Destiny and Call

Destiny and Call

You find your destiny and your soul by responding to the world’s call to you. That is how you find yourself.

Thomas Moore Cited in Mystical Hours

Brother Teasdale expands this terse truth through these words:

“The way to truly find ourselves is to let go of our selfish aims and embrace the needs of others expressed through the call of the world. Only by becoming a servant to the world– through whatever message stirs our hearts to act– do we discover our souls and their purpose in this reality and beyond.”

Thomas Moore who has distinguished himself as a master of this science and art of the soul, is pointing out that there is wisdom that is found in every tradition. Our souls are interconnected with every other soul in the divine reality. The roots of our identity span the infinity of God, who invites us to discover the vast community beyond the ego. That the way into this reality is through selfless service to others, even if it’s only prayer and simple acts of kindness and love.

Why is this noble and universal truth so hard to comprehend? Every timeless religious and/or spiritual tradition teaches the priorities of compassion, the ethics of caring, the necessity of unselfish caring…”

Both Moore and Teasdale refer to the word call or calling… Religiously or at least traditionally, this call has become a recognition of a vocation, or a call to ministry, or priesthood… More widely, we are tasked with finding and affirming our true, whole selves, which cannot be complete without a willingness to serve, and care for others beyond one’s family members,

and to serve the aim and the goal of healing our world in some way, be it humble or grand…

But what of the call itself? Where or how does this recognition or urgent call to service manifest within us? Rarely, if ever, does it come from lengthy study or rigorous analysis! That approach is all too rational, sequential, and limited to those logical faculties that cannot capture and sustain our whole souls, or even begin to care for our world or what Emerson called, “The Soul of The Whole.” 

As I have come to understand it, and know quite well that even a lifetime of careful ongoing considerations of the experience of being called, and then to be anchored in that call, requires a respect for the voice or the vocation you are giving your attention and loyalty to every day!

As I have experienced it, it arrives as an inward call or a beckoning, more of an intuitive flash… 

A moment of sacred recognition, and a feeling of awakening that closely follows, and that declares that I am to be both a witness and a servant.

This call is not necessarily aligned with a school, clinic, or a religious group, or any job, title, social expectations or outward set of roles and responsibilities. From my deepest recognition and awareness, it is the feeling that you have become an instrument of what is sacred in your life and in our world. 

That call signals your ongoing attunement process has begun! That you have received a stirring message from The Holy Spirit and can begin to attest to the inspiration that it was that She who awakened my soul; That it was a sacred invitation to participate in an ongoing, ever refining transcendent mystery that speaks to the essence of life, love, service, and of belonging to something much larger than oneself.

Looking back with the gratitude of being privileged to participate in ministry and beyond it: whether it was ladling soup, dealing with the results of violent crime, offering a blessing, or going into debt to buy a priest a flight home to his dying mother…

 Large or small, grand or humble, this inward call to be of service is what Moore helps each of us to define as our destiny and purpose; That recognition then acts as the way markers of meaning and the crossroads of decision-making in my life…