Your Life is Your Sermon

Orpheus traveled to the underworld. Do you know this story?

When Eurydice died, Orpheus was devastated. He loved her so much that he decided to go to the underworld and bring her back. And somehow, he did the impossible. Armed with his music and his grief, he persuaded the rulers of the dead to release her. There was just one condition. Eurydice would follow him back to the world of the living, but he could not look behind him until they had both made it out.

Think about what he had already accomplished. He had entered the realm of the dead, persuaded its rulers to return someone to the living, and begun the journey home with Eurydice following behind him. He had done everything he set out to do. All he needed to do now was keep walking.

And then he looked back.

Just before they reached the world of the living, Orpheus turned around to look for her. Maybe he wasn't sure Eurydice was still following. Maybe he was afraid of losing her again. Maybe he simply wanted to see her so badly that he couldn't wait another few steps. Whatever the reason, he looked back before they were both safely out, and Eurydice disappeared. He lost her a second time, and this time, forever.

This is such a human story. We tend to focus on the extraordinary lengths Orpheus traveled for love and idolize his devotion. But I keep coming back to that last moment. Why did he look back? It seems like such a small thing compared to everything he had already accomplished. He had the courage to enter the underworld and the dedication to pursue something that seemed impossible. But when he reached the exit, he couldn't manage the one thing required of him. He just needed to keep walking, eyes ahead.

It seems what it takes to journey through the underworld is not the same as what it takes to exit.

The Limits of Human Reason

In Dante's Divine Comedy, another traveler enters the underworld. Dante begins his journey lost in a dark wood, unable to find his way forward. Fortunately, he encounters Virgil, the great Roman poet, who becomes his guide through the Inferno and Purgatory. Virgil represents human reason, and that matters because Dante's journey allows him to witness the consequences of human choices, understand how desire becomes distorted, and confront the suffering that follows. He has a lot to learn about humanity, including his own, and reason is what allows him to make sense of what he observes.

Virgil is an extraordinary guide. He helps Dante understand what he is seeing, challenges his assumptions, and leads him through places Dante could never have navigated alone. But eventually, they reach a point where Virgil can’t take him any farther. Near the summit of Mount Purgatory, Virgil tells Dante that his will is now free, upright, and whole. He has learned what he needed to learn from this part of the journey. Human reason has done its work. He is transformed. But, Virgil’s time is up.

And then Beatrice appears.

Beatrice represents divine love, and she will guide Dante through the next part of his journey. But I think it's important to understand what happens here. Dante doesn't suddenly abandon reason because love has arrived. Everything Virgil taught him is still part of him. His understanding, his discernment, and his ability to recognize the consequences of human choices all come with him. In fact, without the work he did with Virgil, he wouldn't be prepared for what comes next.

The transition is important because it shows us both the value and the limits of human reason. Reason can help us examine ourselves, understand our experiences, recognize our mistakes, and make better choices. We need all of that. But Dante's journey suggests that even after we've done this work, there is more to the human experience than reason alone can provide.

Human reason brings us to the threshold of something that human reason alone cannot complete.

The Human Threshold

Dante isn't the only one who explores the limits of human reason. We see this question across philosophy, literature, and spiritual traditions, although the writers approach it in different ways.

David Hume, for example, pushed human reason to its limits by questioning how we know what we think we know. We assume that because one event has consistently followed another, we understand causation. But Hume pointed out that observing a pattern is not the same as proving a necessary connection. Much of what we confidently believe about the world depends on habits of thought and expectations that reason alone cannot fully justify. Hume wasn't arguing that we should abandon those beliefs or replace reason with religion. He was showing us something important about the limits of what reason can establish.

Augustine encountered a different problem. In his Confessions, he describes knowing what he believed he should do and still being unable, or unwilling, to do it. His famous prayer asking God for chastity and continence, but not yet, is almost funny because it is so recognizable. How often do we know exactly what we need to change but aren't quite ready to change it? Augustine understood the problem. He could reason through it. But understanding something and living according to that understanding are two different things.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna faces a crisis over what he is being asked to do. Krishna teaches him about duty, discipline, and acting without attachment to the results. Arjuna still has to make decisions and take action. The teaching doesn't eliminate his human responsibility. Instead, it places him and his actions within a larger reality, one that he cannot control simply by choosing the outcome he wants.

These works come from different traditions, and they don't all arrive at the same conclusions. But each explores a boundary of human reason, will, or control. We can think carefully, examine our beliefs, discipline ourselves, and make responsible decisions. Yet there are still aspects of life that cannot be resolved through those capacities alone.

