Not to sound like the opening to a lame college graduation speech, but let’s look at Socrates’ famous quote, “A life unexamined is not worth living.” I’d argue — on a basic level — an unexamined life is impossible. Self-examination is baked into who we are. Even those who willfully push away this question in a bid to live in the moment will be haunted by the specter of that self-examination on their deathbeds.
It’s one of the things that makes us human, not animal: the ability to think abstractly about our purpose beyond what’s immediately in front of us.
On a biological level, our first “purpose” in life is to feed ourselves. Also, we have a voracious need to learn. The intellect and the body grow together. But even in young children, there is a desire for something else, a desire to understand our place and our direction. Think of the common toddler refrain, “why?” Teenagers demand the freedom to figure things out for themselves, and then adults return to the question again and again: What is my purpose in life? We share a basic human need to know what we’re doing on this earth.
Some might argue an exception that disproves my theory: people caught in a cycle of poverty don’t have the luxury of self-reflection, they say; the poor have to focus exclusively on getting food, water and shelter. But this isn’t true.
I’ve spent some time working with destitute people, specifically in Guatemala, but also via interviews with families in Africa, Haiti, the Philippines and elsewhere. They have just as much of an interest in their purpose in life as anyone in a first-world country. Impoverished people desperately need food, clean water, shelter and education, but they also respond deeply to spiritual nourishment, to beauty, to community. They have other needs that must be fed.
This demonstrates that self-reflection isn’t a “leisure activity.” It’s fundamentally human. Practically speaking, it helps us develop and adjust a long-term plan for our lives. But more than this, it scratches a deeper itch, some type of baked-in urge that needs to be understood.
We have an inborn sense of a purpose or “end” towards which we should strive. Figuring out that ultimate “end” is important. Every act and thought is influenced, either subconsciously or consciously, by decisions about our purpose in life.
Some Hints
If this desire to know and pursue an ultimate end is something we all share, then perhaps we should examine what else we share in order to dig into the question of our purpose. This is a good exercise, and something contrary to the advice, “find your own purpose,” or “you do you.”
The “you do you” approach assumes that personal autonomy is the most important ethical and moral rule. That everything good will flow from us simply having the power to make our own decisions. That we can make our own ethical and moral frameworks rather than fitting ourselves inside an existing one handed to us from society or religion.
But this, as we have seen in history, only creates monsters. If everyone believes himself or herself to be the source of their own code, there is no common thread tying society together. One person might thing stealing is bad while another thinks all goods should be shared and therefore there is no stealing. Societies can’t exist, much less thrive, in such environments.
So, let’s go the other direction. Maybe we can better define what we share — what it means to be human — so that we can best discover our ultimate purpose. This doesn’t destroy individuality! Think of a soccer team: everyone has the same purpose (to win the game), but people fill different roles, have different talents, and act according to the specific circumstances of the day, the others around them, etc.
So, we looked at some biological needs, but we share needs (“purposes”) beyond the simply biological ones. Here’s a short list of needs, and some pitfalls with getting hung up on just one or another of them. In short, we need to take these as signposts to get to a better definition of what it means to be human.
- Intellectual stimulation. This isn’t just “learning” for practical application. It can be puzzles, entertainment, and conversation. Some people seek their ultimate purpose in life attending to this need — consider historians, writers, entertainers, detectives, university professors, and many more. But is this all there is?
- A feeling of self-worth. While there are many ways to find self-worth, an example of people who take this need to the extreme would be those addicted to competition and success, whether in sports, business or social standing. Inevitably, these endeavors can feel self-centered and therefore a little shallow.
- A feeling of contributing to something greater. Those finding their purpose in this need might be soldiers, officers, politicians, and business executives. This includes an aspect of service, putting the good of the many ahead of oneself. But no city, country, army or company lasts forever. They are always corruptible and have no true identity outside of their functioning. Surely simply contributing to an institution can’t be the purpose for humans.
