July and August
What is life for? For a lot of people the point of life seems
to be to get as much enjoyment out of it as possible. Different people have
widely different ideas of what that means, of course. For some people it’s
lots of parties or thrills; for some it’s a big house with all top-quality
items in it; for some it’s status and position; for some it’s things
they can show off to other people; for some it’s appreciation of the
finest art.
There are some problems, though, with making the primary goal of your life
something for you to enjoy yourself. One is that it is very difficult to fulfil.
Often the need escalates, and what satisfied you once no longer does so. If
you seek thrills, they have to get wilder and wilder. If it is things you can
buy, then you need more and more of them. Happiness is one of those elusive
things that the more you chase after it the farther away it seems to get.
For me, however, the real problem is that it seems to make life ultimately
pointless. When you have done everything and gained everything, what really
has been achieved? It makes me ask of myself: How is the world any better off
as a result of my life? Would this world be, in any way, a worse place if I
had never lived on it? If I cannot answer that positively, then what I am for?
An alternative approach is to make the main purpose of our life the things
we can do for the good of others, and indeed for the good of the whole world.
We can still enjoy ourselves in ways that don’t conflict with that. I
would recommend that we do, because people who make themselves miserable actually
achieve very little for anyone else. It is rather a matter of priorities, and
what is the bigger goal.
The well-known prayer of St Francis includes the words: “It is in giving
that we receive.” That suggests that, as well as being worth while for
their own sake, it is the things we do for others that will, in the end, give
us the greatest satisfaction. They may take a lot of hard work, and they may
not seem much fun at the time, but they are the things that most make life
worth living, and it is in them that we can find what it is all for.
Your Rector
David