A Wonderful Plan

This morning I read a post by Dr. Bruce Charlton, a post examining the idea of finding the spiritual — the significant — in everyday life. Dr. Charlton uses Rudolf Steiner as a platform from which to dive into this topic. I had never heard of Steiner before reading of him in the past on Dr. Charlton’s blog, and I will confess that my attempts to read Steiner have not panned out well. I lack the intellectual muscle-tone to heft this sort of weighty writing (I often have to read some of Dr. Charlton’s essays several times before I can grasp the points he is making). But the central idea presented in this post is clear to me, and the timing of its coming to my attention is, well, fortunate.

The Christian world in which I grew up was noisy with catch-phrases like “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” Such a statement has a certain surface appeal, but when one undergoes suffering in one’s life, the words “a wonderful plan for your life” doesn’t have much practical appeal. For myself, I have become embittered at points in my life, feeling that I have been lied to or betrayed by my teachers and pastors over the years, or that I was too thick-headed to grasp what they were trying to teach me. I turned away from aphorisms like this one.

But on my walks in the countryside, I chew over these deep topics, and I am faced with fundamental questions about what I really believe, about my underlying assumptions. Do I really believe that God loves me? Do I believe He hates me? Do I believe He’s indifferent to me?

And do I believe He has a plan for my life, or do I believe it’s all random, or do I tend to think that it’s a combination of the two, and if this third option is true, is God influenced by the circumstances in my life, or are the circumstances in my life affected by God’s attention to them? I hesitate to even voice these musings, because I am aware that educated men have read miles of scholarly books that address (and perhaps even answer) these questions. I come to the table late, and dressed in shabby clothes. But I still come.

After reading this post, I took a walk in a light mist, down the gravel road, up into the little cemetery near my home. I poked around among the wet tombstones, some of them so weathered they cannot be deciphered. I thought hard about some of the questions, and about some of the things Dr. Charlton highlighted in his observations on Rudolf Steiner. I faced south and watched the cattle on a distant hill as they moved beneath a wreath of fog and rain, and I thought, and I asked, and I whispered to myself.

On this particular morning in June, on Pentecost Sunday, I concluded that I do not believe I am a tiny, worthless cog in a vast machine. I concluded that my life does have meaning, and that if I have an enemy, that enemy would love for me to believe that I am just one of gazillions of replaceable drones, that my life has no ultimate meaning, that I have no eternal, transcendent purpose here. And my conclusion reminded me of a formula I used to use in my younger days, a formula I had all but forgotten. At important junctures in my daily life, I would think to myself, “At this moment, what does my Father want me to believe? And what does my adversary want me to believe?”

As Dr. Charlton points out, just being able to walk from point A to point B without falling down, without being harmed or killed demonstrates the countless things that have to coalesce and harmonize in order for things to work well for just one individual soul in just one moment of time. Only a fool or an intentionally evil creature could conclude that the hours of this life are random, meaningless, throwaway.

When I came home and changed out of my damp clothes, I read my friend Francis Berger’s essay which makes the case that nobody is a nobody. The timing is wondrous.

And so what do I do with this knowledge, these insights? How do I use my time? How do I evaluate my circumstances? How do I proceed?

I don’t yet know. But I know that at this moment, I do not feel alone. I feel the great presence of God with me, and I also feel the companionship of all those scattered souls who are reading and thinking and asking these questions.

On a cool, rainy Sunday in June, how could I not be quietly content in this hour?

~  S. K. Orr