We can do everything within our power and still find ourselves standing at the edge of something we don't know how to navigate.

So what happens next?

The Work of Transformation

I think we sometimes assume that suffering itself produces wisdom. We go through something terrible, survive it, and expect to emerge transformed. But suffering doesn't automatically make us wiser. Sometimes it makes us more fearful, defensive, or attached to the very patterns that contributed to our suffering in the first place. We can survive the fire and come out determined never to be hurt again, even if that determination keeps us from living fully.

Transformation requires more than endurance.

Real transformation requires us to look in the mirror and recognize ourselves, including the parts we would rather not see. We have to examine our assumptions, acknowledge our mistakes, recognize our attachments, and accept responsibility for the impact of our own choices. Sometimes we discover that something we have defended for years is actually holding us back. Sometimes we realize that the way we have been protecting ourselves is also preventing us from experiencing the life we want.

This is difficult work, and human reason is essential to it. We need discernment to recognize patterns and understand what happened. We need accountability to acknowledge our part in things. We need discipline to make different choices, especially when the old ones feel easier. And we need humility because we are not always going to like what we discover about ourselves.

But I think the most important part of transformation happens when we stop looking only at ourselves.

Think about what happens when we really begin to understand our own humanity. We recognize how fear influences our choices, how easily we misunderstand people, how our experiences shape what we believe, and how difficult it can be to change even when we want to. Once we've confronted those things in ourselves, it becomes harder to ignore them in other people.

Someone else's fear might look different from ours, but we recognize it. Their mistakes might not be the mistakes we would make, but we understand what it means to be imperfect. We might disagree with their choices and still recognize the experiences, limitations, and vulnerabilities that are part of being human.

Our self-awareness begins to develop into empathy. We start to understand that other people are living lives just as complicated as our own, even when we only see a small part of them. This doesn't mean we excuse harmful behavior or stop holding people accountable. It means we recognize the humanity of the person whose behavior we are examining, just as we have learned to recognize our own.

The evidence of transformation is not simply that we survived. It is how we encounter humanity afterward.

And that brings us back to Orpheus. He accomplished an extraordinary journey, but the story leaves us wondering why he couldn't manage those final steps. Whatever happened in that moment, his experience raises a question worth considering. What if the qualities that help us survive a difficult journey are not the same qualities we need to live after it?

Transformation can prepare us for a life we haven't yet learned how to live.

The Human Plus

This brings me to something I've been thinking about as the human plus.

There are aspects of life that we can understand, appreciate, and experience, but cannot create through our own human abilities. Two of the most important are love and grace.

Consider love. We can study its biology and psychology. We can explain attachment, attraction, and the behaviors that help relationships develop. We can choose to be kind, generous, patient, and faithful. These are meaningful human actions, and they matter. But none of them gives us the ability to manufacture love. We cannot make another person love us by doing everything correctly. We cannot guarantee that love will last because we have followed the right steps. We can participate in love, but we cannot produce it through determination alone.

Grace presents a similar challenge. We recognize it in moments when someone receives mercy, forgiveness, or kindness beyond what they have earned. Think about someone who has made a mistake and is given an opportunity to make things right. Or someone who is struggling and receives help without having to prove they deserve it. We can make choices that express mercy and forgiveness, but grace itself is not something we can earn, demand, or guarantee.

This is why I think love and grace belong to what I'm calling the human plus. They are more than achievements of reason, discipline, or will. We cannot manufacture them through our own abilities, but we can participate in them. And here's where transformation becomes important.

We cannot meaningfully participate in love if we only see other people in terms of what they can give us, how they make us feel, or whether they meet our expectations. We cannot participate in grace while refusing to recognize the vulnerability and imperfection of others. Both require us to move beyond ourselves and recognize the humanity of someone else.

That's what the work of transformation has been preparing us to do. We began by examining ourselves, but the purpose wasn't to become permanently focused on our own growth. It was to understand our humanity well enough to recognize it beyond ourselves.

The human plus is our participation in something that our humanity alone cannot create.

We are still human. We still need reason, discernment, discipline, and accountability. We still have limitations, and we will still make mistakes. But now we can bring those human capacities into a life oriented toward love and grace. The question becomes how to actually live that way.

The Life Afterward

After going through a significant transformation, I think it's tempting to believe we've finally figured things out. We've examined ourselves, confronted difficult truths, changed old patterns, and developed a better understanding of what matters. Surely all that work should lead us somewhere. And it does. But maybe not in the way we expect.

