48
This Journey
of Service
Justin Trudeau’s Call to Destiny
“All destiny leads down
the same path—growth, love, and service,” said Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
in her autobiography The Wheel of Life, a
Memoir of Living and Dying, a courageous doctor who pioneered the study of
death and dying and gave us the five stages of grieving—denial, anger,
bargaining, depression, and acceptance—in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, and who also pioneered the study of NDEs—near-death
experiences.
When I
read that comment at the end of her autobiography, I felt that it summed up the
philosophy of her long life of service to humanity; and I knew in my heart that
it was true.
I knew,
because I had been brought to this point of understanding by my own quest for
the meaning and purpose of life; and it made such good sense to me that I embraced
it implicitly. But not until I saw this truth in action, as I did the other
night while watching Lisa LaFlamme interview Justin Trudeau on W5 upon winning
the federal election and becoming Canada’s 23rd Prime Minister and
heard what the son of Pierre Elliot Trudeau had to say about his victory, did
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s wisdom hit home with me.
“Take me to the moment you
heard the words majority Liberal government,” Lisa LaFlamme asked
Justin; and Justin replied: “I had a group of
friends watching in a lounge downstairs in the hotel. I was with them for a bit
and that’s where they declared the Liberal government. I was with all my best
friends and it was a really nice moment. Then I went up to put the final
touches on my speech. And at one point Sophie came into the room as we were
working and she sort of looked over and said, ‘Can I say it?’ And we said what?
She says they’re calling it a majority. And it was just this moment of, first
of all, just deep gratitude. Like, ‘Oh my god,’ you know? This connection that
we’ve been building for three years with Canadians is real. And the
responsibility that we have to live up to it is real—”
Lisa excitedly interrupted: “So do you jump up?
What do you do?”
And Justin replied, his clear, warm eyes shining:
“I got up and held her, because I know that yes, it’s a good and big moment;
but I also know that it’s a significant shift in our lives, a significant
moment, and an emotional step along this journey of service.”
“Along this
journey of service,” I repeated to
myself, to impress his words upon my mind because I knew that Justin had just
been called to his highest purpose that Dr. Kubler-Ross spoke to in The Wheel of Life; and I needed no
further confirmation for my own belief that when we have brought our personal destiny
into agreement with our inherent spiritual purpose the next stage of our evolution
is service to life, be it with whatever talent we have acquired over our many
lifetimes in this schoolroom we call life—Justin’s instinctive talent for
politics, for example; which was why Lisa LaFlamme observed on the CTV news panel
on the night of the election that the son of the 15th Prime Minister
of Canada may not have his father’s incisive Jesuitical mind, but he has “emotional
intelligence,” little realizing that she was speaking about Justin’s inherent wisdom
and natural goodness that define his balanced character and radiates his easy,
charming smile.
But why a life of service? Why did Dr. Elisabeth
Kubler-Ross come to this conclusion about all destiny leading to the same path
of growth, love and service? That’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing…
Truth be told, I cannot work out the answer to this
question without calling upon my Muse (handing it over to my creative
unconscious, if you will); and the moment I did so, I heard what St. Padre Pio
said to me in Healing with Padre Pio—the
autobiographical story of my ten spiritual healing sessions with a psychic
medium who channeled St. Padre Pio for my autobiographical novel: “Life is about growth and understanding.” And
in another session he said something else that confirmed my own quest for
life’s purpose: “Life is a journey of
the self.” And when I put Padre Pio’s two comments together, I have the
answer to why all destiny leads down the same path of growth, love and service;
because the purpose of our life is to grow in understanding and love until we
are ready to serve life.
This of course presupposes the concepts of karma
and reincarnation, which for me are not concepts at all but the reality of our
existence; and it is only within this larger paradigm of our purpose in life
that we can make sense of the human condition—which Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross,
who began as an unbeliever in reincarnation, made central to her philosophy.
“Death is
simply a shedding of the physical body like a butterfly shedding its cocoon,”
she said, as she grew into the realization that life is “a transition to a
higher state of consciousness where you continue to perceive, to understand, to
laugh, and to be able to grow,” but grow into what? That’s the question that we
must answer.
Carl Jung, the eminent Swiss psychologist and
co-founder with Sigmund Freud of depth psychology, was practical in his
understanding of life, believing that “as each plant grows from a seed and becomes
in the end an oak tree, so man must become what he is meant to be,” implying
that we all have the same destiny of growing in our own individual identity until
we achieve wholeness and singleness of self; and upon this realization Jung
founded his psychology of individuation to help man realize his destiny. But
how can we be certain that our destiny in life is to become what we are meant
to be, which is our own true self?
I spent
the best years of my life looking for my true self, which I wrote about in my own
memoir The Summoning of Noman, so I
know that our greatest need in life is to become what we are meant to be; but
how was I to prove that this is everyone’s destiny? I didn’t know, and I paused
for thought…
That’s
the conundrum that my spiritual musing had brought me to this morning; but, as
coincidence would have it (again, I never cease to marvel at how synchronicity kicks
in whenever I need guidance), I took a break from my musing and went downstairs
and turned on the TV, because I have found that the best way to let my
unconscious work out a problem is not to think about it, and to my surprise I
just “happened” to catch a program on the documentary channel called Two of a Kind—an intensive study of
identical twins who are biologically the same but who have distinctly separate
identities.
To make
this point, one set of identical twins, two young ladies, remembered a high
school dance and a “pimply-faced boy” coming up to them and asking for a dance.
“It doesn’t matter which one of you dances with me because you’re both the
same,” said the boy; which got the girls’ dander up, because in one blind
stroke that pimply-faced teenager had negated their separate individual self—which
is the core of our being and fundamental purpose of our becoming. This is what St. Padre Pio meant by saying that life is a
journey of the self.
“Being a
twin can be very difficult,” said one of the young ladies. “We’re lumped
together and treated as one and the same, but we’re not.”
Another
set of identical twins, two men in their thirties, both athletic and very fit,
but one was gay and one straight, and both with their own distinct identity,
one married to a woman and with one child, and the other married to a man and
childless, which went a long way to proving the point that we become what we
are meant to be; but the most convincing proof of our own individuality was
provided by a set of identical twins who were so different that one could not
have asked for better proof to illustrate our distinctness.
In their
mid-fifties, both men were identical in appearance; but one man pursued the
good life of the American dream, living in a gated community, enjoying golfing
daily and travelling, and extremely secular in his beliefs. His twin brother on
the other hand was very religious, going back to his Jewish roots and moving to
Israel. These men were so extremely different in their lifestyles that one
would never know they were related were they not identical twins; and when the
program was over I came back to finish my musing.
“No two
sets of twins are the same just as no two individuals are the same,” said one elderly
lady as she looked at her identical twin sister, making my point that we are
all destined to become the person we are meant to be; which brings me back to
Justin Trudeau who was called to his destiny by the Canadian people who voted
him into power, which in his innocence he alluded to when he said that he and
his family had just taken “an emotional step along this journey of service.” It
touched my heart to hear him say that.
Justin
Trudeau may be his illustrious father’s son, but he’s certainly his own man who
has embarked upon the greatest journey
of his life as the 23rd Prime Minister of Canada; and I wish him and
his family the best of luck on his journey to wholeness through service.
───
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