Have you ever felt lost, bewildered, or off-course in your journey through life? The classic literary expression of lostness is Dante’s, at the beginning of The Divine Comedy.
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Who hasn’t felt this way? Perhaps something is ending—a job, a project, a relationship, a career, a ministry, a course of study, a time of life—without much clarity about what comes next. Perhaps you must make an important decision, again, without much clarity.
Dante is not truly lost; a guide soon appears. Neither are we truly lost when we find ourselves in a dark wood, perplexed and confused about the future. We need to be patient at such times, waiting for the guide to appear.
Can we do something else to help dispel the lostness? Here’s an idea, drawn from the Ignatian tradition. Wrestle with the paradox of God’s will. Christian wisdom and Scripture tell us two things about our choices. First, God cares about every detail of our lives (“Even the hairs on your head are all numbered.” [Luke 12:7]), and we’re to seek his will in all things, large and small. But, second, God has given us free will and reason, and we’re to use these and our God-given talents to accomplish good things. The great illustration here is the Parable of the Talents. The master expects his servants to make good use of their talents while he has gone away for a while.
It’s a genuine paradox. Both things are true; we’re to seek God’s will in all things, but we’re also expected to make our own decisions, using our good judgment. I think the solution to this problem is the famous adage attributed to St. Augustine: “Love God and do what you will.” If your deepest desire is to love and serve God, then your will is aligned with God’s. Doing what seems best to you is, in fact, doing what God wills.
This reminds me of a story I heard from a friend of mine, a Jesuit named Ben. Ben was exiting a parking garage on a busy Friday afternoon. He stopped at the booth to pay his fee. The young guy took his money, looked at Ben wearing his Roman collar, and blurted out, “Father, my life is meaningless. What shall I do?” Ben thought the guy might be serious. A line of cars was behind him. He had a few seconds at most to say something helpful. He said, “Think about your desires, and talk to God about them.”
That’s profoundly Ignatian advice. Many religious traditions shun and fear desires. Not the Ignatian tradition. St. Ignatius believed that our deepest desires have been put in our hearts by God. When we know what these are, when we know what we really want, we know what God wants.
Examining our desires is hard work. Our deepest desires are obscured by what Ignatius called “disordered attachments,” desires for the wrong things and passions, anxieties, or yearnings that are disruptive and misplaced. But often, the remedy for our lostness lies in finding and understanding what we truly want most deeply.
So if you are standing perplexed in Dante’s forest dark, take it as an invitation. It’s a circumstance described well by another poet, Wendell Barry, who writes, “It may be that when we no longer know what to do / we have come to our real work.”
