WHY ARE YOU HERE?

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