Strengthening our sense of purpose in life

In the gospel of St. Luke (17,26-37), we hear Christ lamenting over how people in the long history of humanity were entangled in their earthly affairs while practically ignoring the real purpose of life.

“As it was in the days of Noah,” he said, “so it will be in the days of the Son of Man; they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage up to the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.”

He continued: “Similarly, as it was in the days of Lot: they were eating, drinking, buying, selling, planting, building; on the day when Lot left Sodom, fire and brimstone rained from the sky to destroy them all.”

It will definitely help us to have passion and direction in our daily life. We need to develop an abiding sense of purpose so we can avoid getting entangled in distractions or, worse, lost in the maze of concerns or stranded in idleness, laziness, loneliness, worries, and the like.

Yes, we have the grave duty to know and live by the real and ultimate purpose of our life. Such knowledge would help us in giving the proper shape, direction, and consistency to our life that is now being pushed and pulled in any which way by the many confusing elements in our life today.

We have to fulfill this important duty to know and live by this existential purpose of ours, since this will assure us that we are going in the right direction, even if we do it in different ways, paths, forms, and manners.

Especially these days when many people are confused and lost as to what really should be the ultimate goal of their life, we have to make this duty more known and appreciated. We cannot deny that many people do not have yet a clear purpose in life, or that their worldview is limited, distorted, if not wrong.

And what is this existential purpose of ours? It’s none other, of course, than to give glory to God. It can be expressed also in many other ways. It’s about, as our Catechism would put it, knowing, loving, and serving God. In fact, this is the very first point of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

“God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself,” it says, “in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to known him, to love him with all his strength…” (1)

It can also be expressed, according to the words of St. Paul, in always giving glory to God. “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God,” he said. (1 Cor 10,31) We need to continually ask ourselves if indeed that is what happens in everything that we do.

All this business of our existential purpose is lived and summarized by Christ himself, the son of God who became man to save us.  He commanded us to love one another as he himself loved us, which he did to fully carry out the will of his Father.

And so, it should behoove us to know more and more about Christ to such an extent that not only would we know his life, his teachings and example, but that we also would live his life, his teachings and example.