What Color Is Your Parachute? (55 page)

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We need in the first stage to
un
learn the idea that our Mission is primarily to keep busy
doing
something (here on Earth), and learn instead that our Mission is first of all to keep busy
being
something (here on Earth). In Christian language (and others as well), we might say that we were sent here to learn how
to be
sons of God, and daughters of God, before anything else. “
Our Father, who art in heaven…
”

•
In the second stage, “Being” issues into “Doing.” At this stage, we need to
un
learn the idea that everything about our Mission must be
unique
to us, and learn instead that some parts of our Mission here on Earth are
shared
by all human beings: e.g., we were all sent here to bring more gratitude, more kindness, more forgiveness, and more love, into the world. We share this Mission because the task is too large to be accomplished by just one individual.

•
We need in the third stage to
un
learn the idea that the part of our Mission that is truly unique, and most truly ours, is something Our Creator just
orders
us to do, without any agreement from our spirit, mind, and heart. (On the other hand, neither is it something that each of us chooses and then merely asks God to bless.) We need to learn that God so honors our free will, that He has ordained that our unique Mission be something that we have some part in choosing.

•
In this third stage we need also to
un
learn the idea that our unique Mission must consist of some achievement for all the world to see—and learn instead that as the stone does not always know what ripples it has caused in the pond whose surface it impacts, so neither we nor those who watch our life will always know
what we have achieved
by our life and by our Mission.
It may be
that by the grace of God we helped bring about a profound change for the better in the lives of other souls around us, but it also may be that this takes place beyond our sight, or after we have gone on. And we may never know what we have accomplished, until we see Him face to face after this life is past.

•
Most finally, we need to
un
learn the idea that what we have accomplished is our doing, and ours alone. It is God’s Spirit breathing in us and through us that helps us do whatever we do, and so the singular first-person pronoun is never appropriate, but only the plural. Not “
I
accomplished this” but “
We
accomplished this, God and I, working together.…”

That should give you a general overview. But I would like to add some random comments on my part about each of these three Missions of ours here on Earth.

Your first Mission here on Earth is one that you share with the rest of the human race, but it is no less your individual Mission for the fact that it is shared: and that is,
to seek to stand hour by hour in the conscious presence of God, the One from whom your Mission is derived.
The Missioner before the Mission, is the rule. In religious language, your Mission is: to know God, and enjoy Him forever, and to see His hand in all His works.

Each of us has to go about this primary Mission according to the tenets of his or her own particular religion. But I will speak what I know out of the context of my own particular faith, and you may perhaps translate and apply it to yours. I will speak as a Christian, who believes (passionately) that Christ is the Way and the Truth and the Life. But I also believe, with St. Peter, “that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears Him and does what is right is acceptable to Him” (Acts 10:34–35).

Now, Jesus claimed many unique things about Himself and His Mission; but He also spoke of Himself as the great prototype for us all. He called Himself “the Son of Man,” and He said, “I assure you that the man who believes in me will do the same things that I have done, yes, and he will do even greater things than these.…” (John 14:12).

Emboldened by His identification of us with His Life and His Mission, we might want to remember how He spoke about His Life here on Earth. He put it in this context:
“I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and going to the Father”
(John 16:28).

If there is a sense in which this is, in even the faintest way, true also of our lives (and I shall say in a moment in what sense I think it is true), then instead of calling our great Creator “God” or “Father” right off, we might begin our approach to the subject of religion by referring to the One Who gave us our Mission and sent us to this planet not as “God” or “Father” but—
just to help our thinking
—as:
“The One from Whom We Came and the One to Whom We Shall Return,”
when this life is done.

If our life here on Earth is to be at all like Christ’s, then this is a true way to think about the One Who gave us our Mission. We are not some kind of eternal, preexistent
being
. We are
creatures,
who once did not exist, and then came into Being, and continue to have our Being, only at the will of our great Creator. But as creatures we are both body and soul; although we know our body was created in our mother’s womb, our soul’s origin is a great mystery. Where it came from, at what moment the Lord created it, is something we cannot know. It is not unreasonable to suppose, however, that the great God created our
soul
before it entered our body, and in that sense we did indeed stand before God before we were born; and He is indeed
“The One from Whom We Came and the One to Whom We Shall Return.”

Therefore, before we go searching for “what work was I sent here to do?” we need to establish—or in a truer sense
reestablish
—contact with
“The One from Whom We Came and the One to Whom We Shall Return.”
Without this reaching out of the creature to the great Creator, without this reaching out of
the creature with a Mission
to
the One Who Gave Us That Mission
, the question
what
is my Mission in life?
is void and null. The
what
is rooted in the
Who;
absent the Personal, one cannot meaningfully discuss The Thing. It is like the adult who cries, “I want to get married,” without giving any consideration to
who
it is they want to marry.

In light of this larger view of our creatureliness, we can see that
religion
or
faith
is not a question of whether or not we choose to (
as it is so commonly put
) “have a relationship with God.” Looking at our life in a larger context than just our life here on Earth, it becomes apparent that some sort of relationship with God is a given for us, about which we have absolutely no choice. God and we
were
and
are
related, during the time of our soul’s existence before our birth and in the time of our soul’s continued existence after our death. The only choice we have is what to do about
The Time in Between,
i.e., what we want the nature of our relationship with God to be during our time here on Earth and how that will affect the
nature
of the relationship, then, after death.

One of the corollaries of all this is that by the very act of being born into a human body, it is inevitable that we undergo a kind of
amnesia
—an amnesia that typically embraces not only our nine months in the womb, our baby years, and almost one-third of each day (sleeping), but more important any memory of our origin or our destiny. We wander on Earth as an amnesia victim. To seek after Faith, therefore, is to seek to climb back out of that amnesia. Religion or Faith is
the hard reclaiming of knowledge we once knew as a certainty.

This first Mission of ours here on Earth is not the easiest of Missions, simply because it is the first. Indeed, in many ways, it is the most difficult. All can see is that our life here on Earth is a very physical life. We eat, we drink, we sleep, we long to be held, and to hold. We inherit a physical body, with very physical appetites, we walk on the physical earth, and we acquire physical possessions. It is the most alluring of temptations,
in our amnesia
, to come up with just a
Physical
interpretation of this life: to think that the Universe is merely interested in the survival of species. Given this interpretation, the story of our individual life could be simply told: we are born, grow up, procreate, and die.

But we are ever recalled to do what we came here to do: that without rejecting the joy of the Physicalness of this life, such as the love of the blue sky and the green grass, we are to reach out beyond all this to
recall
and recover a
Spiritual
interpretation of our life.
Beyond
the physical and
within
the physicalness of this life, to detect a Spirit and a Person from beyond this Earth who is with us and in us—the very real and loving and awesome Presence of the great Creator from whom we came—and the One to whom we once again shall go.