to their astonishment, they got a whole day's wage for doing virtually nothing. In the traditional parable, with which the crowds who listened to Jesus were quite familiar, the workers of the eleventh hour became so industrious that they did in one hour what it took others all day to do. They earned every cent of their pay. But Jesus turned the tables. The emphasis in his story is not on the industry of the workers but on the mad generosity of the farmer. No landowner, no matter how wealthy, can stay in business very long if he gives money away to those who do almost nothing. 

The point of Jesus' parable is that by human standards the loving generosity of God is mad, lunatic, insane. 

The critical scene in the story of the loving father is the picture of the father rushing down the road to greet the errant son, cutting short his prepared speech of reproach with an embrace, clothing the astonished young man in new garments, and dragging him off to a feast of celebration. The young man deserved nothing. He was a spoiled brat, a rich man's wasteful son who ought to have been made to earn every inch of the way back into his father's favor. A father who continues to spoil such a ne'er-do-well will get only what he deserves when the son deserts him again. 

Once again, the passionately loving generosity of God must appear bizarre to our careful, rational, human calculations. 

It is not an exaggeration, then, but simply a literal interpretation of his parables to say that the God of Jesus is madly, insanely in love with his human creatures. Does my life have any purpose at all? The response of Christianity is that life is a love affair with a graciousness that is hopelessly in love with us. Paddy Chayefsky catches this in a remarkable passage of dialogue between Yahweh and Gideon in his play Gideon: 

GIDEON: I thought of nothing but you the whole night. I am possessed by all the lunacy of love. If I could, I would cover you with veils, God, and keep you hidden behind the curtains in my tent. Oh! just say again you love me, God. 

THE ANGEL: I do, Gideon. 

GIDEON: I do not know why. I must say, I do not know why. 

THE ANGEL: I hardly know why myself, but then passion is an unreasonable thing.*

Jesus came to tell us that it could and did. He knew because he knew the father better than anyone else. Christians are quite simply those who believe that Jesus was right, and that we are right when we are willing to push our intuition of graciousness to its farthest limit and even beyond. But such belief is not merely the dull assent to an abstract proposition. To believe that Jesus was right means I share in his experience of a God madly in love with me, and then live as one must who is caught up in such a love affair. 

Responding to love is always difficult and awkward, but when we find that we are loved, we are happy and we rejoice. We feel like singing, dancing, celebrating, sharing our joy with others. And we cannot help letting others in on the power of the love in which we find ourselves caught up. A young person who has discovered that he is loved is not content with sharing that love by simply describing it to others; he actually shares the love itself by trying to be as good to them as he experiences his beloved being good to him. He may make an awkward mess out of it in his naive enthusiasm, but he wants the world to know that he is loved and loves. And that is what Christianity is all about. 

THEOLOGICAL NOTE 

One is often asked today whether one believes in a "personal" God-a question originating in the nineteenth-century philosophizing about "life forces." The question can have two meanings that are frequently intermingled. An impersonal God can either be one that is something less than human or something more than human. Some people feel ill at ease with the thought of God as a person, because "person" has come to mean "human being," and God is obviously more than that. Others are disturbed about using human images and language to talk about something as fundamentally indescribable as the Ultimate and the Absolute. Still others feel easier believing in an impersonal God that doesn't particularly care for us one way or another. The pertinent question is not whether God is personal or not but whether there is in the universe a plan, a purpose, a graciousness that can best be described as passionate love. Arguments about "person" evade this prior and critical issue. Obviously, human language about God is metaphorical and poetic-as is human language about a lot of things (like love) which cannot fit into precise scholarly and scientific categories. just as obviously, it would be a mistake in language to equate our talk about God completely with our talk about our fellow humans. But a God who does not care is a God not worth taking seriously. And the Christian experience of graciousness is an experience of a Thou to whom one can respond, and who in fact seems to be waiting for a response. 

Notes 

*After each question that introduces a mystery, I include in parentheses the way the question was asked in the old catechisms. I do this to indicate that it is the same religious reality which is being discussed, however different the method of discussion. 

**Paddy Chayefsky, Gideon. New York: Random. House, 1961, p. 67. 
 
 

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