Ash Wednesday, and the season of Lent which it begins, calls us to pause and reflect on the significance of our lives. If, we are to remember that we are but dust, and to dust we shall return, what is the meaning and purpose of this life between birth and death?

In  his novel, Revolution Road, made into the award-winning movie starring Leonardo de Caprio and Kate Winslett, Richard Yates, portrays a young couple who are trying to find themselves, and be something special, rather than just be caught up in a mindless suburban family life, or a the anonymous corporate life in New York City. They want to follow their dreams of going to live in Paris, but events transpire to prevent them. Tragedy ensues as they settle for the safe option. In all the discussion about finding their true selves, there is no mention of God or his will for their lives. There is no faith, no sense of purpose or divine destiny.

In contrast to them, Thomas Merton chose another route. He left the rat-race and entered into a monastery, and became a world-renowned writer of more than 60 books of poetry, meditation, philosophy and social criticism. Here is his take on our meaning and purpose.

“Each one of us has some kind of vocation. We are all called by God to share in His life and in His Kingdom. Each one of us is called to a special place in the Kingdom. If we find that place we will be happy. If we do not find it , we can never be completely happy. For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God’s will, to be what God wants us to be.

Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if only we knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?

We cannot be ourselves unless we know ourselves. But self-knowledge is impossible when thoughtless and automatic activity keeps our souls in confusion. In order to know ourselves it is not necessary to cease all activity in order to think about ourselves. That would be useless, and would probably do most of us a great deal of harm. But we have to cut down our activity to the point where we can think calmly and reasonably about our actions. We cannot begin to know ourselves until we can see the real reasons why we do the things we do, and we cannot be ourselves until our actions correspond to our intentions, and our intentions are appropriate to our own situation. But that is enough. It is not necessary that we succeed in everything. A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.

We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling all the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life’s leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing hell on earth.

If we have no silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest, God does not bless our work. If we twist our lives out of shape in order to fill every corner of them with action and experience, God will silently withdraw from our hearts and leave us empty.

Let us, therefore, learn to pass from one imperfect activity to another without worrying too much about what we are missing. It is true that we make many mistakes. But the biggest of them all is to be surprised at them: as if we had some hope of never making any.

Mistakes are part of our life, and not the least important part. If we are humble, and if we believe in the Providence of God, we will see our mistakes are not merely a necessary evil, something we must lament and count as lost: they enter into the very structure of our existence. It is by making mistakes that we gain experience, not only for ourselves but for others. And though our experience prevents neither ourselves nor others from making the same mistake many times, the repeated experience still has positive value.

We cannot avoid missing the point of almost everything we do. But what of it? Life is not a matter of getting something out of everything. Life itself is imperfect. The relative perfection which we must attain to in this life if we are to love as sons of God is not the twenty-four-hour-a-day production of perfect acts of virtue, but a life from which practically all the obstacles to God’s love have been removed or overcome.

One of the chief obstacles to this perfection of selfless charity is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men. We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do. We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to obtain the one thing necessary for us – whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need.

Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the ‘one thing necessary’ may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest, For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God’s will, to be what God wants us to be.”

(Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, pp.125-131)

May you this Lent, find out precisely the one thing necessary for you, so that you may be what God wants you to be, and so fulfill your own destiny.