A Time for Every Purpose

Since the funeral, the text from Ecclesiastes that was the first reading keeps running through my mind: a time to be born, a time to die; a time for every purpose under heaven. Purpose is the word on which my mind keeps tripping, as the words scroll through my head in that maddeningly catchy hymn version that has been sung in churches now for the past several decades.

I’ve just finished reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. As an inverted telling of Milton’s Paradise Lost parable, the novels form a meditation on the ways in which talk about God ("the Authority") has been and still is so often abused to justify bloody behavior: beheadings, tortures, burnings at the stake, conquest and subordination of “inferior” others, and so on.

Pullman’s solution is to rebel: to overthrow the Kingdom of Heaven so that the Republic of Heaven may be created in its stead. This solution presupposes that, as long as we give our hearts and minds into the hands of the Authority, we cannot engage in the hard work needed to build a Republic of Heaven in which each person has a place, the chance to fulfill her destiny: a purpose.

It’s hard not to agree with Pullman’s bleak assessment of what religion has effected throughout history. At the same time, it’s hard not to wonder whether all talk about the purpose of human existence is undercut when we remove at least some concept of G-d from the picture.

It’s hard to live in the betwixt-between space, between bloody-minded believers who are so assured that they own God, and that God blesses their bloody-mindedness, and between secularists who have shrugged all notions of God off, along with the bloody structures erected in the name of God throughout history.

And yet I don’t seem able to find any other space for my life than that betwixt-between one. As sympathetic as I am to critique of the churches—the justified critique, the necessary critique—I find myself ill at ease with a secular humanism that seems too ready to bless things as they are. I find myself ill at ease with those who are at ease with the way things are.

The world in which we live has, quite simply, too many outsiders, too many people who cannot find any purpose in their lives, because the social structures they inhabit do not give their lives purpose. It is hard to hear the text from Ecclesiastes, affirming that there is a time for every purpose under heaven, without recognizing that, in the world as it is, the world human beings have constructed, a world that can therefore change and be deconstructed/reconstructed, too many of us have little purpose. Because things as they are set up do not permit our lives to have purpose . . . .

I keep clinging to belief because it is the area of human existence that (at its best, when it is authentic) asks us to remain troubled in heart and mind—with things as they are; with the way purpose is thwarted in so many lives. And I have no choice except to combat the churches, insofar as they make being troubled in heart and mind difficult, when they bless the world as it is: when they read God into history and see the world as it is as some kind of finished project that has the blessing and sanction of G-d. As long as the churches find it all so easy to speak of G-d in the kind of world we inhabit now, I have no choice except to agree with Pullman: the churches are frequently an impediment to the very gospel they proclaim.

All this against the backdrop of the funeral, of reflecting on the life of one good man who lived his faith radically and simply—who affirmed the purpose of the lives of others even when those others did not fit his mold. Steve has spent the last day or so poring over yet another box of old photos, photos of dead relatives and ancestors whose visages he’s seen in the albums of cousins across the state, and whom no one can identify any longer.

People who lived and died and would have hoped that their lives have purpose. In some cases, he’s finding that his grandmother carefully labeled her collection of pictures, so he can now tell cousins who the mysterious group solemnly celebrating a wedding at the end of the 19th century is. In other cases, mystery added to mystery: the rather forbidding elderly woman in black silk, sitting so erect in a carved chair, over whose face he has puzzled in the collection of cousins’ pictures. There she is again, in his grandparents’ pictures, again not labeled.

Who is she? Why do they all have her picture, all these cousins? What was her purpose, now seemingly forgotten because her name—and thus her identity, her place in the family—is forgotten?

As we try to match face to face, comparing scanned copies of some of these photos on the computer, from the collections of cousins, with the new cache of pictures Steve has just found, we remember his grandmother’s own dicta for living with purpose. Steve has just found a postcard dated 1908 from two teachers of his grandmother, addressed to her at a school in St. Paul. Up to this time, he had no idea at all that her family had sent her away to school. She was, in his growing up years, simply Grandma, a farm wife moved to town, where she baked delicious strudel before sitting down to watch her daily shows after washing the dishes at dinnertime.

As each of her grandchildren reached marrying age and mulled over the decision to marry, his grandmother persistently advised them, “Wait a while. You’re young yet. See the world. You have plenty of time to marry in the future.”

This advice stood out in a Catholic community in which marrying was, well, what everyone did: what everyone was expected to do. And quickly. Out of high school, if possible. Better to marry than to burn. Be fruitful and multiply. In a school system that tacitly assumed almost every child it educated would one day marry and farm, it was almost unthinkable to question whether one should marry.

And see the world? What good would that do for someone planning to farm and replicate the parents’ life in a small, church-centered community in the upper Midwest?

