How to Find Your Purpose in Life
Dear Friends:
CW: Satan appears in this week’s newsletter. For a while, I thought the belief in Hell was humankind’s most insane delusion—far wronger than belief in alien abductions, say, or the belief that women don’t always deserve the right to free abortions.
Except most of us have already been there. I’m in hell. This is hell. No, a red guy in horns isn’t poking your enflamed ass with a pitchfork, but that sense of continual suffering? The burning unease?
I’m writing to you today from hell. April is always the cruelest month at my job, a conflation of admissions and advising and the semester’s final crunch. Add to it two of my full-time colleagues on sabbatical and a number of conflicts simmering in various classrooms, and most days I wake up wishing everyone in the world had been disappeared.
Before I knew God (see below), I thought the concepts of sin and hell were just more of the evils churches dumped on their flock. But now I know sin is just the stuff you do despite knowing it’ll drift you further from your purpose. Hell is a word for where you often land.
It’s not an eternal prison. Prayer exists, and the end of the semester is at hand.
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements
1. The AIDS Interfaith Memorial Chapel in Grace Cathedral
Hard to capture in words how it feels to get to kneel down in a church and pray before a Keith Haring altarpiece:
But that’s what makes the AIDS Interfaith Memorial Chapel at Grace Cathedral so endorsable. Churches have been outright shits to queer people since like forever (I need not get into the evidence), so providing a space in a house of God for people to pray to both our secular saints (R.I.P. Keith Haring)1 and our holy ones is nothing short of revolutionary. Haring’s triptych, The Life of Christ, was made shortly before his death from AIDS complications in 1990. My pic here doesn’t do justice to the way it gleams, like every holy object should: drawing you toward it in private contemplation while looking too too immaculate to touch.
2. Costco’s Everything Bagel Seasoning
The scourge of the everything bagel is the onion bits, which when made well stick to your fingers and fall easily off in the toaster to singe and smell like burning, so as much as I’ve loved everything bagels, I was grateful to find Trader Joe’s carry little bottles of everything they put on an everything bagel—sesame seeds, salt, dried onion, dried garlic, poppy seed—but in shake-on form. Dash it on a plain bagel coated in cream cheese and it’s perfect. One problem: too salty. Costco, in its quest to make you want to shop only there, now has its own version at a much cheaper price-per-ounce, and what makes it endorsable is the balanced salt content. Speaking of content: is this what Shenny’s become? Costco ads for products people already know and have come to their own opinions about? What can I say, it’s been a rough week. Here’s a photo I found online of a hero:
How to Find Your Purpose in Life
The other night I was sitting alone in Grace Cathedral in awe, again, of the feel of a holy space. I studied art history for a time in my youth, and 90 percent of the architecture I recall was cathedrals. Apses, narthexes, flying buttresses. The gothic v. Romanesque arch. A lot of clever choices meant to draw you in from outside and make your eyes look up.
Look up: there are stained glass windows there, telling now-incomprehensible stories, but doing something to the light. Grace Cathedral rises high enough that it gets shadowy in the uppermost corners, suggesting mysteries and the unknowable. I was there for a poetry reading, put together by my colleagues in celebration of National Poetry Month. I am not a poet, but I have become a man who views leaving the house as a chore, an obligation, a thing that other people have insisted I do for them. Make a window of that guy in stained glass and he’d be your church’s cautionary tale, something to guide the children by as a warning of where sin may someday lead them.
I took myself out to Grace Cathedral as a way to shatter that portrait, and sitting in awe of the space I was reminded of the time in my life I did this every day, sit quietly in a tall, awe-ful church. Back then, I did it to pray as part of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, and one of the first things I was told to do was ask God to show me how I could best serve him. I didn’t want to ask this question. Who doesn’t carry a lifetime of ill associations around servility? But per the exercises, there was no going forward into a relationship with God—and for reasons there isn’t time to get into here, I really wanted a relationship with God—until I figured this out.
The thing about the Spiritual Exercises is that it works your imagination. You read certain passages from Scripture and then imagine yourself in the scene, watching Jesus argue in the temple or whatever. You track the sights and sounds and smells. You try to find a place where you meet God and sit together in colloquy. Mine I found while meditating on a flight to New York: God was in a bar I was picturing. It was daytime, late morning. I pulled open a regular storefront glass door, and the bar itself was to my left, dimly lit, a man in a dress shirt and vest wiping glasses down and nodding to me as I entered. Half a dozen 4-tops on the floor between him and the booths, which were pine, blondwood, each of which lit by its own bright lamp hanging from the ceiling.2 The place was empty, but in the last booth I could see from the back a shoulder in a grey sweatshirt, reading the paper.
