Made for Goodness: And Why This Makes All the Difference

by Desmond Tutu

We know all too well the cruelties, hurts, and hatreds that poison life on our planet. But my daughter and I have come together to write this book because we know that the catalogue of injuries that we can and do inflict on one another is not the whole story of humanity, not by a long measure—as I hope you will see and as you no doubt know in your heart. We are indeed made for something more. We are made for goodness. We are fundamentally good. When you come to think of it, that’s who we are at our core. Why else do we get so outraged by wrong? When we hear of any egregious act, we are appalled. Isn’t that an incredible assertion about us? Evil and wrong are aberrations. If wrong was the norm, it wouldn’t be news. Our newscasts wouldn’t lead with the latest acts of murder or mayhem, because they would be ordinary. But murder and mayhem are not the norm. The norm is goodness.

You can see from the people we truly admire that we are attracted to goodness. We do not revere people who are successful. We might envy them and wish that their money were transferred to our bank account. But the people we revere are not necessarily successful; they are something else. They are good.

You and I, too, are fundamentally good. We are tuned to the key of goodness. This is not to deny evil; it is to face evil squarely. And we can face evil squarely because we know that evil will not have the last word.

Evil cannot have the last word because we are programmed—no, hard-wired—for goodness. Yes, goodness can be enlightened self-interest. Kindness builds goodwill. Generosity invites reciprocation. But even if there were absolutely no material benefit to being kind, you can’t counterfeit the warm glow that you have inside when you have been kind. You just can’t! That glow is something you relish because that’s how we’ve been created. To be hateful and mean is operating against the deepest yearnings that God placed in our hearts. Goodness is not just our impulse. It is our essence.

Our planet will not survive if we cling to the verities of the past. We must recognize that we are part of one group, one family—the human family.

What difference does goodness make? Goodness changes everything. If we are at core selfish, cruel, heartless creatures, we need to fight these inclinations at every turn and often need strong systems of control to prevent us from revealing our true (and quite ugly) selves. But if we are fundamentally good, we simply need to rediscover this true nature and act accordingly. This insight into our essential goodness has shifted how I interact with other people; it has even shaken how I read the Bible.

Goodness changes the way we see the world, the way we see others, and, most importantly, the way we see ourselves. The way we see ourselves matters. It affects how we treat people. It affects the quality of life for each and all of us. What is the quality of life on our planet? It is nothing more than the sum total of our daily interactions. Each kindness enhances the quality of life. Each cruelty diminishes it.

If we believe that we are fundamentally cruel and selfish, we act accordingly. The targets of our nastiness feel the effects of our malice. And the consequences of our cruelty are evident in our health. Meanness shows on our faces. Churlishness shows up in our bodies as stress and illness. It is also true that when we recognize our fundamental goodness, we act differently. And we feel different. We are happier, healthier. God is pretty smart. It feels good to be good. And we know it! When we attend to our deepest yearnings, our very nature, our life changes forever, and, person by person, so does our world. We are made for goodness by God, who is goodness itself. We are made for and like God, who is the very essence of goodness. The creation stories in the Hebrew Bible underline these truths about us. These stories do not set out to tell us scientific facts. They set out to tell us governing truths, truths that affect how we live our lives. Whether, like Mpho and me, you read the Bible as sacred text or, if a...

The entire divine court has to be involved in the emergence of this extraordinary creature that is in the image of God, the likeness of God, who is going to be God’s representative, the steward of God’s creation.

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (Gen. 1:26-27)

At the end of this sixth day, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). All of it was very good, including us; no part of it is inherently evil.

We are very good. How can we believe this when we see the horror and grief we inflict on each other? We can believe it because we know that we are made in the very image and likeness of God. We say this not only as a faith statement or creed. We say this because we have found that it is the best way to express who and what we are.

Perhaps you have not taken in what it means to be made in the image of God. We forget. Or we don’t really believe it. But we are made in the image of God. It is as though we w...

In our creativity we are like God. We are also like God in our freedom. God is self-constrained in relationship to us. God leaves us free to choose how we apply our gifts and talents. Like a good parent, God renders God’s-self powerfully powerless in the face of our choices.

We are made not only like God but also for God. Planted in the center of our being is a longing for the holy.

We are temples of the Holy Spirit. Not just our bodies but our very selves, the essence of our being, is the place in which the Spirit resides. The Spirit within us calls out to God to find its place and its home. Saint Augustine says, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” Being made for God means, for us, that anything less than God will not suffice. We are hungry for God, but we don’t always know that it is God that we crave. Often we are like the woman who stands at the open refrigerator door at three o’clock in the morning knowing that she is hungry for something but not knowing what it is that she needs, so she shuts the mouth of her hunger with something that merely stupefies but does not satisfy. We stand around feeling a vague dissatisfaction and having no idea of what it is that we actually want. So we shut the mouth of our desire for God with busyness, or with things—gadgets, gizmos, trinkets, and treasures—and emerge at the other end recognizing that what we have is not what we need. We yearn for God, yet we feel lost on the way to our own hearts. We want to live lives of goodness. We long for a teacher and adviser close enough to speak the words of wisdom to guide us. Who is this teacher, this adviser? Many can help us along the way, but in the end it is only God whose advice we really need to hear.

