36: When We're Ready, Life Comes Calling

36 

When We're Ready, Life Comes Calling 

“All destiny leads down the same path—growth, love and service.” 

THE WHEEL OF LIFE

A Memoir of Living and Dying

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

I picked up a LIFE magazine the other day when Penny and I were shopping in Orillia where we had gone for an afternoon drive and Chinese dinner, a special edition featuring THE ENDURING POWER OF TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD celebrating “The Book’s Lasting Influence, The Making of the Classic Film, Inside the World of Harper Lee, And Now the Sequel,” and I couldn’t wait to read it because Gregory Peck, who played the lawyer Atticus Finch in the movie adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, just happens to be my favorite actor who also starred in my favorite movie, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit—the story of an ordinary man who’s decency shone no less brightly if not more than it did in the small town southern lawyer Atticus Finch who was named by The American Film Institute the greatest film hero of all time; but I got a gentle surprise when I read the magazine a day or so later because I was blessed with another one of those meaningful coincidences that confirmed my conviction that when we’re ready life calls us to our destiny, as it called Gregory Peck to his acting career; and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing… 

Not everyone is called to their destiny, but not because we don’t have a destiny to be called to; we all do, but in the making. This is a difficult concept to articulate, and it took me years to work it out; but without going into detail (which I do in some of my books like The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway and The Pearl of Great Price), suffice to say that we have two destinies—one karmic and one spiritual; and when we have evolved enough in our karmic destiny, which we determine by the choices we make from one lifetime to the next, we will be called to our predetermined spiritual destiny which in her memoir Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross insightfully spelled out to be “the path of love, growth and service.”

Gregory Peck was a pre-medical student at Berkeley University, California. One day a man came up to him and said: “I’m the director of the Little Theater, and I need a tall actor; and I’ve seen you on the campus and I wondered if you’d come and have a try.”

This director, Edwin Duerr, whom Gregory Peck did not know, was life’s messenger calling him to his personal destiny of service to life through acting; and, unconscious of his own destiny, Peck explained his serendipitous calling in words that make one smile: “And I don’t know why I did; I just said, well, why not?” And the rest is history.

Contrary to what so many people think, especially in this day and age with so much confusion and strife in the world, life is not a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing; it has a logic that we cannot see until we are called to our own destiny, because as we live our destiny we quicken the new potential which is ours to claim as Gregory Peck came to realize late in his life. “If I’d said no (to the director), or I don’t see the point of it; my life would be entirely different.” But acting fulfilled him so completely that he touched the lives of so many people it’s impossible to compute the goodness of his service to the world in the many roles that he played. “Somewhere in that man is the best of all of us,” said one person, which for me he exemplified in Tom Rath in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.

This is the mystical power of the path of love, growth and service that we’re all called to when life has made us ready through the natural process of individuation through karma and reincarnation, because this path is an individual path that completes our life story. Let me explain what I mean by this, because this speaks to the mystery of our personal destiny.

In her memoir I’m Over All That, Shirley MacLaine said: “The truth is that no matter where I went, I was always looking for myself.” I went on quest of self-discovery also, and in my journey of self-discovery I learned that our greatest need in life is to be who we are meant to be. As Carl Gustav Jung said, “An acorn must become an oak tree and not a monkey,” and so too must we become who we are meant to be; but how?

How do we find ourselves? How do we satisfy that longing in our soul to be who we are meant to be? Gregory Peck tells us that his call to acting, however strange it came to be, brought out the best in him and blessed him with a beautiful wife whom he met, again by providential decree, when he stopped off in Paris for an interview while on his way to Italy to film A Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn and fell in love with the interviewer Veronique who married and blessed him with two wonderful children “born in love” and whose daughter’s first child was named Harper after the author of To Kill a Mockingbird.

“Hardly a day passes that I don’t think how lucky I was to be cast in that film,” he said in an a 1997 interview, because his role as Atticus Finch sealed his career and brought out the best in him. But, as irony would have it—which only confirms what I have come to believe, that the role chooses the actor—Gregory Peck said that his values were very much like those of Atticus Finch, and Atticus Finch enhanced him; this is how the path of growth, love and service satisfies the longing in one’s soul to be who they are meant to be. Gregory Peck was destined to serve life as an actor, and when he was ready life came calling. 

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