Yesterday I was glancing at the books in the sale bin at B&N, only one caught my eye and as I flipped it open it landed upon two pages with the section titled, "The First Truth: The Unique Call." Needless to say I bought it then and there. Below are a few snippets from those two pages.
The jacket reads: "The secret is to "live your story," and we do this by identifying our true, unique selves - what he calls our "soul prints."
Marc Gafni, the American-born author of Soul Prints: Your Path to Fulfillment is a biblical myth scholar, dean of the Melitz Public Culture Study Initiative and host of a weekly television program in Israel. I found it interesting he also used the metaphor of a symphony (the music and resonance metaphor I've been using) and that Ricardo Semler, CEO of Brazil's Semco and author of Seven-Day Weekend, also likens an effective organization to a symphony as well.
In the orchestra, there are many instruments, all of them necessary for making music. Each instrument is distinct and special without being "better" than any other. A symphony is the opposite of hierarchy. To participate in the symphony, you need to be familiar with all the instruments, yet in order to make music each member of the symphony needs to be particularly responsive to the unique call of her own instrument. While you may be a dabbler at many instruments, you must be a master of your own. Every calling is great only when greatly pursued. If everyone played the same instrument, the music would just be loud and boring - there would be no texture, no harmony...A calling is not a job or an occupation - it is a vocation. It is not what you do for a living - it is your very life. Vocation literally means "calling" - the word is derived from the Latin vocare, to call. Our vocal expression in the world is melodious if we sing in response to vocare, the call of our vocation. Calling is an issue of voice. You must sense the voice of the caller, then find your own voice, and realize that the two are the same...
Often we try to escape from the singularity of our call. The clarion call can be so loud that we go deaf from its decibels. Its voice can shout so directly to our soul prints that it is exhilarating and affirming, yet frightening. The first resonspe of the Hebrews to the calling voice at Sinai - and according to many Kabbalists it was an inner voice - was to be absolutely overwhelmed and run. In an earlier story, Moses himself hides his face so as not to be overpowered by the voice calling him from the Burning Bush. When the prophet Jonah hears an inner voice calling him to teach in the Assyrian city of Nineveh, he books immediate passage on a boat - going in the opposite direction...
The prime cause of our desire to run is the fear that we are not up to the job. So we ignore our unique calling. We try to join the magnificent symphony of being without learning our particular instrument. But that strategy never works, for everyone knows you're not invited to join a symphony without having mastered your particular instrument...
We are all heading in the same direction, toward the vocation that comes from the authentic realization of our soul prints. Yet we can only reach our destination by taking our different paths.
Comments