Knowing Our Story

From Here All Dwell Free by Gertrud Mueller Nelson:

Our responsibility, then is to find and know the story that is our own. We then reach out to grapple with it, choosing to suffer the conflicts that pull us back into our fate and forward to our true selves. As we become healed and autonomous, we reenter our community and our history, offering our gifts to benefit all, and taking our place as cocreators of our personal and communal destinies. All three of these tasks, though developmental in nature, are not necessarily done in stair-step order, but cycle around and around, deeper and deeper, as we grow in consciousness and responsibility.... Only where we allow ourselves to be fully human can God meet us, and here we encounter our true selves, as if for the first time. Here all dwell free.