"and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation," - Acts 17:26
"May you believe that the boundaries around your life are good and pleasant because God uniquely assigned them to you." - Kathryn Wolf
"A good man always knows his limitations." - Harry Callahan, played by Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force (1973).
Boundaries. Set places of habitation. Limitations. God is infinite, but we are not.
Barnabas Osprey, in an essay entitled, "Coming to Terms with our Finite Existence", writes about finitude through the lens of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur claimed that the "primary task of philosophy is to help us come to terms with our finitude." Osprey explains how trying to escape our limitations can lead to all sorts of problems:
Who doesn’t sometimes get angry, sad, or plain frustrated by their limitations? Wouldn’t we all rather have all knowledge, understanding, and power? But our limits are not something to regret, says Ricœur. The real problem is not that we are finite. The problem is that we wish we weren’t finite. In other words, that we want to be God.
This desire to be God is what led to the Fall, as outlined in Genesis 3. Osprey, working through Ricoeur's thinking says,
Genesis 3 teaches that everything went wrong for Adam and Eve when they started to want to be like God. The status of not-being-God is not itself evil or sinful, but it does make evil possible if we refuse to accept our finite status ... We cannot change the fact that we are finite. Things will always happen to us that we didn’t want or choose. We live in a turbulent world in which we are not the master. No matter how intelligent, wealthy, or powerful we are, there are always factors beyond our control that can spoil our best-laid plans. The only choice we have is how we respond to our finitude.
As I grow older, I recognize my finite nature more clearly. Becoming distinctly aware of your mortality doesn't just involve thinking about death. It also involves embracing limitations. I'm in my late 40s now and my children are growing up and leaving home. I have gray hair at my temples and I now wear glasses. The optometrist said that was normal for someone "my age." I've been blind in one eye since birth, so I have always had limitations on my sight, but now I need help with the one good eye. There are other signs of my finiteness beyond my flagging physical abilities. The future is becoming more narrow. I can see the ruts and grooves of my life more clearly in the emerging lines on my face and the view doesn't seem as wide open as it did when I was 20 years old. My course has been charted and set and I am well along my way in this journey of life. And it really is okay to admit that. It can be liberating, actually. I don't have to live on this constant upward trajectory to accomplish or do more. I can be at peace with who I am and trust God for what's next.
This realization doesn't mean that things can't change or that I am powerless to make needed course corrections. I lost 70 pounds last year, started a doctoral program, I'm continuing to pastor a church, and I seek to love my children, wife, and community well, which requires constant learning, adaptation, and daily repentance from self-focus to others-focus. Change and growth are needed every day. But, part of that change involves learning what it means to be finite, limited, and unable to be all and do all that I'd like to do. I cannot be anything I want to be. I do not just "think and therefore I am" as Descartes said. My life is actually informed by time, energy, geography, seasons, relationships, and boundaries. Living in to who I really am and who God made me to be apart from expectations and comparisons with others is becoming more key as my life narrows. Context matters and I am more heavily influenced by my environment than I'd like to admit.
When my daughter was around five years old, I said to her, "Ashtyn, you can be whatever you want to be." I wanted to enlarge her thinking to dream big and reach for the life she wanted. She corrected me quickly: "No, Daddy. I am only supposed to be what God wants me to be." I was a bit taken aback at her wisdom. Our lives are only fully lived when we live into the life that God has for us. This isn't some kind of determinism where everything is set for us ahead of time and we have no choice or responsibility. Rather, it's more of growing into the awareness that God has set us into families and places and nations as our Creator and Designer and has given us bodies and minds and hearts. We live in the context of what God has done and is doing in our lives beyond us and in our lived experience. Truly, our lives are not our own and we are not the masters of our universe, able to create and recreate ourselves at will. Our future is not wide open just because we want it to be. We aren't a blank slate to be remade again and again.
