Why are you
here?
Articulate a
purpose worth living for.
If
you can’t answer this question then we are drifting through life. We have to
connect our deepest beliefs to what we do all week, and restores meaning to
work. We have to articulate some role on earth that transforming us from
dreamer to visionaries. We don’t just merely wish for a better world, a
civilization of love, or the kingdom, we are called to turn that vision into
reality. We aspire to nothing less than to transform the world but are humble
enough to start by transforming our hearts and we do that by committing to a
worthy purpose.
Your purpose is
to be holy
You
are competing for demands of school work, family, religion and community pull
you to pieces. Sometimes parents feel they are doing none of them particularly
well, and they occasionally lose track of themselves in the process. We have
countless marriages collapse as partners start pulling apart when they need to
pull together. The question we should always ask is What Would Jesus Do.
(WWJD). Many will tell you that they would not know what Jesus would do.
What
would you like to do as a person to integrate your work, family and
spirituality? Rethinking on how spirituality, life and work fit together. This
can only be found in the purpose that ties together life even when it feels as
if daily life's unending demands are pulling you in multiple directions. The
solution is to be holy. Be holy? It sounds like a life's purpose for monks in
monasteries, not for students, working parents, teachers, and sponsors.
We may
find ourselves in situations like my daughter is sick, I am being transferred
to a school I don't know and was not consulted and you tell me to be holy, are
you sick!!! This you can only find some purpose that will make you whole. That
is what integrate means: the word's Latin roots mean "whole", or
"happy".
Holy
people are whole people because they manage to integrate their lives around
some unifying purpose. It's not about a new job or new career, but a new way of
thinking and living, ordering your life around the spiritual beliefs and values
they consider ultimately important. The wholeness manifests itself in a
consistent approach to everything and everyone. Your actions correspond with
your words, you treat your subordinate the same way as they treat their bosses,
and they model an unvaried set of views even when no one is watching. For this
reason, we say they have integrity.
Rabbi
Lawrence Kushner defines holiness as “being aware that you are in the presence
of God” (Cf. L. Kushner and D. Memet, Five
Cities of Refuge, weekly reflections of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Number,
and Deuteronomy, New York 2003, 93). He says most of us are aware of God’s
presence when we gather in mosque, church, or temple, then we go home and God
(in a sense) disappears. We relapse into de-energizing, split-life thinking in
which work is work, religion is religion, and rarely do we collide. According
to Rabbi holiness is an awareness of God's presence always. God is present
after we have left Church, or temple, in that meeting is in the staff rooms to
discuss an undisciplined student, in that shop, supermarket, matatu etc. God is even present in that
person who annoys you, or in that colleague who talks too much at the meeting.
Prophet
Isaiah proclaims “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord…the whole earth is full of his
glory” (Isaiah 6:3), the whole earth is full, the prophet tells us, not just
the churches or inspiring sunsets or the people I like, or the religion I
myself practice. God is unifying presence throughout every moment and aspect of
your harried life, and becoming aware of God’s presence in the thread that can
tie each day's disparate activities into one whole life. That means that we
must act in such a way so as to remind one another of the presence of God as he
states.
Ignatius
of Loyola instructed Jesuits to "find God in all things". And one of
his spiritual sons, the Jesuit palaeontologist and mystic Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin distil from that phrase a pathway to filling our every action with
meaning and awe. "God…is not remote from us"… on the contrary, at
every moment he wants us in the activity, the work to be done…He is in the
sense, at the point of my pen, my pick, my paint-brush, my needle and heart and
thought". (Cf. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymns of the Universe, New York 1961, 84).
God
wants us in the intellectually challenging problem at work, in the opportunity
to support a colleague rather than stab him in the back, in every negotiation
we undertake in our reaction to disappointment, in the woman who needs a seat
during a train, matatu, bus, in the
spouse who you kiss upon arriving, in the dirty diapers we change, and in the
homework help we give before flopping into bed exhausted. We need to look at
Jesus as our model of holiness at work, Jesus spent most of his years in
carpentry than to public preaching in God's kingdom, and we can guess in a
"normal" job was not time wasted. Jesus had a focus on others rather
than on self, a focus on abandoning self-centeredness and attachments and
instead of being concerned for and about others". To be holy is to be for
others, at home and at work and in your community.
