Your Chief Task In Life

Your Chief Task In Life   

Your chief task in life is the care of your soul. You should care for your soul and work to improve it, and you can improve it only with love. he meaning of life lies in two major areas; your personal perfection, and service to other people. You can serve while you are moving towards perfection, and you can move toward perfection by serving people. When I talk of moving towards perfection, I mean moving from a material to a spiritual plane, a plane of goodness, without time or death. From childhood to death, humans, no matter their lot in life, should strive to grow closer and closer to the spiritual life. Strive to learn what God wants, and your life will become filled with freedom and joy!

Count Leo Tolstoy                                                                                                                                     Cited in Calendar of Wisdom

Tolstoy names the care of the soul as our chief human task. When I first encountered that term, it was a well-worn book in a colleague’s office. Its title was “A History of the Cure of Souls” and it was an overview of the whole subject of spiritual direction and spiritual formation, written by John T.McNeill, in 1951. 

In this book, he introduces the practice of spiritual direction in world religions, and from a variety of American religious denominational perspectives. As I see it, it belongs on the bookshelf of any person who aspires to know more about the religious dimensions of healing, curing, or the historical and theological foundations for a spiritual direction practice.                                    

Tolstoy’s adamant language alerts me to how important spiritual care and its application to our lives is, or should be! To know more about God is an essential task-worthy of our best efforts, and or continual striving towards perfection. 

I agree with the need for personal focus, and for being attentive, and for living with a more constant state of discernment about my/our human motives and actions. However, what made me the most encouraged, and truly inspired, was his insistence or inclusion of a synergistic approach to spiritual development. 

In our modern world, spirituality and knowledge of God can become pious, insular, and self-centered, giving way or shape to a spiritual narcissism. Tolstoy defeats this by insisting that progress is only made through love and that by being in service to humankind we make our own spiritual advancements…and vice versa; This is his heartfelt restatement of the Great Commandments, and how he imperfectly yet valiantly tried to live his life… As we could too!