On April 1, President Trump announced that the next two weeks would be “very painful”, with the US leading the world in COVID-19 cases, though not in deaths. However, the Administration estimated that the total number of COVID-19 deaths could rise to between 100,000 to 240,000, with the peak hopefully after two weeks in the middle of April.
Even for those who manage to escape getting COVID-19, movement and life have been reduced to the essentials, with all “nonessential” business being discouraged. The essentials consist of getting food, providing services like medical care or utilities such as transportation, communication and sanitation, and maybe getting some exercise.
With “recreational” businesses taken away, people have gone online with entertainment, as well as with work and even with family and community. But what if we cut out the nonessentials in our lives at home as well?
Blaise Pascal said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Whether we have COVID-19 or not, many of us are doing, or can do, exactly that – sitting quietly (or not quietly) in our rooms alone. When we are forced into inactivity, we are faced with questions like these: If we can’t work because we don’t have a job, who are we? If we are alone, away from family and friends, who are we? Or if we are sick, and can’t DO anything for anyone else, what value does our life have? What value does our life have, ultimately, anyway?
With our physical bodies in this static state, we are left with our inner selves and interior lives – our mental, emotional and spiritual lives. As discussed in my last post, the meaning and purpose of our lives as Christians comes from our relationship to God. As St. Ignatius of Loyola states:
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THE FIRST PRINCIPLE AND FOUNDATION
From the Spiritual Exercises [23] of Ignatius of Loyola
A LITERAL TRANSLATION by Elder Mullan, SJ and edited by Rick Rossi, March 2015`
God created human beings to praise, reverence, and serve God, and by doing this, to save their souls.
God created all other things on the face of the earth to help fulfill this purpose.
From this it follows that we are to use the things of this world only to the extent that they help us to this end, and we ought to rid ourselves of the things of this world to the extent that they get in the way of this end.
For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things as much as we are able, so that we do not necessarily want health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, a long rather than a short life, and so in all the rest, so that we ultimately desire and choose only what is most conducive for us to the end for which God created us.
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam (For the Greater Glory of God)
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Having been deprived of so many secondary things, maybe we can create a space to explore these first things. For me, I found the clearest answer (so far) to the question of my own personal purpose through the Catherine of Siena Institute‘s Called and Gifted workshop, which explains more than 20 different spiritual gifts from the Holy Spirit in detail and how to discern which gifts you personally have.
I went to the live workshop, but as they may not be available in your area, there are CDs and DVDs you can purchase, which are necessary to watch or listen to in order to properly use their books, which are 1) the Catholic Spiritual Gifts Resource Guide (which includes the inventory), 2) the Discerning Charisms Workbook (for group discernment) and 3) Fruitful Discipleship: Living the Mission of Jesus in the Church and the World.
After the live workshop, the Siena Institute recommends three meetings, every other week over the course of six weeks, where a small group accompanies each other through discerning, through experiments, which spiritual gifts each person possesses. After the six weeks, the discernment and testing can continues for six months to a year or beyond, as each person keeps trying out and testing for different gifts. Our group has been meeting for about six months and we are witnessing great movements and epiphanies in each other’s lives! And this blog is one of the fruits of our meetings.
The most helpful insight from the workshop, almost more than my results from the inventory, was that spiritual gifts are qualitatively different from natural talents, which we may be using in our occupations, for example, and are distinguished by their *supernatural* impact, given *in order to be used to serve others*. I had never taken seriously the reality and meaning of my own past spiritual experiences and my own witness of causes and effects from my prayer life.
My own inventory results, from the best to worst fits, were:
- intercessory prayer
- evangelism
- service
- encouragement
- knowledge
- missionary
- pastoring
- wisdom
- faith
- healing
- helps
- prophecy
- administration
- celibacy
- teaching
- giving
- hospitality
- mercy
- voluntary poverty
- craftsmanship
- discernment of spirits
- leadership
- music
- writing
Based on my own experiments over those 6 weeks in praying for others, I can confidently say that the gift of intercessory prayer is very important in my life. But we are not limited to just one!
Is it possible that we will never find the peace and purpose that our inner selves and souls crave if we never find and use our spiritual gifts? I think it’s very likely. Perhaps a crisis in our career is a call to go back to our vocational basics. This video I recently came across is one example of so many similar stories where a great failure or perceived setback has turned around and then propelled a person to an even great success, particularly of purpose, by bringing them back to basics and causing them to reexamine and rebuild the fundamentals of their lives. Maybe lasting success just can’t exist without failure. I hope that we will all be inspired to take our present failures as detours to future successes, and more than that, our true purposes in life.
#coronavirus #quarantine #sars-cov-2 #purposedrivenlife #lifepurpose #justdoit #spiritualgifts #holyspirit
Detours In Eden 
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