What is the purpose of your life? Have you ever wondered? Have you ever attended a funeral, touched the lifeless body, listened to the eulogies, and asked yourself, Why am I alive? or What am I doing with myself? Maybe the questions arrest you when you encounter the limitless expanse of an ocean or the lumbering enormity of a mountain. Nature has that mystical power to lift our inner gaze and cause us to ask big and important questions. Just a brief walk in the woods under a canopy of trees, surrounded by a million unseen organisms has the power to re-focus our attention away from the distractions of daily life ! and back to those haunting, often perplexing, questions of purpose.
Best-selling author Dr. Wayne W. Dyer has suggested that the purpose of life is to know God. Similarly, another best-selling author and pastor, Rick Warren, notes in The Purpose Driven Life that the search for lifes purpose begins with God. Both Dyer and Warren are correct, we think, but by pointing us to God they place a bigger maybe the biggest question squarely before us: What do we mean by God?
Multiple religious traditions across millennia have reflected on the divine. Taking just...