They don’t understand that religion was created in order to share the mystery and to worship, not to oppress or convert others. The greatest manifestation of the miracle of God is life. Tonight, I will weep for you, O Jerusalem, because that understanding of the Divine Unity is about to disappear for the next one thousand years.
Ask a flower in the field: “Do you feel useful? After all, you do nothing but produce the same flowers over and over.”
And the flower will answer: “I am beautiful, and beauty is my reason for living.”
Ask the river: “Do you feel useful, given that all you do is keep flowing in the same direction?”
And the river will answer: “I’m not trying to be useful; I’m trying to be a river.”
Nothing in this world is useless in the eyes of God. Not a leaf from a tree falls, not a hair from your head, not even an insect dies because it was of no use. Everything has a reason to exist.
Even you, the person asking the question. “I’m useless” is the answer you give yourself.
Soon that answer will poison you and you will die while still alive, even though you still walk, eat, sleep, and try to have a little fun whenever possible.
Don’t try to be useful. Try to be yourself; that is enough, and that makes all the difference.
Walk neither faster nor slower than your own soul, because it is your soul that will teach you the usefulness of each step you take. Sometimes taking part in a great battle will be the thing that will help to change the course of history. But sometimes you can do that simply by smiling, for no reason, at someone you happen to pass on the street.
Without intending to, you might have saved the life of a complete stranger, who also thought he was useless and might have been ready to kill himself until a smile gave him new hope and confidence.
Even if you were to study your own life in detail and relive each moment that you suffered, sweated, and smiled beneath the sun, you would still never know exactly when you had been useful to someone else.
A life is never useless. Each soul that came down to Earth is here for a reason.
The people who really help others are not trying to be useful, but are simply leading a useful life. They rarely give advice, but serve as an example.
Do one thing: Live the life you always wanted to live. Avoid criticizing others and concentrate on fulfilling your dreams. This may not seem very important to you, but God, who sees all, knows that the example you give is helping Him to improve the world. And each day, He will bestow more blessings upon it.
And when the Unwanted Visitor arrives, you will hear it say:
“It is fair to ask: ‘Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?’ But now, in this final second of your life on Earth, I am going to tell you what I saw: I found the house clean, the table laid, the fields plowed, the flowers smiling. I found each thing in its proper place, precisely as it should be. You understood that small things are responsible for great changes.
“And for that reason, I will carry you up to Paradise.”
And a woman called Almira, a seamstress, said:
“I could have left before the crusaders arrived, and, if I had, I would now be working in Egypt. But I was always too afraid to change.”
And he answered:
We are afraid to change because we think that, after so much effort and sacrifice, we know our present world.
And even though that world might not be the best of all worlds, and even though we may not be entirely satisfied with it, at least it won’t give us any nasty surprises. We won’t go wrong.
When necessary, we will make a few minor adjustments so that everything continues in the same way.
We see that the mountains always stay in the same place. We see that fully grown trees, when transplanted, usually die.
And we say: “We want to be like the mountains and the trees. Solid and respectable.” Even though, during the night, we wake up thinking: “I wish I was like the birds, who can visit Damascus and Baghdad and come back whenever they want to.”
Or: “I wish I was like the wind, for no one knows where it comes from nor where it goes, and it can change direction without ever having to explain why.”
The next day, however, we remember that the birds are always fleeing from hunters and larger birds, and that the wind sometimes gets caught up in a whirlwind and destroys everything around it.
It’s nice to dream that we will have plenty of time in the future to do our traveling, and that, one day, we will travel. It cheers us up because we know that we are capable of doing more than we do. Dreaming carries no risks. The dangerous thing is trying to transform your dreams into reality.
But the day will come when Fate knocks on our door. It might be the gentle tapping of the Angel of Good Fortune or the unmistakable rat-a-tat-tat of the Unwanted Visitor. They both say: “Change now!” Not next week, not next month, not next year. The angels say: “Now!”