Life-purpose

Reflecting on Karen Armstrong’s “Muhammad: prophet for our time” I realised the sense in which I and every living organism is here for a purpose. I don’t mean that there is a pre-ordained task, like an exam question, that is set before us, to achieve or fail; that would imply that the world was run by a divine Examiner and would belittle the nature of life. No, rather – we find ourselves in the midst of purposefulness; we are agents, creative sources of change, and our actions concern us: we are responsible for them whether or not we desire this. Moreover, as coherent beings, holding together as a whole organism at each moment, being informed and shaped by the past, being called by the future that is implicitly receiving our actions, we cannot think of our responsible agency as a multitude of choices, but as constituting a single coherent act. Not only is it the case that the angels, in the traditional theology,  only make one decision (namely, the decision to face God or to turn away from God – see Rupert Sheldrake and Matthew Fox’s “The Physics of Angels”) but the same is true for us: in its essence, it does not make sense to divide this holistic complex of action into separate actions, even though that is what our narrative rationality tries to do to it. Our life is one purposeful act. That is what “being here” means.

So spirituality consists of facing this fact within the context of the whole of our niche in the cosmos; of grasping my life-being in a firm grip of awareness – awareness of just what this context means. For meaning and purpose are simply the two sides of contextuality. But of course, most of the time we grasp this partially, in the provisional moment, by means of rationality and morality. These are the props that we earthy beings require.