What Child Is This?

 "I was given nothing to help me learn to live as the person I was created to be."

                  --Richard Wagamese, Walking the Ojibwe Path, p.43

This statement caught me short, and I had a loud, resounding question pop up in my brain: Do any of us know the person we are created to be?  If we consider all the accouterments of culture, education, family, and religion does anyone really know themselves, I mean in God's sight, as we're created to be?  I suppose it is impossible to spin time back to the moment of our birth and look at "Who is this child?" Likewise, few of us get born with a predetermined purpose - like Jesus' beginnings of the angelic" Son of God" proclamation to his mother-to-be. People who wind up doing big things with their lives, tend to get biographies written that imply they were "called" to be great in their early beginnings.  But do the majority of us?  Most of us go to public (cookie-cutter) schools receiving the same culturally pre-determined education that curriculums are based upon.  Those K-12 packages supposedly send us all out into the world on a "level playing field" - even though, in truth. they can't possibly. So what happens to any self-actualizing goal "to be the person I was created to be?"

Sure, some families put strait jackets on their offspring at early ages to follow in a parent's or grandparent's footsteps.  Then, depending on the child's created disposition, they'll take on the assignment with gusto or alternatively, go complete rebel and wind up in a wildly different place. That is what I am getting at -- how do we learn to live as we're meant to?

At its heart, I am addressing a profoundly spiritual question: who/what does God intend for humans to be?  Through the ages, undeniably, humans have veered off the "humane" track.  The laundry list of sins cataloged and treated by religion(s) as an illness needing correction reflects the course of departure from loving, peaceful, generous, cooperative, helpful, courteous... basics of the human soul that God likely intends.  While some social structures work at furthering these "positive" ways we are created to be, their commonality across the board is rare. 

For humanity to aim toward a more egalitarian, magnanimous world it would be necessary to change many of the assumptions on which our world's economic and legal systems are based. We would need more effective (and more widely available) methods for addressing mental illness, improved methods of breaking generational trauma, concerted means of addressing homelessness and poverty, and refined educational strategies to support self-esteem and self-actualization. 

All of these and hundreds of other ideas fly 180 degrees against the "traditional" social and religious attitudes reflective of crime and punishment and "making a living." So politically the leap to a New World remains impossible.  Still, there is a peace-filled place for dreaming the God-hope in our meditative imaginations and seeing in our souls the purity of divine intent for our existence.