Being and Doing: Love, Purpose, Happiness, and the Meaning of a Human Life

# Being and Doing: Love, Purpose, Happiness, and the Meaning of a Human Life

One of humanity’s oldest questions is deceptively simple: **What is a human life for?**

We can answer it in different ways. Perhaps life is about experiencing existence: friendship, beauty, food, music, nature, love, learning, and simply being alive. Or perhaps it is about doing: creating, discovering, serving, building, raising children, pursuing justice, making art, or leaving the world better than we found it.

I increasingly think both answers contain something important. There is a difference between **being** and **doing**, but a good life probably requires both.

And there is a third question that connects them:

**How should we be while we are doing whatever it is we are here to do?**

That question brings us to virtue—especially the relational virtues of love, forgiveness, generosity, compassion, honesty, humility, patience, courage, and boundaries.

Christianity gives these ideas an unusually deep and demanding formulation, but their applicability isn’t limited to Christianity. They are human questions before they are sectarian questions.

## Beyond the pursuit of happiness

Popular culture often equates happiness with feeling good. Pleasure and positive emotion certainly matter, but philosophy has long recognized that **happiness is larger than pleasure**.

Aristotle’s *eudaimonia*, for example, was not simply pleasant experience but flourishing: living well, developing one’s capacities, exercising virtue, and forming good relationships. Modern psychology has similarly distinguished hedonic well-being from eudaimonic well-being, which includes meaning, purpose, relationships, growth, and engagement.

A person can be comfortable without flourishing. Someone can endure enormous difficulty for something meaningful and nevertheless regard their life as deeply worthwhile.

Meaning is not identical to pleasure.

Perhaps human beings need not merely something pleasant to experience, but **something worth experiencing life for**.

## Being and doing

This is where the distinction between **being and doing** becomes useful.

Being means inhabiting life: contemplation, friendship, play, beauty, gratitude, rest, wonder, and presence.

Doing means engaging life: creating, discovering, serving, teaching, repairing, protecting, nurturing, and building.

A life consisting only of doing can become so focused on achievement that it never actually experiences the life it is achieving. But a life consisting only of being can become detached from the responsibilities and possibilities of participation.

Perhaps being gives us the capacity to **receive life**, while doing gives us the capacity to **give ourselves to life**.

And virtue provides the bridge.

## The deepest form of doing may be loving

This is where my thinking increasingly overlaps with Christianity.

Christianity does not merely say that love is one virtue among many. It places love extraordinarily close to the center of the moral and spiritual life.

Jesus reduces the commandments to love of God and neighbor. Paul places love above extraordinary religious accomplishments. Christian spirituality repeatedly insists that religious practice becomes distorted when separated from love.

Christian love, however, is not merely affection. It means willing the genuine good of another.

Sometimes that requires generosity. Sometimes forgiveness. Sometimes patience. Sometimes truth, confrontation, sacrifice—or a boundary.

Love does not mean unlimited availability. Forgiveness does not automatically mean restored trust. Compassion does not mean enabling destructive behavior.

This makes relational virtue much more difficult than simply accumulating good deeds.

**Love requires discernment.**

The question isn’t merely, “What can I give?” It is:

**What genuinely serves the good of this person, this relationship, myself, and the wider community?**

## Christianity’s radical contribution

Other religions and philosophies contain profound teachings about compassion, generosity, forgiveness, self-control, justice, friendship, and altruism. But Christianity makes an unusually strong claim about their ultimate importance.

It places **self-giving love** near the summit of human existence.

The cross becomes the central Christian image because Christianity sees divine love as willing to bear enormous cost for the good of others.

But Christianity should not be reduced to “sacrifice is always good.” That would turn it into a philosophy of self-destruction.

Christian sacrifice is meaningful because it is **ordered toward love and genuine good**. The point is not to destroy oneself but to give oneself.

That distinction matters. A person can sacrifice health because of love, pride by apologizing, money to help someone, or convenience to care for another. But self-destruction born from a belief that one has no worth isn’t necessarily Christian love.

The Eastern Christian tradition’s doctrine of *theosis* provides a deeper vision: the goal is not simply obeying rules but being transformed into God’s likeness and participating in divine life.

In that sense, virtue is not merely following rules.

**It is becoming a certain kind of person.**

## The wisdom of the Eastern Christian tradition

Eastern Christianity is especially helpful because it often understands salvation as **healing and transformation**.

The Fathers wrote extensively about the passions, purification of the heart, prayer, humility, detachment, and restoration of the human person.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers took these questions to an extreme. They withdrew from ordinary society partly to discover what remained when distractions were stripped away. Their desert became a laboratory of the human soul.

