Your soul makes sure that God’s dream for you is always edging towards fulfillment even when at times the opposite seems to be the case.
—John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
If you don’t like the word God in this quote, do not allow that to impede the power of O’Donohue’s words for you. If you are reading this book, chances are that you have some sense of your sacred Self. The name you choose to call it matters far less than your awareness that the sacred Self is your authentic Self. The point is this: something greater—beyond your rational mind and ego—has a dream for you. You may have a clear sense of this from time to time and, at other times, have no sense of it at all.
Your soul, the psyche—the part of you that serves as a bridge between the sacred Self and the external world—cooperates with the sacred to bring you to greater consciousness, more awakeness and aliveness, even when the opposite seems true. Occasionally, we find ourselves in the midst of circumstances we did not plan or ask for, experiencing wrenching emotions or what feel like impossible challenges. “How is this edging me toward greater fulfillment?” you wonder. The loss of employment, the loss of a relationship, the death of a loved one, a terminal illness, a bankruptcy, a foreclosure, a natural disaster that leaves you homeless—“if this is the path of greater fulfillment, I don’t care,” you may rail.
In such excruciating moments, it is nearly impossible to grasp that the soul is at work, bringing us to “god’s” dream for us, because we can only feel the nightmare of our immediate experience. Yet time and distance from the horror usually reveal that the sacred was dreaming our greatness and moving mysteriously in our lives to facilitate the deepening of the soul and the expansion of awareness. Eventually we discover that, as a result of the calamity, we have become larger, more magnanimous human beings, and probably far more resilient than we could have imagined.
The tumultuous times in which we live offer us many such teaching moments. Catastrophic as they may be, something greater is dreaming our fulfillment.