Finding Your Way To Meaning & Purpose

Stretching Out To Great Things

A few weeks after we met, I asked my late wife, Cushla, what she thought life was all about. 'It's all about love,' she said simply and then added: 'I knew that since I was a little girl.' She never changed her view on the all-importance of love, and she lived by its tenets all her life. It's apt that her name, Cushla, an Irish term of endearment, taken from the original phrase 'A chuisle mo chroí,' translates to 'beat or pulse of my heart'. (and can also mean 'My love' or 'My darling'. )

It's quite unusual that, as a child, Cushla had such profound wisdom, but I believe she was earmarked early on as a mystic and had sensed that her purpose in life was to live for a cause bigger than herself. As a result, she went on to lead an amazingly happy and meaningful life.

 It's Not About You 

 'It's not about you.' That's the opening line by Rick Warren in the first chapter of his book,The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (one of the bestselling non-fiction books in history and the second most-translated book in the world). Then he adds: 'The purpose of your life is far greater than your own personal fulfilment, your peace of mind, or even your happiness.'

I certainly can attest to Rick Warren's sentiment. I had been very ambitious for years and pursued what the world told me was valuable. I had looked in the wrong places for happiness and purpose. Though I was desperate for what Cushla had, I needed to find answers for myself.

'We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.'

—Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

As time moved on, I had a growing feeling of dissatisfaction despite enjoying business success. I felt empty, even desolate, and began to see through the emptiness of worldly accomplishments. I also noticed those very few people I encountered were really happy. It didn't matter if they had success, wealth, and fame. Indeed, I could see these things often brought even more distress into their lives.

I began to understand why the mystics and saints realised that a prime cause of emptiness and unhappiness is due to living mainly for yourself.  However, the good news is that these unpleasant hollow feelings are often alarm bells sent by God or our higher selves to wake us up to what's real and worthwhile in life. Unfortunately, we don't listen to what they are trying to teach us a lot of the time, and we carry on despite our misery.

Adversity Can Lead You To Your Purpose

'The greatest tragedy is not death, but life without purpose.'– Rick Warren.

Many of us find it hard to recognise our purpose in life when we are struck by adversity, but a higher calling often quietly comes to the forefront during times of great challenge. It's up to us to recognise it and pursue it.  For me, it took a shock to the system to begin the journey along the right path. My business went bust. For a while, my thoughts and sense of direction were in disarray. But something inside me had shifted. Gradually as my old self fell away, I wanted to discover a reason for living that transcended my own narrow ambitions and desires.

Digging Deeper To Find More Meaning

Even after a shock to the system, our cultural values are so ingrained in us that before too long, many of us pick up where we left off. Encouraged by much of the self-help industry, which tells us what we want to hear, we follow the promptings of our ego. There's no objective truth we are told. It's all relative so follow your desires.  

On the other hand, authentic spirituality can impart a deeper metaphysical meaning into our lives.  It can shift our vision from our own shortcomings and guide us to a power much greater than anything we possess. We realise we're not alone and that  God has given us a  spiritual radar to follow the right path for us.

Bishop Robert Barron, in his article, 'Stretching out to great things' (aleteia.org), says: you are safe within the confines of your own desires and expectations, but you are not meant to live in that small world, but rather in the infinitely wider and more fascinating world of objective value. If we define our own values, our own truth, our own purpose, we effectively lock ourselves into the tiny space of what we can imagine or control. When we follow these prompts of our culture today, we become cramped souls, what the medieval philosopher's called pusillae animae (1)

The Little Way

 A meaningful purpose involves finding a cause or reason for living that transcends your own narrow ambitions and desires. However, it doesn't mean you have to save the world:

Cushla very much admired St. Thérèse of Lisieux, or 'The Little Flower,' as the French saint came to be known. I have always thought that they shared many traits. For example, Thérèse lived a hidden life and 'wanted to be unknown'. Even as a child, Cushla had this attitude toward life. After she died, I found one of her childhood diaries and was struck by her last entry, written at age fourteen: 'My life has its ups and downs, but I wouldn't like to be anyone else, not even a famous person.'

Cushla always knew that her mission was to love and take care of those around her. 'The people we are meant to meet in our day show up,' she said to me more than once. It was another of her knowings, (2) not something she read from a book. Like other mystics before her, she intuited that it's no accident that we have all been given the people around us, at work, in our offices, in our neighbourhoods. By faithfully living by this code, Cushla transformed an 'ordinary life' into an extraordinary one.

 Notes

 1) Pusilla anima is smallness of the soul that results from living within the confines of our own needs and desires, and that prevent us from seeing much beyond that. In contrast, the magna anima is a soul that has been expanded and stretched by the love of God and the vision of the Gospel to make space for everyone. This is the soul that surrenders itself to God's will and dares to dream bigger and higher about who God wants us to become.  

 2) Knowings were a higher form of knowledge Cushla drew from deep within her soul. It was a gift she shared with well-known mystics. In her book, Interior Castle Explored, the contemporary Carmelite nun and spiritual author Ruth Burrows writes of St. Teresa of Avila: 'Here is a woman who surely knows. She isn't merely speculating—relying on what others have said. Here is one with a well of living knowledge within her, and it is from this that she is drawing all the time.'

 Recommended Resources:

 Books

The Purpose Driven Life,What On Earth Am I Here For?  by Rick warren. Published by Zondervan.

 More Inspiring Quotes on Purpose & Meaning

  'If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.'
― Thich Nhat Hanh

  'It's not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something.'

– Winston S. Churchill

'True happiness is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.'

 – Helen Keller

 'The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.' 

 –  Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

 'I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.'
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning.