Does Purpose Equal Meaning?

Joan Chichester explores the theme of meaning in the Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully.

From my early days, I’ve had what I now regard as a healthy suspicion of the utilitarian spirit that pervades Western society – the mindset that says things only have value for what material worth they can add. Childhood thus begins an orientation of developing self-worth that is based on simply doing and accomplishing at the cost of reflecting and creating. One might expect this focus to be appropriate for a context of subsistence and basic skill development, but how quickly it translates into opportunities for acquisitiveness. When the gathering of wealth, power, and status becomes the purpose for living, one is entitled to question whether it’s also life’s meaning.

Chichester addresses what happens when we reach a point in life where our capacity for drivenness and performance begins to diminish and even shrink away entirely. If our purpose has been goal and productivity-driven, we find ourselves in crisis. If we have been conditioned, however, to find meaning in our life’s seasons, our days are enriched.

My days of receiving pecuniary rewards for work on a regular basis are now in the rapidly receding past.  Meaning, however, has increased exponentially. Perhaps I have been blessed with a work life where purpose has always derived from meaning, not vice versa. While it has been nice to be able to put food on the table and a roof over our heads, this has not been the prime purpose of my work. The meaning of my work, serving in a vocation of Christ-inspired ministry in whatever setting I find myself, eclipses and transcends mere purpose.

I would venture that even the most mundane daily grind where purpose is defined in the most boring, utilitarian manner can take on a different timbre when imbued with a meaning that derives from deep within one’s being. The monk who spent his days in the scullery peeling potatoes deemed himself the happiest of all in the monastery because he could “practice the presence of God.” I daresay that when he grew too old to manage this simple task, meaning remained with him.

Chichester concludes with this observation:

A burden of these years is that we might allow ourselves to believe that not being as fast or as busy as we used to be is some kind of human deficiency.

A blessing of these years is that we can come to understand that it is the quality of what we think and say that makes us valuable members of society, not how fast and busy we are.