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Love, Worship, And The True Purpose Of Life

Love, Worship, And The True Purpose Of Life

Last updated on: October 10, 2025 at 2:01 am by Henry Karlson

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Love, Worship, And The True Purpose Of Life 2025-10-10T02:01:50-05:00 Henry Karlson

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JFXie: The Purpose Of Life Is To Love God, And In That Love, We Will Find Ourselves Praising God / Wikimedia Commons

In his letters, J.R.R. Tolkien explained to Camilla Unwin what he thought life was about:

So it may be said that the chief purpose of life, for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks. To do as we say in the Gloria in Excelsis: Laudamus te, benedicamus te, adoramus te, glorificamus te, gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam. We praise you, we call you holy, we worship you, we proclaim your glory, we thank you for the greatness of your splendour.[1]

Tolkien gave a very traditional, simple, and, one could say, catechetical, answer to the question: we live to come to know and praise God. As is normal with that kind of approach, one which, to be sure, over-simplified, we can find coming from it a kernel of truth, one which requires us to take it and expand upon it to determine what it really would have us do. If we do not, if we take it as it stands, it can easily lead us astray, as it will have us simply think God created us for the sake of praise, that is, God wanted and needed flattery.

God wants our love, and our praise of God should come out of that love. This is why knowledge of God is important. When we come to know God, we will respond to God in love, and with that love, we will speak and act out of love. Lovers often shower their beloved with their words, sometimes with poetry, and few, if any, question such a reaction. It is this response which God wants for us, not because God is petty, but because God is love, and in God’s love for us, God hopes to be loved back, for when love meets love, the two can come together and become one.

Those who love God, therefore, will worship God, not out of some legalistic obligation, not because God is petty and desires love without loving us back, but because we will find, by doing so, we will be drawn into the divine life, and with it, receive a new kind of freedom, as we find ourselves growing with that love and becoming better persons because of it. “The worshiping heart frees itself of all its strictures, of all its self-centeredness. The inner space it offers to God become ever greater, ever deeper.”[2]

When we are self-centered, our devotion tends to be selfish; we seek to use God as if God were a wish-fulfilling genie, thinking if we rub God the right way, God will give us what we want. Our idea of worship is transactional. We might go through the motions, but our heart is not there; our pretense of piety turns out to be impious. God does not want such selfish devotion; God wants to have a proper, loving relationship with us, and though sometimes, it might appear to outsiders, to be the same thing, if similar words and phrases are said, the two ways are quite different. What is important is what comes from the heart, for that is what makes acts of devotion pious or impious.

Nonetheless, God meets us where we are at; most of us are imperfect, which means, our worship is imperfect: we have some love for God, but it is mixed with our own selfishness. Our worship will be purer sometimes, and far less pure, far more selfish, at other times. While God wants us to engage divine love with pure human love, God is able to use any engagement, any worship, as a foundation for developing a better relationship with us so long as in that imperfection, there is some element of love in it. “He prefers to be worshiped in whatever way, even incompetently, provided it is in keeping with human nature, than not to be worshiped at all out of pride.” [3]

Pride, selfishness,and vainglory, all get in the way of love, and so, get in the way of our relationship with God. But, often enough, even if we find them in our hearts, there is also something more in them. We have some embers of true love in them. Those are enough to start our journey; we just need the Spirit to blow on them and help them develop into a great flame of love inside of us. This is why God can and will grant selfish people, sinners, some of their requests; it is not because God wants to be used, but because God sees something in the person which can be engaged, something which can draw them out of themselves. This is the way God has worked with humanity as a whole—God takes us where we are at, and slowly directs us to a new and better way of life, one which is closer to the pure love which God wants us to have. We this in the way God worked with Abraham and his descendants; God began with their expectations and then slowly revealed to them new ones, and with them, new, purer notions of the Godhead.

Sadly, many people struggle against this process. They want to stay with the views they had in their youth. They want to keep to their selfish ways of dealing with and working with God. They resist all change for the better, and in doing so, they find themselves unwilling to accept the grace and the light of truth which is being offered them. Sadly, they often do so in the name of God. This is what happens when tradition does not remain a living tradition; what was once good and useful and helpful becomes a hindrance because its applicability no longer remains.

If we find ourselves on a long earthly journey, we will often be told places which we can use to stop and take a rest. After we get to one of them, we rest for the night and then move on. It would be wrong to think we should keep returning to that spot and rest there every night. We would not be able to finish our journey. Similarly, much of tradition, and the disciplines which developed, deal with circumstances and conditions which, if we have moved beyond them, would only hinder our progress if we thought we must continue with them today. Not all of them are like this. There are others which are and will be universally applicable, and we must keep to them. They are the foundations which remain constant, and if we try to cast them aside, we end up going off course.

It is important to keep in mind what tradition is and what it is meant to do. It teaches us what has been revealed to us by God, to make sure revelation not only is handed down, but it is handed down with the means for people to properly engage it in their own particular context. It provides a hermeneutic we need to better understand God, and through that understanding, to grow in our love of God, allowing us also to form a better relationship with God (and each other). We often forget this. We try to make more (or less) of it than we should, either thinking what was said and done in the past either must be repeated in the exact same way today, or else, not at all. We should not seek to reinvent the wheel, instead we must use it for its purpose, which is to help us move on. Thus tradition, and the wisdom of the past, is meant to teach us, helping us learn how to open ourselves up to God’s love and able to engage it with a love of our own.

Truly, the purpose of life is to glorify God, as Tolkien said, but it is to do so, not because God is petty and seeks a transactional engagement with us, but because, as tradition reveals, God is love, and as love, God wants to love us and to be loved by us, so that, when that happens, we can be joined together, not just now, but for all eternity.

[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Revised and Expanded Edition. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (Broadway, NY: William Morrow, 2023), 562 [Letter 310 to Camilla Unwin].

[2] Éloi Leclerc, Song of Silence: The Journey of Saint Jeanne Jugan. Trans. Claire Trocmé (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2002), 37.

[3] Marsilio Ficino, On the Christian Religion. Trans. Dan Attrell, Brett Bartlett, and David Porreca (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022), 54

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