Practice Makes Purpose

Practice Makes Purpose

Who we are is more important than any “what”, greater than the “why’s” that others ascribe to our lives. As people in search of the good, our practice for success finds its power in the ways we share our own personal gifts, rather than the quantity of what we can achieve. The art of practicing our purpose is an art that meets as at every moment of our time on this earth. The ways you bring the richness of your own uniqueness are the highest aspirations that anyone else could ever ask of you.

First Reading - On Being a Real Person, by Harry Emerson Fosdick

Tension between who we are and who we desire to be arises in one of its most dangerous forms of high moral idealism and nowhere is it more likely to be mishandled. High moral ideals are among humanity’s noblest possessions, but they too are projections of ourselves as we feel we ought to be or strongly want to be, and the disproportion between them and what we actually are can be so great as to disrupt life. A young person is fascinated by ideals of public service. The person

reads stories of eminent social servants, pioneers, and heroes, until the person pictures themself as one of them. Is not that a high ideal? Yet, the person may not be best fitted for such a role. It is a hard task to persuade the idealist to accept themself the way they actually are, to change those projections of themself accordingly, and to achieve this change so as not to keep the person from being a real person, but to make them one.

Second Reading - Deep is the Hunger, by Howard Thurman

There is something incomplete about coming to the end of anything. This is true even hough it may be the close of something for the end of which we have longed for many days, or even years. There is the end of a long siege of illness, when the surge of new strength and vigor pervades one’s entire body and the mind begins to pick up a fresh attack upon the world of men and things. The days in bed, the routine of the sick room, the frequent and periodic visits of the doctor, the solicitation of friends and loved ones, the silent watches, the night with the voices that can be heard only when “day is done”; all these have become a part of life’s pattern.

But this is over. There is the end of a voyage after days on board ship. The endless promenading on the deck, the long, lazy afternoons, the unique smell of the cabin, the new friends, the storms, the circuitous fascination of the sea, all this is behind at voyage-end. There is the end of friendship. The early days when affection was tender and the hours of anxiety during new unfoldings were safely pass; the period when tokens of testing were everywhere; the moments of mounting ecstasy when the sheer joy of aliveness overflowed, feeding all the valleys of the soul; the long days of tranquility when nothing happened because one had seeped quietly through all open things; then the end–no sharp break, no vast upheaval, only the quiet closing, one by one, of doors.

There is something incomplete about coming to the end of anything. Even the end of life does not seem final, notwithstanding one’s attitude toward life after death. The fact is, one never comes to the end of anything. Something always remains, some deposit, some residue that mingles with the stream of one’s life forever. In a sense, there can never be an end of anything; something remains. This is what is meant by the words Tennyson placed on the lips of Ulysses: “I am part of all that I have met.” 

True also is it that all I have met is a part of me, forever.