- A feeling of belonging to something greater. Many movements and ideologies capitalize on this desire — from the green movement to white supremacy, from a dinner group with trusted friends to a church full of neighbors. Like the previous example, this purpose satisfies a primal component of being human: we are social creatures. Belonging to something greater is a sign that we care about our society. But, as the examples testify, these can be good and bad, effective and ineffective. We have to discern what type of “something greater” is truly worthy of our participation.
- To love and be loved. Of all the examples of purpose beyond the biological needs of humans, this one is the most complete. There is a “rightness” we experience when we love and when we are loved. It’s more than brain chemistry (which undoubtedly also changes), and it’s more than an emotional high. With love, we can experience a panoply of things beyond intellect and bodily senses: wonder, gratitude, humility, courage, strength, comfort, etc. What’s more, we can even experience everything else on our short list: intellectual stimulation (love surprises us every time we encounter it), self-worth, contributing to something greater and belonging to something greater.
Love is clearly a key component in finding our purpose in life. Some would say it is enough. But undisciplined love — that is, love without understanding — can be as bad as all the rest. After all, what is narcissism but an excess of love of oneself? And what is genocide but an excess of love for one’s tribe?
The Full Measure of What it Means to Be Human
Hopefully we’ve demonstrated that being human is more than just biological needs and also more than just intellectual ones. So, being human means we are a body, a mind, and something else. Our ancestors put a name to what we’ve been dancing around: a soul.
It’s a shame that so many people “turn off” when they hear that word. It’s a very helpful way of understanding who we are. As the Church teaches, humans are an ensouled body. Or an embodied soul. It is not a “part” of us, something that can be extracted like the Proton Pack and Ghost Trap used by the Ghostbusters. Instead, the soul is the organizing principle that gives life to our bodies (without it, we’d be a bunch of goo and bones with no life). Traditionally understood, the soul also contains our intellect and will.
When we think about a person, we are really thinking about their soul more than their bodies. Their bodies can change, decay, and even stop working, but we still know who they are. The soul is a more accurate description of the person as we think of them.
Let’s consider a few time-tested descriptions of the soul and God.
Aristotle, back in 350 BC, laid out the template that was later incorporated by St. Thomas Aquinas and the Church: plants have a “vegetative soul,” which enables reproduction and growth. Animals have these faculties plus a “sensitive soul,” which enables them to move and sense the world around them. But humans alone have a “rational soul,” which gives us thought and reflection in addition to these other attributes.
This rational soul is the very thing that contains and contemplates the topic of this essay: what is my purpose?
Aristotle also talks of a Prime Mover, or Unmoved Mover, which is perfect, eternal thought. It is the ultimate object of love and desire, and the entire universe strives to imitate its perfection. Think of this Unmoved Mover as a very abstract god-force, if you will, which doesn’t sully itself with practical matters of creation or human history.
Thus, while Aristotle gives us a very helpful description of the rational soul, it sort-of appears out of nowhere. There is no connection to a broader scheme or purpose.
Compare this to some of the world’s earliest written creation stories, written many thousands of years before the age of the Greek philosophers. These describe a God who is much more involved in the creation of the rational soul. In the Fertile Crescent, the Babylonians, Akkadians, Sumerians and Semitic peoples are surprisingly consistent in describing how humans were created from the clay of the earth by a God (or gods) who had a particular intent in mind.
Closer to our purposes, the Genesis narrative of the Semitic peoples says the very breath of God gives life to humanity. God’s breath is what gives us our soul. Here is a direct relationship to a greater scheme that can shed light on our purpose in life
Let’s try to be aware of our biases for a minute. Like me, you may have been taught to hold the rigid logical arguments of the Greeks in high regard. The Greek philosophers valued efforts of the human intellect alone over religious inspiration. As products of the (so-called) Enlightenment Era, we have come to share this bias.
Meanwhile, creation narratives are commonly taught as mythology. That is, invented stories meant to do some cultural or social function, like keeping people in line or teaching morals. We look less favorably on these narratives, presumably because we don’t know their origin and can’t explain them logically.
But imagine for a moment that God actually spoke to humans in dreams and visions. If you believe in a God, then surely he can communicate to us in any way he chooses. Are not the words of our all-powerful divine being worth more than the whirring of human minds?
