Freedom to embrace uncertainty

‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans’ – sound familiar? Unforeseen circumstances, whether they appear to be for good or for ill, can often require us to take a path we hadn’t intended to, and Charlotte knows all about this. She tells the Things I Wish I Knew podcast about how she has navigated disruption, opportunity and passion.

A life of faith does not necessarily mean knowing where the path leads. Plans change, ambitions take unexpected turns and decisions that once seemed settled can come into question. The challenge is not always to find greater certainty, but to learn how to respond faithfully when certainty is beyond reach.

Charlotte Thun-Hohenstein’s experience, shared in a conversation with Julia Corcoran on the latest episode of Things I Wish I Knew, reflects on what it means to live with this uncertainty. Moving between faith, academia and a renewed engagement with music, her journey raises questions about vocation, the freedom to change direction and the possibility of discovering something unexpected when life does not unfold as planned.

Raised Catholic in a culturally diverse household, Charlotte drifted away from regular church attendance during her university years. In her mid-twenties, while pursuing a PhD in Jesuit history, she began to return to her faith. Her academic journey was not simply a return to familiar practices, but an intellectual and personal engagement with Christianity and its major claims.

Her experience challenges the assumption that faith requires the absence of every doubt. Instead, questioning became part of her return to belief, rather than an obstacle to it. Faith can involve an ongoing encounter with questions that resist easy answers, and a willingness to take those questions seriously. Certainty and trust are not necessarily the same thing. Instead, trust may mean continuing to seek understanding while accepting that understanding remains incomplete.

Charlotte’s story also reveals how questions of faith intersect with the choices that shape a life. Alongside her academic interests, she felt a strong desire to pursue acting and singing. Choosing to continue in academia meant setting aside, at least for a time, a creative ambition that remained important to her.

Vocation is often understood as the discovery of a particular path, as though the task were to identify the right choice and then follow it without hesitation. Yet our understanding of ourselves, our gifts and our responsibilities develops over time. A decision can be right for one season of life without determining everything that follows. The possibility of changing direction need not mean that an earlier choice was a mistake.

For Charlotte, an unexpected turn of events helped her rediscover a part of herself she had set aside. A hurricane in Florida turned her plan on its head – she had to remain in London, a city she had not planned to return to. But this gave her the opportunity to reconnect with its creative community and to reconsider the place of music in her life.

It would be too easy to suggest that every disruption is a blessing in disguise. Unexpected events can bring real loss and difficulty, and their significance is not always immediately apparent. But Charlotte’s experience suggests that an unforeseen change can also open possibilities that a carefully laid plan might have excluded. The future may become more open precisely when what is imagined is no longer available.

This is familiar territory within Ignatian spirituality, in which discernment involves attending to the movements of our inner lives and seeking to recognise God’s presence in our experience. Discernment is not a guarantee that the right decision will become unmistakable. Nor is it simply a matter of following instinct or desire. It requires reflection on what draws us towards greater freedom, love and generosity, alongside prayer, honest self-examination and a willingness to listen.

Charlotte’s reflections on the relationship between artistic expression and the teachings of the Church bring this complexity into view. The desire to create, the responsibilities of faith and the search for a meaningful vocation do not always sit comfortably together. Such tensions call for patience and discernment, rather than the assumption that one clear answer must be available from the outset.

As Charlotte returns to music and songwriting, her understanding of success has also changed. She places greater value on the emotional connection her work creates with others than on conventional measures such as fame or recognition. This shift invites a broader consideration of what it means to use our gifts well. The value of a vocation may lie less in the status it brings than in the opportunities it creates to connect with others and contribute something meaningful.

Living with uncertainty, then, is not simply a matter of accepting that plans sometimes fail to materialise. It involves remaining attentive to what our experiences reveal, allowing our understanding of vocation to develop, and resisting the temptation to measure our lives against a fixed image of success. Faith does not remove ambiguity or provide a complete map of the future. It can, however, offer the trust needed to take the next step without knowing exactly where it will lead.

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