Ultimately, what stirs us most deeply is what is life giving. What is soul stirring, what is life giving, is of God. We are made for God, who is the giver of life. We are made by God, who holds us in life. We are animated and held in life by the very breath of God. It is God’s breath that sustains us.

We who are human are being kept in being by the very breath of God from moment to moment. Each moment is a choice of God. If God stopped, even for the fraction of a second, from upholding us, from breathing God’s breath into us, we would disintegrate. Which is an incredible statement about God; because God does that even for the ones that we call bad people, evil people. God is as intimate with them as God is intimate with the most saintly. There is not a single person that God gives up on, because God knows that we are made to be like God, who is goodness itself.

God created us to depend on each other for our very lives. As primatologist Frans de Waal explains, “We belong to the category of animals known among zoologists as ‘obligatorily gregarious,’ meaning that we have no option but to stick together. This is why fear of ostracism lurks in the corners of every human mind: being expelled is the worst thing that can befall us. It was so in biblical times, and it remains so today. Evolution has instilled a need to belong and to feel accepted. We are social to our core.”

Ubuntu is the Xhosa word used to describe the “tend and befriend” survival behavior. Ubuntu recognizes that human beings need each other for survival and well-being. A person is a person only through other persons, we say. We must care for one another in order to thrive.

As human beings we may tarnish the sheen or rend the fabric of our own goodness. We can act in cruel and heartless ways. But because we are human, we cannot completely rip out and destroy every vestige of the godliness by which and for which we were made.

Attached to that notion of “being good” are all the “oughts” and “shoulds” that we think will win us the prize we truly crave: God’s love and divine favor. We are wearing ourselves out in a quest to buy what is already ours: God’s unmerited love.

You run everywhere looking for life, Searching for the life of life. All the while I am here. I am as close as a prayer. I am breathing in your breath.

I made you for myself, I wanted you. I made you like myself, I made you good and I made you free. Listen! For I have carved in you the heart to hear. Listen and know that I am near. I am as close as a prayer.

With each breath you choose, my child, for you are free. Will you breathe with me the breath of life? Will you claim the joy I have prepared for you? Will you seek me out and find me here? Will you whisper the prayer? Will you breathe in my breath?

From the time before eternity our God has awaited each birth with love and delight.

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” is the word of God to the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah. It is equally God’s word to each of us. Before the “Let there be . . .” of creation, before God breathed Adam’s first breath, God knew us and God loved us. God loves each of us as though there were no one else in the world, as though there were only one person to love. We are so precious to God that, as Jesus reminds us in the pages of Matthew’s Gospel, “even the hairs of your head are all counted.” This is not only a word spoken to the disciples or to the Christian community down through the ages; it is God’s word to all of humanity. Each of us is precious to God. This love that calls us into being and holds us in life is totally unmerited. God does not love us because we are lovable. We are lovable precisely because God loves us.

We get all worked up because we reckon that we must persuade God to love us. But God already loves and accepts us. God has loved us since the time before eternity. That love is God’s gift to us. In fact, everything is gift. There is nothing to earn. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line we have been inveigled and misled by the culture of achievement. We really can’t understand unconditional acceptance.

When done in joyful love, the most mundane tasks can be life-affirming. When driven by the demon, the most exhilarating work can be numbingly life-denying.

Our goodness is, rather, the recognition we offer and the thanks we return for the gifts and the love already given us. Rather than a request for something yet to come, it is a response to the abundance of gifts that have already been given and received. It is in our makeup that, having been given, we want to give back. Having been loved, we want to be the best for our lover. I know that the space is very small between “I am doing it in response to love” and “I am doing it to be loved.” But in that space resides the difference between joy-filled peace and anxious despair.

We need to simply live out of the joy and generosity of our goodness.

What is God’s perfect love? How can we emulate it? Because none of us have mastered perfect love, it is almost impossible to conceive of such a love in God. Perfect love is not an emotion; it is not how we feel. It is what we do. Perfect love is action that is not wrapped up in self-regard, and it has no concern with deserving. Instead, perfect love is love poured out. It is self-offering made out of the joy of giving. It requires no prompting. It seeks no response and no reward. God’s love is perfect because God always and only performs acts of love.

