He who has a why can bear almost any how. – Fredrick Nietzsche
The importance of planting purpose in the Garden of Love is reinforced by the writing of the person many recognize as the most powerful spokespeople for the role of meaning in our time. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl, M.D. described his experience surviving a Nazi concentration camp. Without purpose, Dr. Frankl writes, people soon died. With a clear sense of purpose, they had at least a chance of surviving a place where the whole idea, the whole "purpose" of the camp, was to deny the humanity of Jews.
What is most important to you? What matters in your life? If all of that were subtracted, how would you feel about your existence?
We are not our work. Yet it can often feel that way…
The first time I was fired, after refusing to launch a layoff in 1995, I felt deeply disoriented. My sense of purpose had been so deeply connected to my role as CEO of a large hospital system that I felt, in a way, that I’d been killed. I awoke in the middle of the night thinking about my work only to realize I didn’t have a job. I had lost what I thought of a main purpose of my life. 
When purpose is too closely associated with job, we begin to think we are our jobs. This thinking especially traumatizes mothers who lose their children or athletes who experience paralysis. Who am I, they may wonder, without my particular calling?
This key life question can only be answered by separating ourselves from jobs and re-thinking our lives in terms of our calling and our purpose. Fired caregivers can find their calling in another way.
Recently, a dear friend discovered she would be unable to have children. What makes this loss particularly painful is that she works as an obstetrics nurse. For years, she has helped numerous women deliver babies all along dreaming of the day when she would birth her own child. The news of her infertility must have struck her like shots from a firing squad. Who am I, she may have wondered, if I can’t be a mother?
My friend will find new purpose in her life. What counts is not to give up. What matters is that each of us discover the purpose we need to energize our lives. "He/she who has a why can bear almost any how."
The reverse of this is quite frightening. He/she without purpose can’t bear much of anything. We know people who never find their purpose, their calling. They drift through life in a sort of soporific state, reacting to whatever the outside world delivers to them, mechanically going about their days living in the zone of the average, the mediocre. They may live a life of lost potential.
Victor Frankl survived the horrors of a concentration camp by renewing his sense of purpose each day. How about you? What role does purpose play in your Garden of Love?
-Erie Chapman
Spiritual Exercise:
- What does purpose mean for you?
- Have you found a clear purpose in your life?
- How does it energize you?
Journal of Sacred Work 
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