Things don’t turn out as we expect. People don’t either. Take friendship as an example, or perhaps just a parable. Among Guy de Maupassant’s hundreds of stories—biting and penetrating autopsies of human foibles and wrecked destinies—there is a modest tale about disappointed affection titled “Friend Joseph” (L’Ami Joseph). It recounts the reunion, after decades of separation, of two old friends, once intimate companions in their youth. One is now married, the other is single; one a staid conservative, the other a fervent democrat. Joseph, the radical bachelor, comes and stays as a guest of his old friend and his wife at their estate. The visit is much anticipated; the couple is resolutely welcoming. They remain gracious even as it becomes clear that Joseph has become a bully with little interest in his old friend. He presses his political views upon his hosts at every turn with an almost vicious glee. The story ends with the couple fleeing and leaving Joseph in possession of their home.
The Psalms also speak of old friends (Ps. 55:13–14). Friendships rarely survive the unexpected turns and battered lives of the once close partners. People change; interests diverge; hearts are beaten into new forms. Though I have not quite had former companions like Joseph show up on my doorstep, I have nonetheless gazed across the widening gulfs that have grown between me and friends over the years. We are not who we once were, nor have we become those whom we had imagined we would be.
Few, if any of us, could have predicted at age ten or even twenty where we are now as older adults. Maybe we’re doing what we always wanted to do. But the shape of our profession, the people involved, the events of its pursuit: All these are almost certainly realities we never envisioned. Our locale, health, family, marriage, children, friendships, losses, the homes we inhabit and evenings we spend, pictures on the wall: We had no idea these and other features of our lives would be as they are today. We could not have, nor should we have. We are not algorithms or engineering projects.
Homo faber—man the fabricator or even (rather arrogantly) creator—is an apt description only for the smallest reach of our life’s compass; and even here, hardly at all. We can, perhaps, plan out and execute a recipe for baking a loaf of bread; fix the kitchen faucet; write a short essay; go to the grocery store. We imagine the task, we plan, we have the tools, and we set aside the time required. Occasionally we even succeed: We “make” small things, across a few moments, in a small space. Our effective intentions are largely measured in minutes.
But even in the simplest tasks, one never knows. The yeast is old; the new part for the faucet doesn’t quite fit; we fall asleep at the desk or lose interest; the grocery store is closed. Life is often like this—bad ingredients, failed machinery, weary bodies and wandering spirits, earthquakes, winds and fires that accumulate and conspire against even our most well-ordered creative energies. Our projects and purposes are caught up in and reordered by the unexpected, if often amazing, swirl of other persons and events, friendships and enmities, times and places—an impenetrable infinity of elements and causes.
Put simply: We cannot plan our lives and we do not create our futures. We should, therefore, approach our hopes and plans with a healthy dose of modesty. This much is obvious, if often forgotten. But there are deeper consequences to the impotence of our intentions and the opacity of our futures. When it comes to life itself, homo faber operates (so much as he operates at all) within the grand creation that is the work of some other Creator. Our imagined artistry is like the color of our hair, briefly delightful perhaps but insignificant except in light of a great picture we cannot begin to discern.
Much contemporary Christian devotion—both Protestant and Catholic—revels in the encouragements to self-creation. Our personal hopes are often clothed, piously, in the language of trust in God. But this vaunted trust is generally used as a tool to achieve our own goals. In this kind of piety, “God will make good his purpose for you” (see Ps. 138:8) effectively ends up meaning that “God will give you your heart’s desire” (Ps. 37:4). The call to trust in God becomes the instrument for believing in one’s own self. “I have confidence in me” (to quote The Sound of Music), for God has confidence in me, and will order matters to fulfill my hopes. This, then, becomes the modern twist to Paul’s exclamation (made in prison and facing death), “I can do all things in Christ who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13)—not only bake my bread, but open a successful bakery; not only fix the sink, but own my own house and sell it for a profit; not only write an essay for school, but become a respected author; not only go to the grocery store, but eat what I please while I feed the world’s hungry.
Many of our desires are benign; some are even noble. Only a few are fulfilled, and none of them in the way we first imagined. The pioneer investor and founder of the Vanguard Group, Jack Bogle, wrote a popular book entitled Don’t Count On It! (2010). Bogle was someone who put into practice the ideas of economic theorists who emphasized the “irrationality” of markets. Bogle encouraged the creation of “index funds” that tracked average performance of stocks rather than betting on special cases. Still, he did so with the desire to make money within the tamed sphere of uncertainty. Perhaps he was moderately successful, though to what end is unclear.
The New York Times entitled a recent article on Jonathan Clements, the popular Wall Street Journal finance writer, “A Money Guru Bet Big on a Very Long Life. Then He Got Cancer.” The article is about a real person, an individual with his own story of hard work and love, but it falls within a well-worn moral genre: You never know. The long story of Joseph (not Maupassant’s, but the Bible’s) is profoundly encouraging in its broad sweep. We mean evil; God uses it for good. The vagaries and details of the tale, however, are hardly reassuring for our planning. Betting on rationality or irrationality: neither comes close to penetrating the shape of our lives.
The alternative is arresting. I do not want my desires fulfilled; nor do I wish to understand, at least for now, God’s purposes “for me.” I only wish—as Psalm 37:4 in fact indicates—to “delight” in my Maker and in the Maker of my life. “Reward” tumbles out of this abandonment to God. This is a difficult lesson.
”My life.” What could this be, if not the smooth unfolding of my plans, or the rational construction of my creative intentions, or even the prudent navigation of a tricky space and time? If today I simply cannot say what tomorrow will be, what marks the sum of my todays and tomorrows? The answer is: “God knows” (see Job 28)—a harrowing consolation. Though we have, it sometimes seems, an hour in our control, we do not have a day; though we can utter a well-rehearsed phrase or two to our aggrieved companion, we cannot order the conversation and its end; though we hope for a family, we cannot conjure it. Though I wish for long life, that is not mine to grasp. God takes the small things we construct, from this moment and another—things which, from the vantage point of later years, seem like scattered fragments of human yearning—and builds his house (see Prov. 9:1). To see and delight in this making that is beyond our grasp is to have “wisdom.”
The wisdom found in knowing that God is the Maker of our lives is hard-won, if ever truly “won” at all. For the “fear of the Lord” is the beginning of wisdom, we are told. The shape of such fear is uncovered in God’s word, which warns us that efforts to plot everything out are “a weariness of the flesh” (Eccl. 12:12). The plan for my life is “written” in his book, in which are to be found “the days that were formed for me when there was none of them” (Ps. 139:16). We are called to “be still” (Ps. 46:10) so that we might know what is ours to know. “My delight is in the law of the Lord” (Ps. 1:2).
I do not wish to deny the proper vocation of homo faber. But we will achieve it only in the spirit of Psalm 119 and its call to “meditate” on God’s “precepts,” on his “wonderous deeds” and “decrees”—in other words, the Scriptures, that great map of the world, wherein the forms of all things are given. The Garden, the Land of Nod, the Flood, the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, wilderness and oases, mountains and deserts, Israel and the nations, Temples and exiles, Galilee of the Gentiles, Gethsemane, and the ends of the earth: my life. When an old friend returns, seek his place there, the great map wherein homo faber finally becomes homo inventor, the discoverer of the gifts that God alone reveals.