If this sounds a bit troubling and, well, limiting, it is because this perspective flies in the face of the modern zeitgeist. Western Individualism has many good aspects to it. It recognizes that people are unique and have value and have certain inalienable rights, and if it is connected to its source in the Hebrew theo-philosophical tradition, it finds that meaning in the Imago Dei; that mankind is made in the Image of God and bears the imprint of the divine upon his soul. But, this is worth, value, and dignity that is derived from a Creator and not just inherent in oneself. We are not God and we are not fully autonomous, no matter how far our fingers stretch toward a hoped for self-created future. We have limits and time teaches us that as it keeps marching on and eventually steals your strength, ideals, and aspirations. Try as one might to change the world, we find it hard to change even ourselves, much less the people closest to us. There are other forces at work and we are not as in control as we pretend to be. Things are rather out of control and that fear of loss, and ultimately death, drives us to cling more tightly to what we know, to our little distractions and escapes, and toward what we think we can create and preserve on our own. And, that fear can often turn us against others in our quest to protect and promote our own established "way of life." Individualism and its attendant anxieties can ultimately isolate and atomize our lives to the point that we fear threats to our autonomy and sense of control over an uncertain future rather than live with a healthy sense of hope. As isolation and fear grows, we look for tribes that will protect us from the "scary other" and polarization from others not in our tribe grows. The end of rampant individualism looks like isolation, fear, and grasping for tribal identities and leaders to protect us from what might be lost if our fear of losing control is realized.
So what do we do? Osprey, in his further treatment of Ricoeur's philosophy, gives us some options in how we respond to our limitations. Either Refusal or Consent. Osprey continues:
Refusal means living in angry and bitter resentment against the things we can’t control. It means frustration, shaking our fist at the world and at God.
Consent means humbling ourselves to say ‘yes’ to whatever situation we find ourselves in, however difficult, however much it is not one we would have chosen. It means embracing our finitude and seeking contentment within the limits that have been given us. And for those who believe in a loving Infinite, consent also means trust. We trust that the origin and goal of all things is good, without any trace of evil. We trust that everything that exists is created by a loving Creator, and that therefore we were created, not for conflict and discord, but for peace and harmony with the creation and the Creator.
Embracing our limitations, our advancing age, our boundaries, and the fact that we are just a mist on the earth here today and gone tomorrow can actually be liberating. We can dig in deeper where we are and explore what God has given us, the relationships we have, and the wonder of the life we've been given. This is the "consent" that Ricoeur talks about. But, when we are constantly looking outward to extend ourselves beyond where we are and who we are, we can live disjointed lives disconnected from the actual life we have. We will either try to create a new life altogether through our own efforts (and that will often be applauded by others), or we can engage in escapism through seeking to dull the ache of daily living and distract ourselves from the lives who we actually. These are all forms of "refusal" as Ricoeur called it.
Embracing Finiteness means that we find contentment in our Creator and the life that he's placed us in. Again, this doesn't mean that we settle for mediocrity or that we give up if things are going badly. We can make changes and strive for better things, but we do so as whole people made in God's image with a real substance to who we are, a real identity, a real past, a real context and setting and geography with real relationships and real limitations. All of those things inform who we are. They don't dictate our present or future and yes, Jesus makes all things new and saves to the uttermost. We must believe that. But, we are not the savior. We cannot recreate ourselves into something of our own imagination and we cannot escape our finite nature. We are the creature - the created, not the Creator. Life is lived best not through over-extension of the self into every realm that our imagination can take us into, but through embracing the blessings (and boundaries) that God has for us where we are, where He sends us, and through whom He sends to us.
The Apostle Paul said, in Philippians 4:12-13, "I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength." We can be content in any and every situation through Jesus, who gives us strength. We don't have to change our identity or our circumstances to find wholeness and joy. We must be reconciled to our Creator who has the master plan for our lives, and we must be willing to embrace who we actually are in all of our limitations, flaws, weaknesses, and struggles and realize that there is grace for us. God sees us as we are and knows that we are but grass. He doesn't want us to fix ourselves or the world. He wants us to trust him. And that requires faith, not in ourselves and what we can do, but faith in God who makes all things new - and who redeems our lives and slowly, but surely, transforms us.
There is so much more to say here and a thousand caveats spring to mind - and a hundred objections to my own words. I can hear the "but what about ..." from multiple directions. But, embracing my limitations, I'll stop here and cut off an already too long essay with the awareness that seeking to extend ourselves beyond ourselves causes us to live disjointed lives. We need to be rooted what is firm and stable and lasting. That starts with God and extends to the boundaries of the life He has placed us in as we lear to trust God to be in charge of our boundaries and to move them as He determines as He gives us grace for this life.