Their teachings repeatedly return to humility, self-knowledge, silence, mercy, freedom from judgment, and transformation of the inner person.

The basic insight is psychologically profound: **we cannot love others well if we have never confronted the disorder within ourselves.**

The purpose of self-examination isn’t self-hatred. It is freedom. The person who understands himself becomes less controlled by every impulse, fear, resentment, and desire for recognition.

## Stillness and engagement

This is one reason Eastern Christian spirituality offers a corrective to modern culture.

Modern society is extraordinarily good at **doing**: work, consume, produce, communicate, exercise, optimize, scroll, learn, invest, accomplish.

Even spirituality can become another productivity project.

The Desert tradition offers another possibility:

**Be still.**

Not because doing is bad, but because without stillness we may never discover *why* we are doing what we are doing.

Thomas Merton understood this. His engagement with the Desert Fathers, Eastern Christianity, Buddhism, and other contemplative traditions helped him see contemplation not simply as escape from reality but as a way of seeing reality more truthfully.

The problem isn’t merely that we are too busy. We can become **alienated from our own existence**, performing identities until we lose contact with the person beneath them.

Contemplation says: become quiet enough to find that person.

And then return to the world.

**Being should deepen doing.**

## Love and happiness aren’t enemies

Modern happiness research provides an interesting secular parallel.

Prosocial behavior is associated with well-being, social connection, purpose, and meaning. Helping others can increase well-being, while greater well-being can make people more prosocial. Prosocial spending has likewise been associated with greater happiness.

Research on forgiveness, gratitude, hope, and empathy also finds relationships with well-being and positive relationships.

None of this proves Christianity or the existence of God. But it does suggest that Christianity’s intuition that a good life involves turning outward toward other people is not psychologically absurd.

We flourish in relationships.

We need meaning.

We need purpose.

And we often become happier not by asking, “How can I maximize my happiness?” but by becoming involved in something—or someone—worth caring about.

This creates a paradox:

**Sometimes the best way to pursue happiness is to stop making happiness the immediate object of pursuit.**

You care for a child. Help a friend. Create something beautiful. Teach. Volunteer. Build something. Love someone.

Happiness sometimes arrives as a consequence rather than a target.

## The danger of turning purpose into achievement

Our culture romanticizes purpose: “Find your passion.” “Change the world.” “Leave a legacy.”

There is nothing wrong with those aspirations, but they can turn purpose into another form of achievement anxiety.

What if your life’s most important work isn’t historically significant?

What if you are a scientist whose discoveries are never famous? An artist whose work is seen by 300 people? A parent who raises kind children? A neighbor who checks on an elderly person? A friend who stays when someone else leaves?

It seems strange to call such a life a failure.

Perhaps we have confused **mission** with **importance**.

Your mission may be particular.

Your importance may be relational.

## Near-death experiences and what ultimately matters

This is where my interest in near-death experiences enters the picture.

NDE research cannot establish Christian theology. Near-death experiences remain scientifically controversial, and researchers emphasize that experiences associated with cardiac arrest are heterogeneous and can be difficult to distinguish from dreams, delirium, medication effects, or other altered states.

But the phenomenon is philosophically fascinating.

People who report NDEs frequently describe peace, expanded awareness, light, separation from the body, encounters with deceased people or perceived beings, and profound meaning. Prospective cardiac-arrest research has documented recalled experiences during resuscitation, although this does not establish that consciousness survives bodily death.

What interests me most is what happens **afterward**.

Many people report becoming less materialistic, less afraid of death, more appreciative of ordinary life, more interested in relationships, and more concerned with love and meaning.

Why do experiences interpreted as encounters with ultimate reality so often make people care more about how they treated other people?

That doesn’t prove an NDE reveals an afterlife.

But it is strikingly compatible with the idea that we may have misunderstood what constitutes a successful human life.

## The life review and the moral meaning of relationship

Some NDE accounts include a “life review,” in which people report revisiting significant events and sometimes experiencing their effects from other people’s perspectives.

Whether this reflects objective reality, neurological processes, psychological reconstruction, or something else remains open.

But as a thought experiment, imagine seeing your entire existence from the perspective of the people you affected.

Not your résumé.

Not your bank account.

Not your reputation.

But what it felt like to be around you.

Who felt loved? Who felt ignored? Who became more hopeful because of you? Who did you forgive? Who did you unnecessarily wound? Who did you help?

That hypothetical life review changes the meaning of achievement.

