I think it was from Steve Pavlina that I got this little exercise.

What is your true purpose in life?

If you don’t know the answer, take a blank piece of paper. Write freely whatever comes to you as an answer. Give it time. When you write something that makes you cry, you’ve finished.

~~~

My answers were these:

(swift answers)
To preach the word
To be a priest
To love
To speak the word I have been given (something which my ordaining Bishop told me)

(pause for thought)

To heal people

(further pause for thought)

To teach
To sing

(much more pausing, then eventually)

To communicate by the beauty of my voice

Which got the eyes mildly moist, so I stopped there. There’s an ambiguity about ‘voice’ at the end of course – it’s not really a claim about the quality of my singing, although I’ve been given reason recently to think it’s not that bad. It’s the content of what is sung as much as how it is sung (it’s ‘the word I have been given to speak’). (Von Balthasar hovers in the background)

I was reminded of this because that MII test (see last post) gave me a higher score on music than I was expecting, and it brought to mind just how important I think it is to sing the liturgy (see this). One of the highest moments in my ministerial life so far was singing the Exsultet on Easter morning several years back. I am reinstituting it this year; I think it’s when one of those things most deeply embedded within myself is enabled to peep out and blink in the dawn. It is probably the moment when I am most profoundly in tune with my true purpose in life.