Your purpose is well worth the searching

Nov. 26, 2009

Dear Adams family,

I miss your sunny Southern Californian smiles around all the Thanksgiving tables required to seat everyone and their friends in your home. That was two decades ago. A new generation has arrived since then, here to fulfill their destinies in the world. But are our own destinies done? If we are still alive, that can't be so.

I don't believe in fate but do believe in destiny in the sense of a hidden purpose to being alive. My purpose is very good at hiding. But once a week I go to Blanchard Elementary School where second-graders struggling with reading sit on a bench in the hall beside me and urge from tiny books stories about bunnies and hippos, and I leave thinking, "If that's all my purpose is, it's enough." I leave feeling I have served a purpose bigger than myself, my spirit bathed in these children's sense of wonder.

What is that wonder? Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian mystic who as both scientist and priest attempted to marry the physical and the spiritual. During the first half of the 20th century, as the atom was being explored, he wrote of matter as energy infused with consciousness of varying degrees of complexity, and of consciousness evolving toward a summit he believed humanity was beginning to reach. He lived in a state of wonder, proving his own theory of evolution.

In his book "Hymn of the Universe," Teilhard wrote: "The mystic suffers more than other men from the tendency of created things to crumble into dust: instinctively and obstinately he searches for the stable, the unfailing, the absolute."

All mystics are the same, yearning for the absolute, the wonder. Sufis, Islam's mystics, pursue a state where everything is done for the love of God. In Hinduism, Vedanta teaches the way of self-realization. The Kabbalah shows that way for Judaism. Siddhartha was not the Buddha until enlightened. "All religions, all this singing, is one song," the Sufi mystic poet Rumi wrote.

Love is the principle that binds the universe together, Teilhard wrote. "To be pure of heart means to love God above all things and at the same time to see him everywhere in all things." That is a state of wonder.

To see God in all things is another way of saying, Be grateful. Be thankful. You have been given a purpose so secret even you don't know what it is. Your purpose could be to discover your purpose. When things go wrong, be grateful. You've just gotten a course correction. When life gets confusing, be grateful. Learn to have a little faith.

Be thankful. See God in all things. Look outside. Look inside. Your sense of wonder is waiting.

Love and happy Thanksgiving, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.