‘In the deepest part of each of us there are always two things: the desire to become everything we can be, and the need to find out exactly what that is. At the convergence of these two roads—at the point where faith in self becomes faith in something greater than ourselves—lies the meaning of life.
The paradox of personal purpose lies in the fact that most of us can trace the seed of it back to the earliest moments of our lives. It begins to stir within us in inarticulate, unshared, amorphous, and mystical ways. We look back years later and discover the answer to what we were, to what we wanted to be, to what we really loved, to what we wanted to spend our life on, had simmered in us for years.
The point is there is a core in each of us all out of which come the strongest, clearest, most basic drives we’ll ever know. Under stress, driven by need or despair or fear, it is this great drive that rises within us to prod us on, to give us hope. This great primitive direction of the heart makes us strong in times of greatest weakness, deepest need. It becomes the fire that burns away all the obstacles that lie between us and our heart’s desire.
Those for whom this fire of life has never been sparked, those in whom this fire has been damped, risk dying without ever having fully lived. Those in whom there is no memory of purpose or great potential or sure destiny or untasted identity live life on a plain of dull, dry dust. Then life lacks taste. Life becomes dull.
But for those who know within themselves this driving, leaping sense of purpose, life is constant becoming. For some, this great burst of certainty about who I am and what I was made to do in life is a clear and ringing call. Then there is no mistaking the moment of fulfillment when it comes. Then we speak our truth to power. Then we expend ourselves without measure and without limit for the sake of a purpose greater than our own aggrandizement, more meaningful to me than even my own interests.
This is the kind of personal insight and holy faith that carries astronauts into space and visionaries into politics and holy people into martyrdom. It is this sense of purpose and commitment that makes us who we are and confirms why we have come to this earth—and why it is a better place because we are here.
There is simply something in life that all of us are meant to do.
And someday the moment will come when, if we are true to ourselves, we will do it.
From the book Two dogs and a parrot by Joan Chittister
What You’re Saying