On Knowing Your True Purpose

According to Simon & Schuster, more than fifty million copies of Rick Warren’s best seller The Purpose Driven Life were sold last year.  Warren’s guiding steps to pinpoint what drives happiness and how to live with purpose can certainly help to answer the question “why I am here?”

However for the Christian, setting out to discern one’s purpose begins with understanding the “causes” attracting the soul toward “goodness” as a means to God. The journey does not start out with a question – but with an answer.  That is, knowing that God is our Ultimate Destination.  We then set out to pursue a life that is a reflection of his image – seeking only the good.

God knows that we cannot do all that He desires in our own strength. He gives us an interior power “source” enabling our capacity to seek only goodness.  St. Thomas Aquinas refers to this source as the four “causes” that cultivate a life of virtue – personally and publicly.

The causes enable “soulful” dispositions or natural inclinations of virtue(s).  Cultivating them, we receive the gift of God’s grace that brings joy and freedom in our life .  Our relationship with God flourishes.

Hence, the causes are spiritual tools for the sojourner seeking to know and love God.  The first is the formal cause, a “quality of mind” or habitus that perfects our capacity to live and function only for good. The first cause equips us to pursue goodness, actively choosing to do “good” in our concrete actions and spoken words.

The second cause is designated as “material,” focusing on the behavioral capacities that the virtues mold and modify.  For example, activating the virtue of temperance in our lives produces the positive outcome of having control over those things that might not be good for us.  We can say “that is enough” and be happy at that.  They are the interior powers of the human person (intellect, will, and appetites) that shape the underlying root of every action for the good of the person.

Third, is the efficient cause based in the truth that God works within us, without us! 
There are virtues that come to us as gifts of divine grace, received directly from God in love.  There is no action on our part that can be taken to receive them.  These virtues (faith, hope and charity) are infused not acquired and cannot exist apart from God’s grace.

Finally, the fourth cause is the source that enables the actual carrying out of the virtue itself in daily life.  We embrace and actualize goodness in all things.

The four “causes” are the means for cultivating virtue that take us along the unequaled path to joy. The struggle and toil inflicted by the world is met head on by God’s grace freely given. They shape the interior dispositions needed by the soul to nourish our natural inclination to seek only the good.  Thus in pursuing them, we embark on a precise path to joy.

We live in the image of God – as our true purpose.