Purpose

*PURPOSE - also see MEAING

The only way you can understand the real meaning and purpose of love is to be willing to pay the price. You have to go out there and risk sharing it. (Soup, 116)

If we're going to be interested in life, we have to start out with an interest in God. Once we find God interesting, everything falls into place. Then we start to get interested in everything because now it all has purpose: to get us to God. (Crucifix, p114-5)

In one chapter of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver encounters a handful of people who are fated never to die, and they are the most pitiable of creatures. A knowledge of our mortality makes us take life more seriously. Time is precious because we know we have a limited supply of it. The knowledge that our years are limited makes our choices matter. This knowledge of our mortality gives us the opportunity to declare that certain things - our families, our country, our faith - are supremely valuable to us because we are willing to risk losing our lives to defend them. (How Good, p155,157-8)