It suggests that the moral significance of a life might lie less in what we accumulated or accomplished than in the **web of consciousnesses we touched**.

Again, that does not establish the metaphysical truth of NDEs. But it is a profound way of asking what we mean when we say that a life was good.

## The Christian answer is unusually demanding

Christianity takes this relational dimension further than merely saying kindness makes us happier.

It says **love is not merely useful. Love is the point.**

If Christianity is right, ultimate reality isn’t indifferent mechanism but God, and the character of God is revealed as love.

That would mean learning to love isn’t merely psychological hygiene. It is learning to participate in reality itself.

This is where Eastern Christianity’s *theosis* becomes especially beautiful. The goal isn’t merely to obey God from outside but to become transformed into God’s likeness—to participate in divine life.

If God is love, becoming like God means becoming increasingly capable of love.

The moral life therefore becomes an ontological transformation.

**You aren’t merely checking boxes. You are becoming someone.**

## What about people who aren’t Christian?

I don’t think a compassionate Buddhist, secular humanist, scientist, artist, parent, or philanthropist is secretly practicing Christianity.

Different traditions have radically different explanations for why life matters, and those differences are important.

But there can still be **convergence at the level of human wisdom**.

Love matters.

Relationships matter.

Character matters.

Meaning matters.

Self-transcendence matters.

Compassion matters.

Forgiveness matters.

Boundaries matter.

The ability to sacrifice for something genuinely worthwhile matters.

The ability to experience the present matters.

The ability to become quiet enough to examine oneself matters.

The ability to engage the world rather than merely consume it matters.

These may be among humanity’s most universal existential questions.

## So what is the purpose of life?

I increasingly resist the idea that every person must have one giant predetermined earthly assignment.

Perhaps Christianity has an ultimate answer. But from the human side, we can distinguish between **universal orientation** and **particular mission**.

Your particular mission might be science, art, parenting, business, caregiving, philosophy, volunteering—or simply being the person your community can depend upon.

These aren’t the same calling.

But they can be pursued according to universal principles:

**Seek truth. Receive life with gratitude. Develop your capacities. Form meaningful relationships. Contribute something. Love other people. Forgive when appropriate. Set boundaries when necessary. Be generous without becoming foolish. Be humble about your blindness. Have the courage to suffer for something genuinely good. Don’t confuse achievement with worth, pleasure with happiness, or busyness with purpose.**

And don’t become so focused on doing that you forget how to be.

## Being, doing, and loving

Perhaps the original distinction can be expanded.

**Being** asks:

> How do I inhabit this strange gift of existence?

**Doing** asks:

> What am I going to do with the life I’ve been given?

**Virtue** asks:

> Who am I becoming while I do it?

And **love** asks:

> What does the good of another person require from me here?

Christian spirituality offers one ultimate answer: these questions converge in God, who is love.

Philosophy gives us flourishing, virtue, meaning, and purpose. Psychology gives us evidence that relationships, purpose, engagement, prosocial behavior, gratitude, and growth are deeply connected with well-being. The contemplative tradition tells us to become still enough to see through our illusions. The Desert Fathers tell us to confront ourselves. Eastern Christianity tells us that the person can be transformed. Merton reminds us that contemplation and authentic engagement need not be enemies. NDE research raises profound questions about consciousness while repeatedly confronting us with reports in which love, relationships, and meaning become more important than worldly achievement.

And ordinary experience tells us something simpler.

At the end of a good day, we rarely remember whether we optimized ourselves perfectly.

We remember people.

We remember moments.

We remember beauty.

We remember helping someone.

We remember being loved.

And sometimes we remember having the courage to love someone else.

Maybe that is why Christianity’s insistence on love has such philosophical reach.

It doesn’t require every person to become a monk, missionary, martyr, or saint in the conventional sense.

It asks something both simpler and harder:

**Whatever you do with your life, learn how to love.**

Perhaps the deepest form of flourishing is what happens when **being and doing finally become one**—when we become the kind of people whose way of existing is itself a contribution to the world.

Not everyone will cure cancer, write a symphony, discover a theory of physics, or build an institution that survives them.

But everyone encounters other human beings.

Everyone has opportunities to give or withhold, forgive or resent, understand or judge, help or exploit, listen or ignore, protect or violate boundaries.

In that sense, the great relational virtues are not merely the concerns of saints.

**They are the curriculum of being human.**

And perhaps that is why Christianity places love so high.

Perhaps the Christian claim is not that every human being has the same earthly mission.

It is that whatever mission we undertake, **the way we love along the way is part of what the mission was for.**