Holy
organizations work better
One
has to cultivate the value of being for others. Best managers concentrate on
serving clients well, making team members more effective and productive, and
strive to deliver outstanding financial returns for their shareholder owners.
These managers go through their day mindful of others, customers, subordinates
and shareholders, consciously being for others. On the contrary managers at lousy
companies mostly worry about themselves. They scheme to get ahead of the pack
at the expense of peers, use their subordinates to make themselves look good,
and take advantage of customers and shareholders to stuff a few more pennies
into their own pockets.
Harvard
researchers summarized their findings this way "If the managers at the
lower-performing firms do not value highly their customers, their customers and
stakeholders or their employees, what do they care about? When the interviewees
asked mostly often said: "Themselves" " (Cf. John P. Kotter and
James L. Heskett, Corporate Culture and
Performance, New York 1992, 50). Jim Collins in his bestselling “Good to Great” speaks of “Level Five” leaders as the pinnacle rule
models of high-quality organizational leadership because they “are ambitious
first and foremost for the cause, the organization, the work-not themselves”
(Cf. Jim Collins, Good to Great and
Social Sectors, 2005:34). This is all about attitude people bring to work
or don’t and those who bring that attitude to work ground it, all about how
people work and treat others.
We
attract leaders who manifest a deeply spiritual sense of purpose beyond
themselves, we need to spend our time helping parents and children find the
opportunity to most fully express their love and care for one another. Most of
us feel lucky if our work enables us to develop and express our talents and
interests. Often we ask the question of what is my purpose in this world, once
we are into adulthood. We have to enter willingly into chaos as Jim Keenan
would say to answer to people's needs. (James F. Keenan, The Works of Mercy: the Heart of Catholicism, New York 2005, xiii).
Working with people whom society shuns can be challenging because these people
arrive at us feeling lonely, isolated, and worthless, stigmatized, we need to
build up their sense of dignity, and you can’t pass on the judgment on someone
until you have put yourself in his or her position.
Sometimes we are called
upon to admire their fortitude, persistence and compassion in dealing with
unbelievably difficult situations, of course sometimes they leave us miserable,
disempowered, bitter and disappointed. Or sometimes we enter the temptation why
do we bother anyway? Not every story may end as we wished. None of us is as bad
as the worst thing we have ever done, or indeed, as bad as the bad things we
cannot keep ourselves from doing,
We
are valuable not because of what we accomplish or well we cope, we are valuable
simply because we exist. This means treating each person as equally dignified,
whether he or she owns a bank, staffs the teller counter, or too poor to open
an account there. Doing so we transform
our everyday encounters in supermarkets, conference rooms, no longer mere
opportunities to get something we want, these will become expressions of a
spiritual purpose that pulls our life together and fills it with meaning.
Building a
civilization of love
We
have to build a civilization that transforms us and our world, first by
figuring out where we are, and where we want to go, understanding our purpose
in the world. We are either in the world to be holy or repair the world. Where
do you belong? We, humans, are created to "praise, reverence and serve
God". But we get on with life in a harried way, we live in "as
if" our purpose in life is to gather money. Some live here as if they are here to pursue
sex, to be entertained, to avoid boredom or merely to show up every day at work
and go home. This kind of life can’t work for us individually or for us
individually or for our civilization, but to abandon “as if” living and embrace
more intentionally purposeful living.
A
worthy purpose must be mighty enough to lift us above our narrow everyday
concerns, and it must be great enough to last a lifetime and cover a whole
life. My purpose is not “just a job” even so worthy a role as banker, nurse, or
parent. Each one has to find and speak words of purpose that resonate in his or
her heart. We need to delve into our hearts and our spiritual beliefs to find
in our purpose a connection between our spiritual beliefs and the work we do, a
path to make our lives whole again, and a way to fill our work with great
meaning.
It’s
all about discovering your mighty purpose, evaluating the world you have
inherited, envisioning the future worth living for, embracing values worth
standing for, and putting your heart into a strategy to give it life.
©
Nyamunga2020
