Living Your Life on Purpose: Nina Hirlaender’s Mystical Path Toward Flourishing

Self-emptying/Field note 1

“For those of you that don't know, a little bit about Francis: Francis was born wealthy. He was the son of a rich cloth merchant, and he grew up with all these fine clothes and parties and very much lived a life of comfort. And there's a famous story in his life that…his father drags him in front of the bishop and the whole town of Assisi. And Francis strips off every piece of clothing that he's wearing, right there in the public square, until he's standing there, in front of the entire town, completely naked. And he folds his clothes neatly, and he sets them in a pile at his father's feet. And it's very famous, this story, because, well, it's dramatic, but it's also the most literal picture of self-emptying that you can imagine. Because he really walked out of that square owning nothing. And it was then that it was the first time really in his life that he belonged entirely to himself and entirely to God. And Francis found that freedom in a concept that most of us spend our whole lives avoiding, which is that everything that you own, in some way, owns you back. So, every possession is something that you have to protect and worry about losing. And every bit of status that we gain in life, at school, in our work, is something that we have to keep defending. And the more we accumulate, the more of our attention has to go against guarding it all.”

Availability/Field note 2

“And that freedom is the core value of Franciscans, and the order still stands by it today. And Francis had a different name for it. He called it poverty. But what it really is is availability. Because a person carrying nothing can respond to anything. And I think that's the part that translates most directly to our modern lives today. Because most of us, we miss those promptings. Not because we don't hear them, but because we're so weighed down by our schedules and our accumulation of wealth and our degrees. We're so weighed down by these things that we don't act on those inner promptings. You know, you feel a nudge to call a friend—you've been thinking about them—but you talk yourself out of it because you're busy. Or you pass a homeless person on the street who clearly needs help, but we've numbed ourselves, and it's so inconvenient to notice them, so we just ignore them. And this availability that Francis stood for is keeping yourself light enough that, when the moment comes, you can actually say yes to it.”

More than survival/Field note 1

“I had this thought that is completely outside of the norm, which is: If I'm cured tomorrow, would it actually help my soul flourish? Would it make me more loving? If I was cured, would it make me become a more honest, more compassionate, more awake person? And the truthful answer in that moment was no. Because being handed my old life back would have been kind of like going backwards. So, it's not that I didn't want to survive. I did, but I wanted more than that. I wanted to flourish. And anyway, I didn't dare to pray for survival, because I genuinely didn't know if it was meant for me.”

Stay in love/Field note 1

“Joy is the capacity to stay in love when everything else has been stripped away. And this kind of ties back to your question about flourishing, because I think we tend to use these words, joy and happiness, as if they're the same thing, but they're really not. You know, happiness…happiness is like what the body feels, what we feel when the world cooperates. It's when the good news arrives or the scan comes back clean or the to-do list is done, and it's lovely. But it's completely dependent on circumstances.”

The aftertaste of attention/Field note 1

“He read these books, and he daydreamed, and that's all he did. And when he daydreamed about his old life—the glories of conquests, you know, winning a battle—it would thrill him for a while. And then it would kind of leave him feeling restless and dry and a little empty. But when he imagined giving his life to something larger, like the saints he was reading about, that good feeling he felt when he daydreamed about that: it stayed. And it left him feeling peaceful and expansive. So, his daydreams had two completely different aftertastes. And Ignatius had the genius to pay attention to that difference […] And he gave the rest of his life to teaching people how to make this distinction between what draws you toward love and what pulls you away from love, and helped people really make wise, discerning life choices. And that is the heart of Ignatian spirituality.”

Permission to play/Field note 1

“What I discovered when I crossed over from the theater world to the spiritual world is that they actually run on the same three ingredients, which are community and open-heartedness and curiosity. Those three things are what makes a play come alive, and they're exactly what makes a pilgrimage come alive too. Because in both cases you're asking people to show up, to drop the performance of who they usually are, and to become genuinely curious about what will happen next. So, the theater trained me for this work more directly than any postulancy could ever have. And my pilgrims, they really remind me of that over and over again because they have this desire to play. You know, adults want to play too. The longing we had as children is right there, fully intact. And we're often just waiting for permission. You know, somewhere along the way, we absorbed this idea that reverence means hushed voices and solemn faces.”

