Quote

"When we discuss our purpose in life, the ego always drifts toward the question of what we should be doing. What we are discussing has nothing to with any particular mode of doing. There is a different and deeper level of purpose. It has to do with how our talents are connected to the road Home. There is a way in which our gifts relate to the path back to God. Each of us has a gift. We all have access to Light. Even though our deepest longing is to go Home again, the most profound longing we can have in relationship to our
destiny on this earth is to find the particular way this Light was left within us." We long to exude something delicate and rich about ourselves which whispers of infinite Truth. To set a goal of dislodging the blocks that hold our talents back is the only worthwhile goal we can pursue. When we discover our gift then we can only share it. It cannot be given away too much. It can only be shared. It cannot be held on to. I am referring to something very delicate which has to do with the particular way our humanity and our Divinity meet. In this sense, it has nothing to do with career, which for all of us is linked to success and failure. The gift of which I speak is beyond such concepts. It has nothing to do with "making it" in the traditional sense. It has nothing to do with the way others look at us and say, "You have succeeded." It has to do with the simple ways in which we help ourselves and other people to feel better and to inspire them to move ahead. Steps can be taken to surrender to our talent. We can take little steps. We can take this journey a piece at a time. When we have fully surrendered to our talent, the details make no difference. It moves along because we have surrendered to the way in which Divinity has left something of Itself in our heart. Therefore, we can trust the gift completely. I recognize with unutterable certainty that there isn't a human being on this earth, who doesn't have access to a gift which is the reflection, in their own unique way, of the divine impulse as it seeks to enter into the human form. Part of the depth of this work is that it asks people to honor that gift in its multiplicity of forms, including the possibility that we have misrepresented our gift to ourselves and called it some weakness or shortcoming or drawback."

- Taken from The Prayer of the Body: Compassionate Self-Care and Reclaiming the Sacred Presence, a compilation from the work of Stephen Robbins Schwartz created by Ray Minkler (styraco@blomand.net) - more on this in the last item of this compilation below.