This is the basis of creation narratives the world over: that God wants to reveal himself to us, within history. Do we dare open our souls to receive our Creator?
I think the greatest benefit (you might call it a grace) of accepting that God has been working throughout history is that we can conceive of ourselves as a gift. This is a great counterbalance to our modern conception of our own identity as belonging completely to us. How lonely and potentially meaningless if we randomly developed rational souls! Beyond the existential sadness, something in our rational souls tells us this is wrong. We are searching out a purpose — all of us — as if something is calling us, as if something planted that need for a purpose in us. There are too many signs within the experience of a single human life, much less an entire culture, pointing towards a greater end.
If we consider the creation narratives as containing divine truth, we discover this deep meaning we’ve been looking for. Let’s give it a shot.
In our fundamental Christian narrative, passed down faithfully for thousands and thousands of years, we hear, “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.’” This has astounding implications. Not only do we have our incredible “rational soul” thanks to our benevolent God, we are also told that this embodied soul is the very image and likeness of God himself!
With Great Gifts Come Great Responsibilities
Now we approach a richer understanding of what it means to be human. We were made according to a template, and that template is pure perfection.
We are a soul, made to be like God.
But who is God? What does it mean to be made in his image?
This topic could fill many books, so let’s focus on just a few things from our Christian dogma.
- God is one.
- God is also a communion of three persons.
- God is perfect; the source of all goodness and beauty.
- God is love.
Each of these has implications for how we understand what it means to be human, made in his image:
God is one. This is the “greatest commandment” that Moses shares alongside the Ten Commandments: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is one,” (Deuteronomy 6:4). Being one tells us that he is unique, and so we learn that we, too, are unique beings. At the same time, as we learn that he is three persons in one, this “oneness” tells us that he is a unity. Likewise, there is a common unity among humanity that we must uphold.
God is a communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God exists in constant loving communion within the three persons, and we, too, are made for communion with each other. Humans may seek out solitude, but we are genetically programmed to thrive in and crave society. Even on the basic family level, we need two to procreate and a full family to care for its members.
God is perfect. Our template is not flawed. No matter the biological challenges a person might have, every human being has a spiritual template that is perfect. Our souls yearn to return and unite with that perfection, and nothing short of that perfection will suffice. We are meant to be good and bring beauty to the world because they are a part of that pure source of perfection.
God is love. We have to resist the trap of triteness that hearing this phrase over and over can present. This love is not sappy and it has a depth that we cannot begin to understand. First of all, this love has no end. It does not get tired or turn into something lesser. The divine love is the relationship between the Father, Son and Spirit, constantly flowing, constantly generating life. The love of the Father is a long-term love that looks to our ultimate salvation, which means that we might need correction along the way. It is also a doting love, a protective love, a jealous love. The love of the Son is an adoring love, constantly showing off the greatness of the Father, happily dependent on his love, grace and will. The love of the Spirit is an infectious, rapacious love that transforms everything it touches. It is the love of miracles and wonder.
How do all of these aspects of love exist in and through us? Our lives are the proving grounds for getting to know the love of God, loving him back, and bringing this life-giving love into the world (in a mini act of creation) concretely. The world can and should be our playground for love, where we transform the ugly, dirty sand into beautiful sand castles. We don’t do this because the sandcastles are amazing in themselves, worthy of being saved for eternity and full of inherent dignity, but simply because God wants us to do this and we want to do his will. The real treasure is not what we affect here on earth, but the love and divine energies with which we engage the world.
This, then, should be our understanding of what it means to be human: we are souls made in the image of the Perfect One who desires us and gives us himself so that we can know his love and allow it to flow through us as we make our way back to him.
Every one of us is this. Not just the ones who go to church or the ones who do good deeds. This is what we must see if we are to love all the other souls on this earth and be in communion with them. We must desire their good, just like the Father desires the Son’s good. We must work to lift them up and help them get to heaven. Hopefully, they will do the same for us.
