The Bedpan on My Head
On telos, and what happens when we get it wrong
I was recently at a monastery in western Idaho, nestled in a wide valley beneath the shadow of the mountains. I’ve had the joy of this being the location of my studies to become a spiritual director through a program called Stewards of the Mystery (Sounds right up my alley huh?). Our classroom has these huge floor to ceiling windows that look out over the aforementioned valley.
I chose to drive up to the monastery from Phoenix, which is very on brand for me. The drive gives me ample time to process and consider the previous few months, and one thing specifically had been bouncing around my skull like an unbalanced washing machine recently.
Over the last few months, I’ve started to become aware that I think our culture believes and operates as if my ultimate purpose in life is to be a consumer.
As I’d been wondering about this and writing, my thoughts had grown wild and were in desperate need of pruning. I was grateful for the drive and the retreat to offer me the shears.
One of our sessions at the monastery was on the state in which we enter the spiritual direction relationship with our directees. Our facilitator, Steve, came at this from the angle of purpose. The word he used to describe it was telos.
As soon as he said it, the shears made their final cut, and what had been a wild and overgrown mess had a shape I could finally see.
Telos!
This was a word I had left to gather dust at the back of my mind, suddenly rocketed forward into the light of day. It is exactly what I was missing. This beautiful word is Greek, and it is best translated as an ultimate end, a purpose, or a design function. Every created thing has a telos. A chair’s is to be sat on. A cup’s to hold liquid. A book’s to be read. A window’s to let the light in.
Steve wanted us to consider what the telos for spiritual direction is, and furthermore, what the telos for humanity is.
You know, just a light, casual question for a Tuesday morning.
What is my telos? And what happens if I get it wrong?
Telos is not something new to me, I encountered it fresh out of high school when I attended a gap year program called Impact 360 Institute. I remember thinking it was a cool thing to keep tucked away to impress people with later in life (is it working?).
What I had not done was let it touch anything. It had sat in the back drawer of my mind, with all the other terms I half-remembered, and it had gathered dust there until Steve ushered it back into my conscious mind.
The reason it landed the way it did, I think, is that the word does something the English word purpose cannot quite do. Purpose can be assigned, chosen, or invented. A person can have purposes for an afternoon or for a season of life. Telos is different. Telos is the end a thing is moving toward when it is moving rightly. An acorn’s telos is the oak tree. The telos of a thing is not something you decide. It is something you make an effort to discover or fail to.
For my philosophy nerds out there, this is, more or less, what Aristotle argued for. He thought you could not really understand a thing until you had asked four questions of it: what is it made of, what shape does it have, what brought it into being, and what is it for. The last one, the final cause, was the most important. You can describe a thing forever and still not have said what it actually is.
Picture a kid in a hospital room. He is bored, his parents are out in the hallway talking to a doctor, and there is a curved plastic object sitting on the bedside table. He picks it up. He has never seen one before. He turns it over in his hands, considers it for about three seconds, and puts it on his head. It fits surprisingly well. He is now wearing a hat.
He can tell you everything about the object. It is made of hard pale plastic. It has a particular shape, a shallow oval basin with a curved lip on one end. Someone made it, presumably in a factory somewhere. He can describe the weight, the smooth interior, the slight give when he presses on it. He can wear it around the room and admire himself in the small mirror over the sink. He has, by his own assessment, a comprehensive understanding of the object.
He is also, of course, wearing a bedpan.
What he is missing is the only thing that actually makes the object what it is. The moment the kid’s mother walks in and tells him what is on his head, every other thing about the object suddenly makes sense. And he takes it off very quickly.
Most of the time we do not have to think about this. We know what bedpans are for. We know what chairs are for. The trouble starts when we try to ask the question of ourselves.
The trouble, of course, is that we are not chairs and we are not bedpans. We are not built by a factory with a clear spec sheet, and there is no mother who walks in and tells us what is on our head. The question of what humans are for has been asked for as long as humans have been around to ask it, and the answers are not as obvious as the answer to what is this curved plastic object?
Augustine, writing in the late fourth century, opened his most famous book with a sentence that has been doing pastoral work for sixteen hundred years. You have made us toward yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. You have made us toward yourself. Not just for you. Toward you. The toward-ness is built in. The restlessness we feel when we are not moving in that direction is not malfunction. It is design, reporting that something is off.
I am not trying to convince anyone of Augustine’s theology in a single paragraph. What I want to notice is the shape of his claim. What this means is that the ache you feel when your life is not adding up to what you were made for is a dashboard indicator that has lit up. It is not weakness. It is not a personal failing.
My car doesn’t shame itself into becoming a bike when it runs out of gas. Why, then, do I have the tendency to do that to myself?
Augustine had a related idea he called ordo amoris, the order of loves. He thought most sin was not the love of bad things but the love of good things in the wrong order. Money is an amoral thing. Loving money more than people is a disorder. Comfort is an amoral thing. Loving comfort more than calling is a disorder. The disorder is the misalignment between what a thing is for and how we are relating to it.
The good thing put in the wrong order will work, and work, and work, until one day it does not.
We are taught, in a hundred small ways, to interpret these moments that things stop working as personal failures: we are not grateful enough, we are not disciplined enough, we are not yet successful enough, we have not yet found the right partner or the right job or the right city. Augustine’s claim is more disturbing and more freeing. The ache is not a bug. It is a signal. We were made toward something, and our heart is reporting that we are not pointed in that direction.
Augustine had a vocabulary for what he was experiencing. We mostly do not.
It is not that people stopped feeling the ache. The ache is still here. It surfaces in late-night conversations, in therapy, in the slow disorientation of a career that looked good on paper and feels hollow in the body.
