Ordinary Time 25 - Meaning of Life

Ordinary Time 25

September 20, 2026

Meaning of Life

 

            Have you ever had the experience of God speaking to you? A lot of Catholics don’t understand how that works, so let me give a brief explanation. Many times we go to prayer and we will have a thought that is not in our usual “thought voice”. You know how your inner monologue sounds? Sometimes we will have a thought that is stronger, more persistent, or in a different “thought voice” than the one that usually runs in our head. Sometimes that’s accompanied by a strong emotion like inexplicable peace or a strong desire. This is how God usually speaks to people: not that we’re “hearing voices” but that the Holy Spirit will inspire us to think a certain thing that comes in a different thought-voice or doesn’t seem to match up with our usual train of thought.

            So, that’s a background to a story I’m about to tell you. Last spring, one day I had a very intense conversation with a student – I’ll call him Billy – at the school where I teach. It was a conversation about his faith and kind of a come-to-Jesus moment. He shed some tears, and made some resolutions to follow Jesus more closely – it was very inspiring. That night, I woke up from a dead sleep in the middle of the night, with the strong thought running through my head – “You have to pray for Billy!”

            Well, I knew it was from the Lord, but I was very comfortable in my bed, so I hemmed and hawed for a moment before reluctantly rolling out of bed and stumbling down to the chapel in our rectory. As soon as I walked in, I heard God say the following strong, mentally loud words (in my mind, not my ears): “I am preparing him.” That was it. I kept asking God what He was preparing Billy for, but I felt nothing more – which is how I knew it was from God, not from myself. So after ten minutes of prayer I went back to bed.

            The next day I told Billy about this experience. He got very excited and wondered, “What is God preparing me for?” I don’t know, and neither did he. Fast-forward a few months, and I’m with Billy at Camp Veritas. He wanted to skip one of the talks, so he and I sat on a park bench and talked about a lot of topics but at one point I asked him, “If you knew you were going to die in one year, what would you do?” He thought for a moment and said, “I’d probably pray a lot more, get closer to God.” So I asked him point-blank – “Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. Why not do that now?” He got the point and we had another great conversation about his faith.

            A week later, he sends me this email, “Fr. Joseph, I’m sitting on my bed on a cruise in Bermuda and it just hit me – you said God is preparing me, you asked me about living for one more year…I think something’s going to happen to me this year! I’m going to die!” I wrote back and tried to calm him down – no, I don’t think he’s going to die. He wrote back a few hours later and said, “I just went jet-skiing and had a ton of fun, so I’m fine now. Thanks.” Ha! Classic overreaction – but it brought up a great question in his mind: if you were going to die in a year, what would you do differently?

            As we prepare to breathe our last, our life will flash before our eyes. What will we regret? What will we wish we did differently? What will we be most grateful for? Will we wish we spent more time at the office? Will we wish we played more sports? Will we wish we could get a few more hours of screen time in?

            I’ve worked with plenty of dying people, and none of them have ever wished for these things. Rather, their regrets were about love: I wish I had spent more time with my kids. I wish I was more generous with my money. I wish I had loved God more and prepared my soul to meet Him. We will never regret prayer, generosity, sacrificing for others.

            What is the meaning of life? To enjoy it? To have “success” (defined by the world as making money and living the American Dream)? St. Paul is clear about the meaning of life in our Scriptures today. “To me, life is Christ, and death is gain.” The meaning of life is to know, love, and serve God, so we can be eternally happy with Him in Heaven. Let’s break into that.

            First, the meaning of life is not about us. We are meant to live for the glory and praise of God our Creator. On a plane flight back from Italy this summer, I had nine hours to kill so I ended up watching three hours of nature documentaries (I mean, it was one of the few clean movies that wasn’t a Disney cartoon). But it struck me after three hours that the lives of all these different birds and beasts were really very similar. All they did was find food, build shelter, and mate. That’s it. That is the entirety of their lives. Food, shelter, reproduce. Sadly, I think that’s also the meaning of life for many human beings too. Find food – we spend forty-plus hours at our jobs to make enough money to put food on the table, and then do it again the next day. We build our shelters – our homes – and then fill them with every possession and convenience known to mankind. And then we focus on our mate – just trying to navigate through the rocky and difficult marriages that most of us have, and drive our kids to soccer practices so that the next generation can get a scholarship to college. And to distract ourselves from the emptiness of that existence, we try to fill those quiet moments with entertainment on our little devices so we don’t have to think about the futility of our lives. As Henry David Thoreau said, “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” How many times have you asked someone how they’re doing and they respond, “Same stuff, different day”?

            Maybe it’s because we know that we are made to live for more. What sets us apart from the animals is that we have a spiritual soul which can never be satisfied by earthly goods. We need to live for something greater than food, shelter, and keeping the human race going – our hearts long for more. Pope St. John Paul II once said, “Man can only find himself in a sincere gift of himself.” Our life is a gift meant to be given away. We all give ourselves to a cause bigger than us: maybe we dedicate our lives to following a sports team, or to politics, or to eliminating injustice, or to saving the environment. But the only cause that endures for eternity, the only truly noble and transcendent reason to live and die, is for God.

            We were made for an eternity with God! Look at any superhero movie – the whole plot is to keep everyone alive from the aliens or robots or evil villain who are trying to destroy the world. The desire for self-preservation runs pretty deep in our hearts, and it points to a deeper reality: we don’t want to die. We want to live forever. This desire points to its fulfillment: there is an everlasting life that we are created to enjoy – but it’s not here on this earth which is rife with suffering, sorrow, and brokenness. But this everlasting life is not something we can achieve through science, medicine, or strength of will. As they say, “death is the great equalizer.” But we know someone who has already conquered death – Jesus Christ, Who after entering into the mystery of death, destroyed it from within by rising again three days later. So our heart’s cry for an eternity of happiness is not just wishful-thinking – it is meant to be fulfilled in God Who longs to grant it to us!

            Paradoxically, those who discovered truly the meaning of life were those who were willing to lay their lives down for Christ. We call these the martyrs – those whose love for God was so intense that they were willing to shed their blood for Him. Since the beginning of the Church, there have been hundreds of thousands of people ready, even eager, to shed their blood for Christ. Their witness makes us ponder: is God worth giving up one’s life?

            I think of the example of St. Xi Zhuzi, who was not even baptized when he gave up his life for God. He was a Chinese teenager around the turn of the century. The few Christian families he knew in the village lived so differently from the rest – with joy, love, purity of heart. He found this very attractive, and asked to be instructed in the Faith. But his parents found out and gave him an ultimatum: worship the family ancestors, or be disowned from the family. He chose the Lord, and was kicked out of home at seventeen. He was adopted by a Catholic family, but soon his family found out where he was and sent for him to come home. His journey was intercepted by the anti-Catholic Boxer rebels, who asked him if he was a Catholic. He replied yes, and they began to torture him. But as he was dying, he cried out, “Let every piece of my flesh, let every drop of my blood profess that I am a Christian!” Is this not the greatest meaning of life: to proclaim that every breath in our lungs, every beat of our heart, is for Jesus Christ? May this be the purpose of our lives too!

            (And after St. Xi’s death, his family was so moved by his witness that they became Christians, too).

            I cannot tell you what to live for – that is a personal decision in your own heart. But if you’ve felt the restlessness and emptiness of modern life and are hungering for something more, perhaps it’s time to look to God. That starts right now with an invitation – just as God speaks to us in our thoughts, make a silent prayer asking God to reveal Himself to you. As you seek Him, remember that He has been seeking you first.