Reading Francis

Augustine was right, of course.

One way of thinking about the essential brokenness of human nature from a Judeo-Christian perspective is that all of us are guilty of breaking the first of the Ten Commandments. All of us, at some level, worship gods we have created instead of the God who created us. In the modern age, those who say this tend to talk about wealth and power and status and pleasure as false gods (because there really aren’t that many folks out there sacrificing to Ba’al these days). The truth is, those who claim religious affiliation are just as prone to worshiping a version of the Biblical God that better soothes our consciences through selective editing. We all, for the most part, emphasize the aspects of God that align with what we already agree with, and minimize or forget the aspects of God that would make us change the way we live our lives. 

The gods we prefer to worship, for the most part, seem better on the front end. Ultimately, they disappoint.

For most of my life, the god I worshiped was the one who said that there was a plan for me to fulfill some unique destiny. That I had one “life potential,” and I just had to find out what it was and live into it.

A friend of mine asked me if I’d seen the show “The Big Door Prize” on AppleTV. I’d seen the promos when it came out, but didn’t pick it up until the friend mentioned it. But since I’m an amateur theologian who takes requests, and there are clearly some theological angles here, I jumped in. 

The premise is that a mysterious machine shows up at a small-town five-and-dime that promises to reveal “your life potential” in exchange for two bucks (and your Social Security number and fingerprints, which sets off all my fraud alarm bells). People in the town grasp onto the little blue card that the MORPHO machine spits out for them with varying levels of intensity, but most of the show is about people making dramatic changes in their lives to drop what they’ve been doing – careers, marriages, you name it – and embrace what the machine says their true potential is.

I don’t know, but this seems like a very American thing. Our culture leans into the myth of the “self-made” and lionizes the individual with a dream they pursue until the happy ending. It’s enough to make you think that maybe we really do each have that one thing, that one true life potential, and our success and happiness in the world is just a reflection of how astutely we discerned what the thing was, and how persistent we were in pursuing it. If we aren’t happy with our lives, maybe it’s because we haven’t found that true calling yet, or maybe it’s because we gave up on our dream too soon.

What it took a lot of my life to figure out is, the god who orders life like that, the god who assigns one true life potential to each person and challenges us to play hide and seek to find it, that’s just another false idol.

Augustine was right, way back in the fourth century. He opens his autobiographical Confessions by saying to God “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”

God is not a MORPHO machine, nor does God hide our one true life potential for us to seek. It is we who hide, behind all the false gods, including the “true life potential” one. 

But if God WERE to deliver us a blue envelope with a card inside that told us our one true life potential, they would all say the same thing:

BELOVED/LOVER

The rest – the vocations and passions and careers and hobbies – are for us to work out later. Not that God doesn’t want to be part of that working out – I do believe there’s a place for discerning whether a particular vocation is a better or worse way for you to practice the roles of lover and beloved. But those details are downstream from the one thing, the true life potential. Whether you live out your calling as a priest or a spouse, it’s less about the specifics themselves than how they train you for letting your heart rest where it belongs.