Newspapers are full of stories about people whose lives change, it seems, in midair. Sometimes the reversals are drastic. More often they seem more subtle than startling. But whatever the nature of the change, it is always determinative. Even in your life and mine. Hurricane Carter, for instance, was a young man whose rise out of a New Jersey ghetto to the level of contender for the 1964 title of middleweight champion of the world was meteoric. Three years later he was convicted of murder and sentenced to three life terms in prison for a crime he did not commit. It was twenty-one years later before the sentence was finally overturned.

He once “boxed to make a living,” he says, but since his release from prison he has been fighting for the release of others whose cases are tenuous but ignored, because “innocent people in prison rarely have anyone in their corner.”

Carter was a fighter who used his physical abilities to overcome the racism of his time. Now he uses his moral and spiritual gifts to fight for the rights of others.

Did Carter have one call or two? Or was Carter’s one great life-changing call simply a result of doing differently what he had been doing in the first place? Struggling for just recognition first for himself and then, later, for others whose place in life left them essentially invisible and powerless. So what difference does it make just because he found himself and his place in life late and slowly? The point is that life is about living into the one great moment of insight, awareness, realization that changes us so that we can do what we are meant to do to change it for others, as well.

Prison, Hurricane Carter wrote, is what helped him realize that his destiny could lie in lacing up his gloves to fight for others.

Is there more than one call? Probably not, though there are certainly variations of it along the way embedded in everything we do. But without a doubt, each of the byways on the road is a small step on the way to do it. As Emerson taught, life is a “progress,” a passage through time, “not a station,” never a stopping place. It is a progression of events that leads to insight, to self-knowledge, to the direction of the home within. One experience at a time, we begin to understand who we really are and what happiness really is for us. Then, what the poet Emerson wrote becomes glaringly clear: Life, he said, “is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”

—from Following the Path: The Search for a Life of Passion, Purpose and Joy by Joan Chittister (Image)

Ed. Note: Rubin “Hurricane” Carter died in April 2014, two years after Sister Joan’s book was published.