Steve’s grandmother was “different”—the ultimate Minnesota word for something or someone who is inexplicable in a faintly questionable way. As a girl and young woman, she played the organ equally for her own Catholic church and for her grandmother’s Lutheran church: early Mass at the Catholic church, then a hop over to the little Lutheran church on the other side of town to play the organ there, as well.

Now that he knows she also went “off” to school, he begins to understand something of her willingness to encourage the coming generations to see the world, become a bit more educated, consider other options, before settling down. She lived quietly but firmly beyond some of the hard and fast rules of her own provincial culture, which forbade a Catholic to attend a Protestant service, let alone play the organ at such a service; and which dictated that one marry and become an adult—a farmer or farm wife—as soon as one had finished high school.

Along with this, as we pore over the old pictures and talk about the lives of those depicted in them, we think as well about the way in which Steve’s grandparents—and their son, Steve’s recently deceased father—made room for others. And for the purpose of others.

There was, there always has been, more diversity in these rural church-centered communities, than the stereotype permits us to see. People have always quietly lived their own way, according to their own lights.

And the pressure to conform has sometimes been less draconian in the past than it is today, with our sullen tacit dictatorship of the nuclear family model to which everyone is expected to adhere. Or else. Even though that model flourished in the past, there was far more leeway Since the funeral, the text from Ecclesiastes that was the first reading keeps running through my mind: a time to be born, a time to do; a time for every purpose under heaven. Purpose is the word on which my mind keeps tripping, as the words scroll through my head in that catchy hymn version of this text that has been sung in churches now for the past several decades.

I’ve just finished reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. As an inverted telling of Milton’s Paradise Lost parable, the novels form a profound meditation on the ways in which talk about God (the Authority) has been and still is so often abused to justify bloody behavior: beheadings, tortures, burnings at the stake, conquest and subordination of “inferior” others, and so on.

Pullman’s solution is to rebel: to overthrow the Kingdom of Heaven so that the Republic of Heaven may be created in its stead. This solution presupposes that, as long as we give our hearts and minds into the hands of the Authority, we cannot engage in the hard work needed to build a Republic of Heaven in which each person has a place, the chance to fulfill her destiny: a purpose.

It’s hard not to agree with Pullman’s bleak assessment of what religion has effected throughout history. At the same time, it’s hard not to wonder whether all talk about the purpose of human existence is undercut when we remove at least some concept of G-d from the picture.

It’s hard to live in the betwixt-between space, between bloody-minded believers who are so assured that they own God, and that God blesses their bloody-mindedness, and between secularists who has shrugged all notions of God off, along with the bloody structures erected in the name of God throughout history.

And yet I don’t seem able to find any other space for my life than that betwixt-between one. As sympathetic as I am to the critiques of the churches—the justified critiques, the necessary critiques—I find myself ill at ease with a secular humanism that seems too ready to bless things as they are. I find myself ill at ease with those who are at ease with the way things are.

The world in which we live has, quite simply, too many outsiders, too many people who cannot find any purpose in their lives, because the social structures they inhabit do not give their lives purpose. It is hard to hear the text from Ecclesiastes, affirming that there is a time for every purpose under heaven, without recognizing that, in the world as it is, the world human beings have constructed, a world that can therefore change and be reconstructed, too many of us have little purpose. Because things as they are set up do not permit our lives to have purpose . . . .

I keep clinging to belief because it is the area of human existence that asks us to remain troubled in heart and mind—with things as they are; with the way purpose is thwarted in so many lives. And I have no choice except to combat the churches, insofar as they make being troubled in heart and mind difficult, when they bless the world as it is: when they read God into history and see the world as it is as some kind of finished project that has the blessing and sanction of G-d. As long as the churches find it all so easy to speak of G-d in the kind of world we inhabit now, I have no choice except to agree with Pullman: the churches are frequently an impediment to the very gospel they proclaim.

All this against the backdrop of the funeral, of reflecting on the life of one good man who lived his faith radically and simply—who affirmed the purpose of the lives of others even when those others did not fit his mold. Steve has spent the last day or so poring over yet another box of old photos, photos of dead relatives and ancestors whose visages he’s seen in the albums of cousins across the state, and whom no one can identify any longer.

People who lived and died and would have hoped that their lives have purpose. In some cases, he’s finding that his grandmother carefully labeled her collection of pictures, so he can now tell cousins who the mysterious group solemnly celebrating a wedding at the end of the 19th century is. In other cases, mystery added to mystery: the rather forbidding elderly woman in black silk, sitting so erect in a carved chair, over whose face he has puzzled in the collection of cousins’ pictures. There she is again, in his grandparents’ pictures, again not labeled.

Who is she? Why do they all have her picture, all these cousins? What was her purpose, now seemingly forgotten because her name—and thus her identity, her place in the family—is forgotten?

