Aligning My Purpose

In a powerful series of reflections embedded within meditation and prayer, I have encountered the challenge of asking myself: what is my purpose?

This is perhaps an opportunity to really highlight the wisdom of the Bible and how it came to be so sacred and inspiring for so many generations. It contains truth that can guide us at such a deep level and away from scary messages from society that unremittingly indicate that our worth and values are tied up with a purpose to survive and receive praise. My purpose was wrapped up in my unquenching thirst to be loved. It remains a struggle.

So not always knowing quite where to begin, I was reminded of a passage we studied in Bible school almost twenty years ago (at King's School of Theology, run at that time by Salt & Light ministries). It's from the prophetic book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament. In the NIV it reads: "For the Earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea." Sounds pretty awesome still, but first let's check out the English translation a little.

Our Bible studies "teach" us theological facts like "God is love", "God gives us his peace if we submit to his ways." But that kind of knowledge leaves the part it's supposed to impact the most specifically, our heart, almost completely untouched, on the edge, unaffected. The worries and fears of my mind are unaffected by this kind of "knowledge." What might help these mindsets - of which I am a direct descendant - are words like 'understanding' or 'awareness'. We could consider colliding them all somehow, Amplified Bible-style:

Knowledge

Understanding

Awareness

"...filled with a knowing and understanding awareness of ..."?

I think we can do better than that. Let's look at some of these words' traits.

Knowledge (stable but not pervasive, sensory or experiential)

Understanding (embracing)

Awareness (now, experiential, but temporal)

Let us attempt a return to 'awareness' and see how we might overcome its temporal limitations:

" ...filled with awareness of...". Without the article there is a greater feel of stability and transcendence to this quality of awareness. I also recall that sentences such as these in Hebrew can be understood in a progressive sense, i.e. the Earth shall be increasingly filled (until completion), which also plays against any worry of a "flash-in-the-pan" kind of awareness.

Moving onto "Lord" - we have long discussed on this blog how to better go about translating the Tetragrammaton in English and the deep-seated problems for Bible translation in maintaining allegiance to this medieval word. This was one of the pillars also for my presentation at the Bible Translation conference last October. The best option we found according to the dynamic method and the grammatical translation history was Eugene Peterson's "GOD". 

"Glory" is another interesting word. It is a bit religious sometimes, and I am not sure Christians always quite know what to do with it, but I feel it sometimes lacks the human response intended by the word, of awe and wonder at its beauty, light and power. I am using "glorious presence". I would also like to go further than waters simply "covering the sea". It sounds kinda cranky, and we can do bigger than "sea" as well. So I am choosing "engulfs the oceans." So here is my biblical purpose, embodied in my translation of Habbakuk 2:14:

For the Earth will be filled with awareness of GOD's glorious presence as the waters engulf the oceans.

I think that's a great common purpose. And it is in nature and it is in us. So deep, so good, breath, life. It makes a nonsense of my mental constraints on 'love'. And it breathes life into my values too. 

Firstly: Let life breathe. Express. Listen. Voice. 

Secondly: Rejoice. Flood.

John 10:17, why does the Father love Jesus?

My Mum came up with an interesting question yesterday about the following passage from John 10:17:

The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again.

It's a curious translation. It prompted my Mum to ask if Jesus had to earn God's love through his obedience, even though the Father and Jesus are "one"? What role does obedience have in obtaining or experiencing God's love? I don't know where NIV derived their definite article, "the". So firstly, the Greek does not say "only because of this one reason".

Further, I feel prompted to add that God is love, he can't not love us. Anything in us unlikable or unlovable is not fundamentally who we are. If you switch out "God" for "Perfect Love", we can't have "Perfect Love" who doesn't love you perfectly!

But my own perspective is moving away from some kind of spatial transmission from the outside in, but rather a deeper awakening of that already resident and divine perfection. As a "fundamentally" impatient person, I recently dared to dream and affirm myself that I had glimpsed patience there. And now I know that I was right! Underneath the impatience there really, really is patience, and I was able to practice it despite feelings of frustration (mindfulness practice helps me here a lot, seeing rather than living inside the feeling). The patience wasn't beamed in from somewhere else, but rather awakened according to releasing some more of that extraordinary and exquisite design we all share, that us spirituals call "divine" or "of God".

So the Father just loves Jesus, not because he specifically did A, B or C. The obedience is instrumental in the experience and awakening of the love and perfection already at work (or dormant) within.

Unlocking down, wisdom for decision makers and prioritising our own mental health

I was listening a few days ago to Sam Harris on his Making Sense podcast, where he discussed with Paul Bloom the ethical issues surrounding how we deal with our responses to the pandemic. What is the value of human life? Look how crazily dependent the context is. If we were to say only 800 people died worldwide of the virus today would seem like an amazingly positive thing to say or think, and yet we would be horrified to hear of the same number resulting from a fire in our town, right?

Flourishing is an important word in this debate, which also brings in economic concerns. People's lives are profoundly impacted in negative ways to increase worldwide suffering, by:
- lockdown raising one day early
- lockdown raising one day late
- lockdown raised in ways that are not perfectly defined, followed and enforced.

Clearly, our national and local authorities are faced with a daunting task.

In any case, the ethical dilemmas are complex and cannot hinge solely on short-term results. In our own personal circumstances, we pray particularly for wisdom for authorities governing the conditions under which French schools can return to some degree of operationality. The French education minister appears quite indecisive and limp. Many of the very important practical details appear overlooked. Home support from children's teachers for parents choosing not to return their children seems ready to be cut starting next week (I'm homeschooling the children in the mornings using these materials). 

What connection can we make with the task of making faith and scripture relevant or even useful? Much can be said of wisdom, of the peace and mental health that can be drawn through regular meditation/meditative prayer. We need to be concerned for and take care of our mental health more than ever - for Christians, like everyone else really, that means digging in deeper to their beliefs. What do I fundamentally believe about life? What are my priorities? What am I so thankful for? Who am I so thankful for? Just how extraordinarily beautiful is our natural habitat? Can we glimpse our own inner beauty and value? How aware and tolerant am I of my internal worries and fears? The Bible is a solid resource for grounding a good number of these questions and I'd encourage folks to seek some out, such as:

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Matthew 6:34).