That was God, and that was 10 years ago. Every time I pray to him, I go to the bar and walk over to the last booth.
It was the imagination that got me through my block. I’d been led to understand that ‘serving’ God meant less doing things for him than helping to carry out his project, distribute his love through the world. And I knew I felt his love the most when I used my imagination or creativity, or when my brain made some associative leap it didn’t expect to. Where did that come from, that leap, that sudden idea? I decided it came from God.
Making new things in the world, that’s how I could serve God. That, I decided, was my purpose.
Now? I’m not so sure.
I’m bad at a poetry reading. My mind doesn’t hold well onto language spoken into the air—for its own end, that is, and not as a means of delivering information—so it’s hard for me to track a performed poem’s movement. It’s like getting high: Wait, what did they just say? Poet-voice’s flattening intonations only make it all worse.
Ideally, every poetry reading would involve handouts, or the spoken poem also projected onto a screen, but until that’s the norm, I wander a lot, in my head. At Grace Cathedral, I got to wander in my eyes, and I kept looking at this statue behind the stage:
Here was, from what I could tell, a man reading a book being startled in gape-mouthed fear of an angel on his back. Despite all the Scripture I read in 2014-2015, I had no idea what story this statue might illustrate. I had only the illustration, and the imagined experience: being shocked out of a deep reading practice by the heavenly.
By reflex, I started thinking about how to caption this pic to garner the most Likes when I’d post it on Instagram later. But I deleted Instagram from my phone last week. Not enough time to get into those reasons either, so I’ll just say these days I’m trying to break some habits. But I bring this all up because for a time, Instagram gave me a way to feel purposeful. I could look out into the world, capture on my phone something I saw in it (often myself), and give it to others to look at with some of my language or thinking.
Post. Boom. A new thing I made in the world. Creative purpose achieved.
But not really. Any Instagram post is just another bit of content Meta can mine for data and engagement. Any post is always something ‘I’ ‘made’.
Being without this ersatz creative outlet has brought creative outlets themselves into question. Now when I think about making new things in the world, I think about the verb, to make, the way some parents talk euphemistically to their kids about shitting.
Did you make?
Who cares?
Well, I do, for one. Making new things, I’ve learned the hard way, is crucial for my mental health. Also: it’s fun. But I’m starting to rethink its being my purpose in this world. What, ultimately, do I mean by this word? I think I mean the tithe one pays for the impossible gift of being born. As hard as this world feels to live through lately, that each of us even gets to is a miracle.
Look at all you’ve been given. What do you want to give back? Let ‘purpose’ be our shorthand for that.
Midway through the reading at Grace Cathedral, I started asking myself some familiar questions. Did I like this poem? What about that poet who recited poems from memory, did I like that? Was that a better or worse way to deliver poems? And this person: weren’t their poems paltry compared to what the other poet was writing about?
I didn’t know how the next thought came to me, but I knew where it came from: Rather than see myself amid delivered to an assessment task, what if I was being given instead (from guess who) an encounter with difference—like an alien abduction, maybe, or looking up from a hike and meeting eyes with a far-off coyote?
That question invited me to connect, a la Forster: ‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.’ This helped me enjoy the reading more than I otherwise would, and it helped me return to Shenny this week, after some time of wondering whether it was time to fold this little exercise.
And it’s helped reform what I’ll take to be my purpose in life, for now: make connections, not just within myself (I used to love to watch what language could do) but more so to others. After the reading I turned to my pewmate and got to meet the partner of one of the MFA students. They live not far from us. Her phone case looked like a Game Boy, and handing it to her (she’d left it behind after she got up to go), I saw in that unexpected object from my youth, and by my estimate from before she was born, a kind of hinge. They’ve been rusty for a while. Happily for me, it’s spring cleaning season.
This week’s thing I did not buy at the antique store is this cookbook in a binder:
Fun fact, Haring and I worked in our youths for the same arts center in Pittsburgh.
Pittsburghers will recognize this layout from the Squirrel Cage, the first bar in my life I felt was ‘my own’, but the bar I meet God in has a much lower ceiling, counterintuitively, and looks more like a cafe than latenight dive.