The question of telos is not gone. It has shrunk. We ask it about jobs, about relationships, about whether we should move cities or have kids or start a business. We are allowed to ask what we are for in these particular slices of life. What we have lost is the bigger version of the question, the one that sits underneath the smaller ones and would actually answer them.
In 1981, a philosopher named Alasdair MacIntyre put words to what he believes we’ve lost. His argument was this: For most of human history, becoming a good person depended on three things working together. There was who you were right now. There was who you could become if you grew into what you were made for. And there were the practices that would carry you from the first to the second.
Take the middle piece out, MacIntyre said, and the whole thing falls apart. You still have the starting point. You still have the practices. You just have no idea where you are going. That, he thought, is exactly what happened to us. We kept telling each other to be better people. We forgot what better was supposed to be for.
What is left, when telos is gone, is preference. I want this. I do not want that. You should do what makes you happy. Live your truth. These are real and human, but they are not telos. They cannot bear the weight the question is asking them to bear. Preference can tell you what you want for lunch. It cannot tell you what your life is for. What do I prefer and what am I made for are two questions that are not the same size, and we keep trying to answer the second by stacking up answers to the first.
The result is a culture full of people who feel the ache Augustine named and have no language for it. So, we medicate it. We distract from it. We optimize around it. We tell ourselves the next thing will fix it: the next job, the next move, the next relationship, the next pair of shoes, the next certification, the next vacation, the next version of ourselves we have been promised by the right book or the right podcast or the right twelve-week program. None of those things are evil. Most of them are good, in their rightful place. But none of them answer what we are for, and the ache will keep reporting that fact whether we have the language for it or not.
This is the strange situation we are in. We are walking around with the same heart Augustine had. We are also walking around without his words for it. The ache has not gone away. The vocabulary has.
This is not the first time humans have noticed they were missing something. Every civilization that has lasted long enough to write things down has, at some point, tried to answer the question of what people are for.
Aristotle thought we were made for eudaimonia, a word usually translated as happiness but closer to flourishing. Not the cheerful feeling of a good day, but the deep satisfaction of a life that has developed what a human being is built to develop: wisdom, courage, friendship, justice. He thought you could not get there alone, and you could not get there quickly. A flourishing life was a long becoming.
The Christian tradition, with Augustine, has answered that we are made for communion with God, and through that communion, for love of neighbor. The two are bound together. Jesus put the whole thing in one breath when someone asked him what mattered most. Love God with everything you have. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. That sentence has been an answer to our telos for two thousand years.
The Buddhist tradition has answered that we are made for liberation from the suffering that craving produces. We grasp at things that cannot satisfy us. The work of a life is to see clearly and loosen our grip. The result, when the practice works, is a kind of freedom that is not escape but presence.
The Stoics thought we were made to live in harmony with the rational structure of nature. The world has a shape. We are part of that shape. The good life is the life that recognizes what is given and aligns with it.
And then there is the answer I believe our culture has settled for. We are made to make ourselves. There is no given telos. There is no design we were built toward. There is only what each individual chooses, builds, performs, expresses, optimizes, brands. The freedom is real. The cost is that a self that has to invent its own telos can never rest, because the work of inventing is never finished. The next version is always pending.
These answers disagree, sometimes sharply. The Aristotelian flourisher and the Buddhist seeker would have a hard time recognizing each other’s projects. The Stoic and the Christian would argue for a long time about what counts as nature and who set up the structure. The self-inventor would have to agree, on his own terms, that he could become any of them if he chose.
But what is striking, when you set the first four next to each other, is how much they share. Each of these traditions assumes that there is something we are for, and that figuring it out is the most important thing we will ever do. Each of them assumes that getting it wrong has a cost. Each of them assumes that the answer cannot be reduced to preference.
The last on the list is the strange one. And I believe it is the bedpan we’ve unknowingly set upon our heads and called a hat.
The thing about wearing a bedpan as a hat is that you can do it for a long time before anyone walks in to tell you.
The kid in the hospital room has the good fortune of a quick reveal. His mother arrives within minutes. The misunderstanding gets named. The hat comes off. Most of life is not arranged that helpfully. Most of the time, the mismatch between what we are and what we are being used for has no one to walk in and announce it. The misuse is allowed to continue. We are allowed to keep going. The dashboard indicator stays lit, and the ache stays present, and the days accumulate, and we get on with whatever we have decided our life is for.
This is the part that makes the question urgent rather than academic. If we are made for something and we are doing something else, the something-else is not without cost. It does not stay neutral. It does not wait for us to figure it out. It begins, slowly, to do its work on us.
When I was in college, I lived in a home with three other dudes and it was your classic college bachelor pad. A random assortment of furniture around the house, empty liquor bottles displayed around the top of the kitchen cabinetry, and a mishmash of candles strewn about to cover the smell of four boys living in close proximity (which didn’t work btw).
One of my favorite pieces of furniture was a nightstand that we used as a kitchen chair. It was the perfect height and was honestly pretty comfortable to sit on. We used it daily as we ate meals, played games, and did homework together. Until one fateful day, one of us sat down on the nightstand and suddenly found themselves on the ground, the furniture having disintegrated beneath them.
The first thing that comes up in that memory is the laughter that ensued, but the next thing is what really sticks to me. A nightstand is not a kitchen chair and because we used it as such, it gave way. If we had used it as intended, I can only imagine it would still be with me today after countless moves across the country.
The thing is, though, the nightstand worked as a chair for a long time. It seemed fine for months. How were we supposed to know it wasn’t designed to be sat on?
This is a question that has been following us around since the beginning. What do we exist for and what do we not exist for? Religions, philosophies, communities, companies, and empires have been formed around how we choose to answer this fundamental question.
That is the question I want to sit with for a while and I suspect it will take more than one essay.
More to come,
-Charlie