We cannot choose how we feel. We can choose what we do, how we act. But we do not always act out of love. Sometimes we act out our anger. Sometimes we act out our shame. Sometimes we act out our jealousy, our insecurity, our pride, and our resentment. Sometimes we act out our hate. No, we do not love perfectly. But God does. And the more we come to emulate this divine love, the more our lives are an expression of the goodness that is at the heart of each of us.

Perfect love is the love that is responsive rather than reactive. It pays little or no regard to the emotions aroused in any given moment. We love perfectly when the good we do cares nothing for how we feel. When we love perfectly we endure beyond endurance. We pour ourselves out despite pain, stress, sadness, or fatigue. Perfect love is shown by the parent loving the unlovely child: waiting through the temper tantrum; holding and soothing the child through her vomiting; making the groggy midnight march to chase away the child’s nightmares.

Perfect love is shown by the people who deliver hot soup to prostitutes on cold nights, or blankets to street children. We can offer this love because we each have experienced it from God, though often unaware. We have experienced it in the rain that falls on our garden with no regard to whether we are deserving or not. We have experienced it in the gift of warm sunshine when our behavior merits a tempest. We have experienced it in the beauty of nature, the kindness of strangers, and the laughter of children. We have experienced it in the hundreds of graces that fill our days, though we have not earned them and do not deserve them. That is why we Christians say we are called to be Eucharistic people, by which we mean we are called to be people filled with thanks: because we are always being given. Our goodness is our Eucharist. It is our thanksgiving for all that has been given to us.

Sometimes the demonstration of love in action can take us to dangerous places. Our love and our own goodness compel us to make choices that self-preservation would eschew.

There is a relief worker who resides in our soul. In each of us there is a dignified Darfuri, one who can find occasion for gratitude and joyful laughter in almost any circumstance. To whatever extent we recognize and act on those traits, they are there and want to be expressed. We can always aspire to be more compassionate and more generous, not out of some dogged need to be good or to be lovable, but because to give love is our greatest joy.

How can we express this loving goodness in our own very ordinary lives? Loving with a lack of self-regard does not have to be heroic, nor does it have to happen half a world away, to be a valid expression of the goodness and compassion that are our essence.

Living our goodness is our way of testifying that we know ourselves to be perfectly loved by God.

Some of us tie ourselves in tortured knots in the dogged quest for a flawlessly perfect life. God invites us to set aside the guilt, the shame, and the anxious questing. We are invited to a different way of life—one

You are a child after my own heart. Seek out your deepest joy and you will find me there. Find that which makes you most perfectly yourself and know that I am at the heart of it. Do what delights you And you will be working with me, Walking with me, Finding your life Hidden in me. Ask me any question. My answer is love. When you want to hear my voice, Listen for love.

How can you delight me? I will tell you: Love. The tough, unbreakable, unshakable love. Are you looking for me? You will find me in love. Would you know my secrets? There is only one: Love. Do you want to know me? Do you yearn to follow me? Do you want to reach me? Seek and serve love.

In the word perfect you might hear every test you failed. You might hear every target you did not quite hit. You might hear the impossible standard set for you by a parent, teacher, partner, or spouse. Indeed you might hear the impossible standard you set for yourself. As you read “Be perfect,” you may find your stomach coiling into an anxious knot as you wonder what is now to be demanded of you that you cannot achieve. As human beings, we hear in the command to be perfect a demand for flawlessness. But flawlessness is not the goal of God’s invitation.

Each generation finds a new focus for its anxious yearning. In our world our self-worth seems so bound up in outdoing each other. We have this arbitrary set of standards against which we are constantly measuring ourselves, and we never measure up. There is the standard of what we are supposed to earn—and that is invariably more than we are actually making.

Somehow we are always falling down on the job. Heard through the filter of our competing and striving, the command to be perfect feels like one more impossible demand on a long list of impossible demands. Rather than an invitation to greater joy, it sounds like another place to fail.

But God’s call to be perfect is not just a command—it is an invitation. It is an invitation to something possible. It is an invitation to something life-giving, to something joy-creating. God invites us to a godly perfection. Godly perfection is not flawlessness. Godly perfection is wholeness.

God is not calling on us to create the museum-quality house, the magazine-ready garden, and the immaculate self-presentation. A life that can be completely described by “I,” “me,” and “my” may look flawless, but it is not a life of godly perfection. God’s invitation to perfection is a call to a truly good life. The good life means flourishing for us and for others.

Ubuntu recognizes the interconnectedness of life. My humanity, we say, is bound up with your humanity. One consequence of ubuntu is that we recognize that we all need to live our lives in ways that ensure that others may live well. Our flourishing should enhance the lives of others, not detract from them.

God’s invitation to wholeness always includes more than ourselves. God’s invitation to wholeness is ubuntu.

Our misuse of the earthly environment has been in the pursuit of a human vision of worldly perfection. We use what we want as we will, because it seems to create the greatest benefit for our smallest circle of concern: “I,” “me,” and “my.”