will speak what I know out of the context of my own particular faith, and you may perhaps translate and apply it to yours. I will speak as a Christian, who believes (passionately) that Christ is the Way and the Truth and the Life. But I also believe, with St. Peter, “that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears Him and does what is right is acceptable to Him” (Acts 10:34–35).
Now, Jesus claimed many unique things about Himself and His Mission; but He also spoke of Himself as the great prototype for us all. He called Himself “the Son of Man,” and He said, “I assure you that the man who believes in me will do the same things that I have done, yes, and he will do even greater things than these….” (John 14:12).
Emboldened by His identification of us with His Life and His Mission, we might want to remember how He spoke about His Life here on Earth. He put it in this context: “I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and going to the Father” (John 16:28).
If there is a sense in which this is, in even the faintest way, true also of our lives (and I shall say in a moment in what sense I think it is true), then instead of calling our great Creator “God” or “Father” right off, we might begin our approach to the subject of religion by referring to the One Who gave us our Mission and sent us to this planet not as “God” or “Father” but—just to help our thinking—as: “The One From Whom We Came and The One To Whom We Shall Return,” when this life is done.
If our life here on Earth is to be at all like Christ’s, then this is a true way to think about the One Who gave us our Mission. We are not some kind of eternal, preexistent being. We are creatures, who once did not exist, and then came into Being, and continue to have our Being, only at the will of our great Creator. But as creatures we are both body and soul; although we know our body was created in our mother’s womb, our soul’s origin is a great mystery. Where it came from, at what moment the Lord created it, is something we cannot know. It is not unreasonable to suppose, however, that the great God created our soul before it entered our body, and in that sense we did indeed stand before God before we were born; and He is indeed “The One From Whom We Came and The One To Whom We Shall Return.”
Therefore, before we go searching for “what work was I sent here to do?” we need to establish—or in a truer sense reestablish—contact with “The One From Whom We Came and The One To Whom We Shall Return.” Without this reaching out of the creature to the great Creator, without this reaching out of the creature with a Mission to the One Who Gave Us That Mission, the question what is my Mission in life? is void and null. The what is rooted in the Who; absent the Personal, one cannot meaningfully discuss The Thing. It is like the adult who cries, “I want to get married,” without giving any consideration to who it is they want to marry.
Comment 2:
How We Might Think of Religion or Faith
In light of this larger view of our creatureliness, we can see that religion or faith is not a question of whether or not we choose to (as it is so commonly put) “have a relationship with God.” Looking at our life in a larger context than just our life here on Earth, it becomes apparent that some sort of relationship with God is a given for us, about which we have absolutely no choice. God and we were and are related, during the time of our soul’s existence before our birth and in the time of our soul’s continued existence after our death. The only choice we have is what to do about The Time In Between, i.e., what we want the nature of our relationship with God to be during our time here on Earth and how that will affect the nature of the relationship, then, after death.
One of the corollaries of all this is that by the very act of being born into a human body, it is inevitable that we undergo a kind of amnesia—an amnesia that typically embraces not only our nine months in the womb, our baby years, and almost one-third of each day (sleeping), but more important any memory of our origin or our destiny. We wander on Earth as an amnesia victim. To seek after Faith, therefore, is to seek to climb back out of that amnesia. Religion or Faith is the hard reclaiming of knowledge we once knew as a certainty.
Comment 3:
The First Obstacle to Executing This Mission
This first Mission of ours here on Earth is not the easiest of Missions, simply because it is the first. Indeed, in many ways, it is the most difficult. All we can see is that our life here on Earth is a very physical life. We eat, we drink, we sleep, we long to be held, and to hold. We inherit a physical body, with very physical appetites, we walk on the physical earth, and we acquire physical possessions. It is the most alluring of temptations, in our amnesia, to come up with just a Physical interpretation of this life: to think that the Universe is merely interested in the survival of species. Given this interpretation, the story of our individual life could be simply told: we are born, grow up, procreate, and die.
But we are ever recalled to do what we came here to do: that without rejecting the joy of the Physicalness of this life, such as the love of the blue sky and the green grass, we are to reach out beyond all this to recall and recover a Spiritual interpretation of our life. Beyond the physical and within the physicalness of this life, to detect a Spirit and a Person from beyond this Earth who is with us and in us—the very real and loving and awesome Presence of the great Creator from whom we came—and the One to whom we once again shall go.
Comment 4:
The Second Obstacle to Executing This Mission
It is one of the conditions of our earthly amnesia and our creatureliness that, sadly enough, some very human and very rebellious part of us likes the idea of living in a world where we can be our own god—and therefore loves the purely Physical interpretation of life, and finds it anguish to relinquish it. Traditional Christian vocabulary calls this “sin” and has a lot to say about the difficulty it poses for this first part of our Mission. All who live a thoughtful life know that it is true: our greatest enemy in carrying out this first Mission of ours is indeed our own heart and our own rebellion.
Comment 5:
Further Thoughts about What Makes Us Special and Unique
As I said earlier, many of us come to this issue of our Mission in life, because we want to feel that we are unique. And what we mean by that, is that we hope to discover some “specialness” intrinsic to us, which is our birthright, and which no one can take from us. What we, however, discover from a thorough exploration of this topic, is that we are indeed special—but only because God thinks us so. Our specialness and uniqueness reside in Him, and His love, rather than in anything intrinsic to our own being. The proper appreciation of this distinction causes our feet to carry us in the end not to the City called Pride, but to the Temple called Gratitude.
