What is the goal of life? God, for the religious; for the nonreligious,
living well. Although pursuing the material comforts of life is a
tempting goal for many, the believer knows this will not bring true
happiness. For a Christian, the direction of our life can be summed
up by the familiar words of Jesus in the Beatitudes.
The columnist writing on spirituality for the Catholic Times says the
secret to attaining happiness is to have the proper goal in life: living
in harmony with God's will.
The proper goal for a Christian
married couple should be, first and foremost, to live for the glory of
God, and secondarily to save one's soul. In the same way, he says our students who often study hard primarily for personal success, should have as
their primary goal the glory of God. This approach to life requires
obedience to the will of God.
Faith needs obedience. Without
obedience, says the columnist, we will have the temperament of migratory
birds, and problems that are fundamentally spiritual will come to the
surface. We can do well for a time with a fickle temperament, but then
we flutter off to something else, when dissatisfied or in trouble.
Obedience
requires that we cease being migratory, that we be steadfast in our
pursuit of our goal, while being open in our responsiveness in meeting
the challenges of life. If we are restricted by our thinking, the
columnist believes that the option of choosing among multiple
possibilities will not be available to us. God is always there to fill us with his word; with his
grace, he is moving our minds and hearts in the right direction.
Throughout our life God continues to move us, whether through those we
meet in life, or through the Scriptures, the lives of the saints, or our
reading--both of books and of nature. We have no way of knowing the
many ways he speaks to us, so we have to be ready and open.
This
is not an easy path for most of us; there are many things
that militate against this openness to God and others. Those fixated on
yesterday will not be open to the dawning of a new day, or be open to
the possibility of an ever-renewing self that is responsive to our
neighbor and to whatever situation in life comes our way. We
contemplate
yesterday only to learn about living today, striving each day to be
more in harmony
with the will of God. To insure that we stray as little as possible from
our good intentions, it's helpful at the end of each day to reflect
where discord made its appearance in our life, and take note of what can
be improved to bring us more in harmony with the will of God.