As we try to match face to face, comparing scanned copies of some of these photos on the computer, from the collections of cousins, with the new cache of pictures Steve has just found, we remember his grandmother’s own dicta for living with purpose. Steve has just found a postcard dated 1908 from two teachers of his grandmother, addressed to her at a school in St. Paul. Up to this time, he had no idea at all that her family had sent her away to school. She was, in his growing up years, simply Grandma, a farm wife moved to town, where she baked delicious strudel before sitting down to watch her daily shows after washing the dishes at dinnertime.

As each of her grandchildren reached marrying age and mulled over the decision to marry, his grandmother persistently advised them, “Wait a while. You’re young yet. See the world. You have plenty of time to marry in the future.”

This advice stood out in a Catholic community in which marrying was, well, what everyone did: what everyone was expected to do. And quickly. Out of high school, if possible. Better to marry than to burn. Be fruitful and multiply. In a school system that tacitly assumed almost every child it educated would one day marry and farm, it was almost unthinkable to question whether one should marry.

And see the world? What good would that do for someone planning to farm and replicate the parents’ life in a small, church-centered community in the upper Midwest?

Steve’s grandmother was “different”—the ultimate Minnesota word for something or someone who is inexplicable, in a faintly questionable way. As a girl and young woman, she played the organ equally for her own Catholic church and for her grandmother’s Lutheran church: early Mass at the Catholic church, then a hop over to the little Lutheran church on the other side of town to play the organ there, as well.

Now that he knows she also went “off” to school, he begins to understand something of her willingness to encourage the coming generations to see the world, become a bit more educated, consider other options, before settling down. She lived quietly but firmly beyond some of the hard and fast rules of her own provincial culture, which forbade a Catholic to attend a Protestant service, let alone play the organ at such a service; and which dictated that one marry and become an adult—a farmer or farm wife—as soon as one had finished high school.

Along with this, as we pore over the old pictures and talk about the lives of those depicted in them, we think as well about the way in which Steve’s grandparents—and their son, Steve’s recently deceased father—made room for others. And for the purpose of others.

There was, there always has been, more diversity in these rural church-centered communities, than the stereotype permits us to see. People have always quietly lived their own way, according to their own lights.

And the pressure to conform has sometimes been less draconian in the past than it is today, with our sullen tacit dictatorship of the nuclear family model to which everyone is expected to adhere. Or else. Even though that model flourished in the past, there was far more leeway to go your own way in the generation of our grandparents, we both now realize, than exists today.

What seems to have been different in previous generations is the willingness to permit those “other” lives to have purpose. I have memories of my grandparents that are very similar to Steve’s. Like his grandparents, all my grandparents grew up on farms in small, rural, church-centered communities.

And like Steve’s grandparents, my grandparents never seemed to assume that their tiny world was the entire world in miniature. They were eager to hear news of a larger world. They were eager to learn. The eagerness to learn contained a recognition that there was always much more to learn, that they did not have all the answers—as their church also did not, as their community did not. As their model of nuclear family did not.

They were eager to include, as well, since the lives of those who did not fit into the mold of nuclear family had purpose just as much as did the lives of those who were conventionally married. In farming communities where the labor of neighbors can be needed at any time—for example, to share the task of haying when rain is on the horizon and the grass must be mown, raked, and gathered quickly—who can discount any neighbor, in time of need?

And what did it matter if the bachelor farmers helping to make hay not only had not married women, but were even suspected of having their own little unconventional family thing going on at their farmplace? Their lives had purpose, too. They were needed. And so, they were respected. Respected as members of the community, as those whose labor contributed to the good of everyone in the community.

This ethic of radical inclusion presupposes a different way of looking at G-d than the way that has come to prevail in the churches of the radical middle, with their ethic of individualism centered on idolatry of the nuclear family. The ethic of radical inclusion presupposes that no one has G-d all figured out, since to figure G-d out completely—in such a way that we are oh so certain that our way of seeing and doing things is the only possible way—is also to exclude others who do not fit our model from living lives of purpose.

And when we thwart the purpose of the lives of others, we make the scriptures we read each Sunday in our churches void of all meaning . . . . To everything there is a time for every purpose under heaven.*

*And, as I think about purpose or the lack thereof, God or the absence thereof, what to make of this strange coincidence: when we packed to travel for the funeral, I brought along P.D. James' autobiography A Time to Be in Earnest, to read in case I finished the Pullman trilogy. I began the book yesterday. In its opening paragraphs, P.D. James notes that she wanted to try to capture the story of her entire life by recording a single year, reflecting each day, as she entered data about that day, on the past—on the purpose of her life.

The day on which she began her chronicle was 3 August 1997. I started the book yesterday, 3 August 2008.