We often imagine that after the suffering, the reckoning, and the difficult work of growing, we'll finally arrive at the life we were meant to live. We'll know what we're doing. We'll make better decisions. Things will fall into place because we've done the work.

But what if the destination isn't the point?

There is a difference between an itinerary and an orientation. An itinerary tells us where we're going, how we plan to get there, and what we expect to happen along the way. It can be useful, but it depends on circumstances cooperating with our plans. And we all know how that goes. An orientation is different. It tells us how we intend to live, regardless of where the path takes us. We can have goals, make plans, build relationships, establish boundaries, and take responsibility for our future while recognizing that we cannot control every outcome.

If love and grace are our orientation, then the question is no longer simply whether life is unfolding according to our expectations. We also have to consider how we are participating in the life that is actually happening. And this is where the work gets interesting, because we are still human. I can understand the importance of empathy and still get irritated with someone. I can value grace and still struggle to forgive. I can recognize the importance of being present and still spend half the day worrying about something that hasn't happened.

Knowing what matters doesn't mean we will always know how to practice it. The work of embodying a transformed life is different from the work it took to transform. Instead of continually asking what new hell we have to go through now, we start asking, Okay, how do I do this?

How do I practice love when there is damage? How do I extend grace when I'm disappointed? How do I stay humble when I'm pretty sure I'm right? How do I exercise discernment without turning it into judgment? How do I stay present when the future gives me anxiety?

These aren't questions we answer once and move on from. They come up in our relationships, our work, our parenting, our disagreements, and the ordinary decisions we make throughout the day. Every situation asks us to practice what we believe, and sometimes we discover that living it is considerably harder than understanding it.

Integration is the ongoing work of living according to what our transformation has taught us.

Living in the Life Afterward

So what does that look like in everyday life?

I think we begin by paying attention. Before reacting to something, we can ask ourselves what's actually happening. Am I responding to this situation, or am I reacting to an old wound, a familiar fear, or an expectation that hasn't been met? Sometimes simply recognizing the difference changes what we do next.

Then we look beyond ourselves. Who else is involved? What might they be experiencing that I don't know about? What can I recognize in their humanity because I've had to confront something similar in my own? We may not understand everything about another person's experience, but we can make room for the possibility that there's more to their story than what we see.

We also bring our reason with us. We examine what we know, what we're assuming, and what remains uncertain. We consider the consequences of our choices and recognize what is actually within our control. This matters because participating in love and grace doesn't mean abandoning discernment or allowing other people to harm us. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is establish a boundary. Sometimes grace means allowing someone the opportunity to take responsibility rather than protecting them from the consequences of their choices.

And then we ask how we can participate in love and grace in this particular situation. Maybe we need to listen instead of defending ourselves. Maybe we need to apologize. Maybe we need to offer forgiveness, or accept that someone isn't ready to offer it to us. Maybe we need to act with compassion while recognizing that we cannot make another person choose differently.

Then we act. We make the best choice we can with the understanding we have, knowing that we cannot control every outcome. None of this guarantees that love or grace will appear. These are not steps for manufacturing something beyond our human capacities. They are ways of practicing the awareness, humility, and presence that prepare us to recognize and participate in them.

And we won't always get it right. We'll misunderstand someone. We'll make a decision out of fear. We'll realize that an old pattern has returned, even though we thought we'd worked through it. Sometimes, we will look back. When that happens, we return to the mirror. We examine what happened, acknowledge our responsibility, and remember that the person on the other side of the situation is human, too. Then we decide how to move forward. And tomorrow, we try again. Everyday.

This is the work on the other side of the Inferno. We don't leave our humanity behind. Everything we've learned comes with us, including the reason, discernment, and discipline that helped us through the difficult parts of the journey of finding the clarity that leads to transformation. But now we're learning how to use those capacities in a life oriented toward something beyond ourselves.

Orpheus reminds us that reaching the exit and knowing how to walk through it are two different things. Dante shows us that the guide who brought us through the difficult journey may not be the guide who leads us into what comes next. And the work of integration asks us to take what we've learned and put it into practice, not once, but in the ordinary circumstances of our lives.

We did not come this far only to go this far.

We may not know what the next chapter looks like. We may have plans that change, relationships that surprise us, and circumstances we never expected. But we can still choose how we intend to participate in the life we're living. We can pay attention, recognize our shared humanity, bring our reason with us, and still stay oriented toward love and grace.

We do not have to know where the road leads to know how we intend to walk it.