Finding your Identity as Well as Your Purpose
Of course, the world is full of injustice and suffering. This is not a reflection on who God is or the fundamental goodness of souls. The issue here is personal freedom. God created us in his image, and he is fundamentally sovereign — that is, free to make choices, inhibited by nothing. According to this template, our souls have this same freedom of choice, only not to the same extent. We don’t have the power to create universes, for example. What we do have in our power is to choose God as our guiding light or choose something else.
Our Genesis narrative explains the consequence of choosing something other than God. The lesson and the template are important here, not the specifics, per se. Adam and Eve’s great sin of mistrusting God results in their banishment from perfect union with him, and the resultant fallen world that we inhabit. What’s more, every time we choose to act in self-interest or sin against God or one another, we repeat this sin of Adam and Eve. The results are never good for our souls. There is a great truth in this story.
We have a shared human tendency to sin and choose ourselves or temptations over God and his law. But this is not a shared human identity. It’s simply a shared way of acting. This is a big distinction. Let’s talk about identity for a moment.
Culturally, we have greatly confused our identity with the choices we make. Not long ago, my “identity” might be defined by the sports teams I like, the music I listen to, and how I dress. Increasingly, it means your stance on political issues and even your decisions to accept or reject your own biology (e.g., gender, sexual preference, etc.). And while choices in life are an enactment of our soul’s individuality, they do not define who we are. Our core identity was given to us. Our core identity comes from and belongs to God, to whom we owe everything.
We may think we “re-make” ourselves when we change where we live, how we look, or how we act. But all of these things are just momentary trifles. The most mind-boggling truth about who we are is that we are immortal souls, not simply bound to our time on this earth. All this identity obsessing is like spending your life in the changing room of a clothing store, looking at yourself in the mirror. Real life exists outside the clothing store. And real life doesn’t actually care what you are wearing.
So what is real life? What is our purpose? God explained it to us by becoming a man himself in order to teach us.
Jesus answers in this way: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment,” (Matthew 22:37-38).
To love God with our entire being is a lifelong endeavor. It is the greatest endeavor. To love him with our heart means that we align our will with his, that we make choices according to what he wants us to do. To love with all our soul means that we attempt to know him as intimately as we can, like a bride yearning for her husband, thirsty for the time when we will never be separated. To love with all our mind means to continually bring our minds back to him, to pray constantly, to not be distracted by the world.
But there is more, because God is always outward-facing, loving the other, and generous. So Jesus adds, “And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets,” (Matthew 22:39-40).
To be made in the image of God means that we have been given souls like his, souls made for communion with others, souls meant to love. By loving him first and always, we learn to love others. It doesn’t work the other way around. Some may find their way to God by doing good works, but this is not the way that God has identified for us, and once they find God, they realize that there is something greater. There in God, they find the well from which all life and love springs.
This is our first step in realizing our purpose in life. This is also our goal. Not enough people say it: your life’s purpose resides in your soul’s union with God, nothing more and nothing less. So many of us occupy ourselves with other pursuits and other distractions. Do not be fooled by the ways of the world.
But What About Being Unique?
It’s important to differentiate between a purpose in life, a core identity, and a vocation. All humans can share the first two, but each of us lives a unique life thanks to the vocations we choose and the personality we infuse in our choices and actions.
Every person inherits different genes, develops differently, has natural and learned inclinations that determine their choices and responds to God’s call differently. Countless studies of twins show how different their lives can become, even sharing so much of the same genetic makeup and upbringing. The soul is a unique thing, made in God’s image.
So, it’s impossible for us NOT to be unique. That shouldn’t be an anxiety for us.
The real drama of our lives is recognizing the gift of an immortal soul we’ve been given and being faithful to our Creator’s vision for our lives. We are too easily pulled into the delights and sufferings of the world. God wants us to enjoy, to mourn, to feel, but to do so in a way that puts love, truth, goodness and beauty first. Learning to do this is learning to live a life well.
Next, we will explore how God helps us achieve our purpose by giving himself to us always and forever. See How to Live a Good Life Part II ->