Closing the gap/Field note 1

“I love that quote. And so many people love Teilhard because he is the scientist who also believed in God. So, he's like proof that you can have both. Teilhard helped me understand a cultural wound that most of us carry without even knowing it. Now we've all inherited a worldview that draws a line straight down the middle of reality. Where you have matter on one side and spirit on the other; you have the body here and the soul over there. We treat the physical world as a kind of inert backdrop, and we act as if God is somewhere beyond where we are […] This is our story. Because we've been carrying that ache of division for a very long time. And Teilhard really spent his whole life closing that gap.”

Bathed in the holy/Field note 2

“And, you know, it's why the incarnation is such a beautiful story: because it's trying to tell us about the Univocity of being all along. In Jesus, God didn't just visit the world; God revealed that God had been there the whole time in the world, as the world, since the beginning. And once that… Concept becomes real to you, not as an idea, but as something you actually feel in your life, then your understanding of human flourishing completely changes. Because the secret is no longer something you have to escape to. You know, there's no ordinary moment that you have to get through on your way to a holy moment. And it like allows you to see the face of the person across from you or the food on your plate or the breath in your body as a, like, a medium that God is reaching you…through. And I guess that's the thing that Teilhard is pointing out to us about human flourishing: you know, you don't wait for the holy to arrive. You just realize that you're already bathed in the holy. This whole time.”

Taste the dish/Field note 1

“Yes, there's different types of mysticism in every religious tradition, but in some ways, religion and mysticism have little to do with one another at the start. Because a mystic is someone for whom God has stopped being a concept and become an experience. You know, most of us inherit our faith secondhand. So, we're handed beliefs about God the way that we're handed, like, a family recipe. You know? And the risk is that we can carry those beliefs our whole lives without ever really tasting the dish itself. And there's such a difference between a recipe as it's written and the taste of this delicious home-cooked meal. Same is true with religion and mysticism. The mystic is the one who tastes the dish.”

A doorway back in/Field note 2

“It's, like, warm and immediate and personal. And…once that happens to a person, your entire life reorganizes itself around the experience. And I know this because, you know, it happened to me. I wasn't a follower of any faith. And I didn't really come to the mystics through religion. I actually came to religion through the mystics. And I've learned that this is actually quite a common story. Because for so many people today, the mystics are like a doorway back in because they're examples of living your life on purpose.”

Experiencing love/Field note 1

“And then the second shift is the shift from earning love to experiencing love. So many of us inherit a faith that functions like school. You know? Follow the rules, accumulate merit, hope your good deeds outweigh your bad ones. Well, this is a misunderstanding. The spiritual life is not a test of whether you are good enough. It's a relationship where you become present to the life force of the universe loving you unconditionally in real time. This single shift heals what most people find so painful about religion.”

Start from grace/Field note 2

“Because modern spirituality…so easily can become one more self-improvement project, one more area of your life to optimize. You know, you have religion, which is like all the rules, and then you have often what New Age spirituality is—like a self-improvement project. The mystics, they actually start from the opposite premise. They start from grace. Grace means that God moves toward you first. So, the question changes from ‘What do I need to fix about myself?’ to ‘What is God already doing in my life and how am I being invited to respond?’ And I watched that question really take weight off people's shoulders.”

Vaults of wisdom/Field note 3

“[Mystics] were the ones who went the deepest in. They took tradition so seriously that if something didn't make sense, if something seemed incongruent, they questioned it and they insisted on finding the truth at the center of the tradition. And I think that's what these ancient traditions really are. It's like vaults of wisdom carried by communities across centuries. And the mystical tradition of every religious institution is like the vault that's waiting for you to stop admiring it and just to open it and find the treasure inside. But you need to look.”