To hope in destiny.

There exists a movie entitled "Serendipity". It is one of my favorites, starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale and has Jeremy Piven in an amazing supporting role. It is a romantic comedy about destiny guiding love and the romantic life. Kind of along the lines of the true love will never die and always works out in the end type of stories. Now I am not going to go into what true love is or how the movie doesn't quite portray it correctly, that isn't what this particular thought is about. The name of the movie serendipity says it all. Merriam-Webster defines serendipity as the faculty of phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for. Or, as the movie puts it, a fortunate accident. What we see in the film that has inspired this specific brain wave is the idea of destiny. How there is some force beyond our control that is behind everything that happens to us and drives the course of our life. So is destiny real? Do we have any control over our lives and the course they take? In the film, Jeremy Piven's character writes an obituary for his friend Jonathon as the best man speech for his wedding and it reads as follows below:

Jonathan Trager, prominent television producer for ESPN, died last night from complications of losing his soul mate and his fiancee. He was 35 years old. Soft-spoken and obsessive, Trager never looked the part of a hopeless romantic. But, in the final days of his life, he revealed an unknown side of his psyche. This hidden quasi-Jungian persona surfaced during the Agatha Christie-like pursuit of his long reputed soul mate, a woman whom he only spent a few precious hours with. Sadly, the protracted search ended late Saturday night in complete and utter failure. Yet even in certain defeat, the courageous Trager secretly clung to the belief that life is not merely a series of meaningless accidents or coincidences. Uh-uh. But rather, its a tapestry of events that culminate in an exquisite, sublime plan. Asked about the loss of his dear friend, Dean Kansky, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and executive editor of the New York Times, described Jonathan as a changed man in the last days of his life. "Things were clearer for him," Kansky noted. Ultimately Jonathan concluded that if we are to live life in harmony with the universe, we must all possess a powerful faith in what the ancients used to call "fatum", what we currently refer to as destiny.
Now there is a lot of good within what was written in this obituary. I particularly like the analogy of life as an intricate tapestry of events all culminating in a sublime plan. In a sense that is true, but the idea of destiny; how does that play in? As Christians we believe that God has a plan for the entirety of creation and an intimate plan for all of our lives. However, we do not, as Catholics believe in predestination in terms of each little event in our lives is planned for us until the time of our death including whether or not we reach salvation. We believe in free will and whether we see heaven or hell is ultimately up to us because our God loves us so much he gives us the ability and freedom to choose. Yet He still has a plan that is more times than not a mystery to us, and it is our job to seek that plan in prayer and do our best to live our lives in accordance to it. Still, if there is a plan from the get go, how much influence do we have? If God knows what we are going to choose before we do, are we really in control? By believing in God's plan for us, which we see laid out in the scriptures, "For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope." Jeremiah 29:11 What then is our role in all of this? As children of God we have plans set out for us, so in a sense we have to believe in fate. The idea that plans exist for us that gives reason and purpose to the events of our lives from the little things we disregard as meaningless to the major life-shaking events that make us into the people that we are.

Believing then in this idea of fate, we accept the idea that there is another governing force guiding our lives. The first question this begs, is what about free will? If God will not interfere with free will but has this intricate plan for me how does all of that work? To a certain degree this can generate frustrations within our minds and hearts, very much along the lines of rugged individualism that we as a modern society can have. We like to be in control and don't always like the idea of being told what to do. However, on the contrary I believe that in this paradoxical idea we find a bit of comfort. The idea of being left to my own devices to find happiness makes me anxious. I know that in our society and within the world today we all seem to have a common understanding of what happiness is and how to go about obtaining it. Still we all seem to buy into the idea of belonging and purpose; and these of course are truth. We all want to belong and want a purpose. We want a role to play in the grand scheme of life. We all want to leave our mark. So if indeed we have that role to play, how do we go about finding it? Is it possible that we have more than one role and the one we wind up with is the one we choose? Or are we made for it, are we born with all of our skills and talents and idiosyncrasies intended for and tailor-made to fit a role also designed for us? As Christians, and as humans we all seem to believe in this idea of destiny in this basic sense. That is where I find comfort in this idea. Without some guiding force to help shape my life I have no chance of finding this role, this destiny and ultimately no real chance at finding fulfillment. In the same vein, this idea of destiny brings purpose to the happenings of our life. There are so many things that happen to us and events that shape our lives and if there is a destiny behind it all if brings purpose and meaning to everything that we go through in order to shape us for this role.

So what does it all mean? What we should take away from all of this is the way in which we need to go about finding this purpose for our lives. That begins with our desires. God created everything our of love. The mere fact that you exists proves that you are loved. It also proves that you are good. We who are made in the image and likeness of God are inherently good. By extension then our desires are good. Now when I say desires I don't mean passions, impulses, or instincts. We are fallen beings and we have concupiscence and not every urge we have is good. But the desires of our heart are indeed good. When coming to understand God's will in our lives we need to remember that it is not something that is imposed on us from the outside, but rather motivated from within. The Lord works through the desires of our hearts. What we find as passions or loves in our life are most likely from God. He has given us free will and has a plan for us in accordance to His will, and we will find that often times they aren't in juxtaposition to one another. It would make sense that our loving God would want us to be happy and His will for us is usually what is in line with the desires of our hearts because He put them there. THEREFORE we are called to pursue those desires and go deep. We should run after our desires with passion. Keeping in mind that Christ is the heart of our desires and our deepest desire, we realize that we are really seeking Him. We also seek Christ that we would purify our desires and align them with Himself. And as we go deeper with Christ through pursuing these desires, these passions, we become more and more who we truly are and who are meant to be. By finding Christ and going deeper with Him we find ourselves. He calls us to fulfill our potential. Just like the parable of the talents, we are not called to bury our talents but to use them to give more back to Christ.

As we saw before with the verse from John, Christ promises us an abundant life. We find this life in Him. That may well be our own greatest fear. By echoing the Gospel in which Christ calls us to deny ourselves, pick up our crosses and follow him, we fear losing ourselves to Him. We fear going deep. So many times in my walk with Christ I find that I have this model or idea of who I see myself becoming, of who I think I truly could be if I lived as I feel Christ is calling me to. I see this man who has pursued this desires with passion and gone deep and has all this potential, but I fear going there myself out of what it might cost. It becomes a goal that is never reached, always pushed back until tomorrow. I will begin going there; going deeper tomorrow. However by giving all of this to Christ, our passions and desires and allowing Him to bring us deeper, here lies our hope. We truly discover who we are and who we are called to be. By trusting in the Lord's will for us, and going deep with Him and pursuing those desires of our hearts to the full, we find that happiness we are looking for. And by doing all of this and waiting upon the Lord we truly find our destiny.