Spice of an (Un)Wonderful Life
by S. M. Hutchens
In a family newsletter a friend told me the sad news that his young son’s best friend had killed himself. This brought me to reflect on the terrible time when, at a similar age, the evil spirits that killed this boy had strongly sought entrance to my own consciousness. At that time, any number of churchly pronouncements on how much God loves each of his children, all of whom have infinite worth to him and who live in a wonderful plan that he has for their lives, were almost a mockery before the agonies of life and the beckoning void.
They certainly had no power to rescue me, for I as a young man heard all this as mere church-talk, especially when the word “love,” used, even in the churches, to mean “intense emotional attachment,” was part of it. But love, against which suicide is an offense, means little to the miserable unless it has become much stronger than this, its metaphysics and deep constructs taught in the Church and enfibered in the life of its children from early years.
No one who purposes to kill himself conceives his own worthiness of love in God’s eyes or in the Scheme of the Whole. In such moments of temptation, he is reduced to something worse than nothing: the devil lends him his own goggles, so he in self-regard becomes an utter failure, a useless piece of clutter whose removal would not only cause his pain to cease (or so the lie goes) but also make a positive improvement in the condition of the universe. Killing oneself under that impression seems the logical thing to do.
God’s Deliberate Intention
In such a condition, it does little to remind a person of his value as a kind of dogmatic postulate. Rather, it must have been impressed upon him how small and seemingly insignificant things are valued and used by God for the beauty of the Whole and the praise of his own glory, which is to recognize that each person, created in God’s own image, is therefore also something in his uniquely created being, and should spend his life seeking the significance of his personal endowment with somethingness, and not be cast down at the discovery of his smallness.
Søren Kierkegaard, whom I regard as one of the greatest of the philosophers, and a corrective apostle at the end of philosophical history, meditating in his Journals on his own place and stature in the world, put his finger on precisely what everyone needs to know about himself as one of God’s deliberate intentions:
As a skillful cook says with regard to a dish in which already a great many ingredients are mingled: “It needs still just a little pinch of cinnamon” (and we perhaps could hardly tell by the taste that this little pinch of spice had entered into it, but she knew precisely why and precisely how it affected the taste of the whole mixture); as an artist says with a view to the color effect of a whole painting which is composed of many, many colors: “There and there, at that little point, there must be applied a little touch of red” (and we perhaps could hardly ever discover that the red is there, so carefully has the artist suppressed it, although he knows exactly why it should be introduced). So it is with Governance. Oh, the Governance of the world is an immense housekeeping and a grandiose painting. Yet He, the Master, God in heaven, behaves like the cook and the artist. He says: “Now there must be introduced a little pinch of spice, a little touch of red.” We do not comprehend why, we are hardly aware of it, since that little bit is so thoroughly absorbed into the whole. But God knows why.
Finding Our Place
There is much Christian writing, beginning in the Scriptures, on striving by the regenerative power of the Spirit towards transformative change in an original self—and it is, make no mistake, complementary, and not contradictory to the doctrine of purposive design of the individual as articulated by Kierkegaard (he is not here a Protestant opposing a Catholic idea). But as David was born to be king and Christ to be Lord of the universe, the corresponding task for us all is to be the little pinch of spice or the little dab of red—to be truly what we were made to be and not to achieve the becoming of something else.
It is this original end toward which all our conversions tend. It derives its highest meaning not from overcoming the whole of which it was intended to be a part (else the body were all a see-ing), but so the Cook and Künstler can use it to his own ends to flavor or color the whole. To this end the small thing sacrifices itself, not by changing but by the giving of itself, and its satisfaction is taken from its Master, who says, “Be content, little thing: it is the Father’s good pleasure, and your own, to make you a part of his project.” We who are preoccupied with being something, of achieving significance, must remember that the greatness to which we are called is nothing more or less than being what we were made to be and doing what we were made to do.
It would have done me great good if it had been impressed upon me early on that the key to understanding my purpose in life was to be found in examining my curious self as a divine invention, and in becoming the most potent example of God’s intentionality laid down in the unique and unrepeatable foundation of a particular man—to do my job as I found it in myself and find my place excellently well as a pinch of spice or a dab of red, a planter of cabbages, or the King of France, and not be cast down at the dawn of life for being something else. Had I attended better to this business, how many years could have been better spent, and how many times the voice of the Evil One suppressed?
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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