Gandhi and Destiny | October 25, 2026 | Rev. Karen Melander-Magoon
October began with Gandhi’s birthday on the 2nd. He became a symbol of so much we long for: non-violence, an end to all wars, and the patience to remain positive and work for peace.
Gandhi’s words still ring true:
Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your
words positive because your words become your behaviors. Keep your behaviors
positive because your behaviors become your habits. Keep your habits positive
because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive because your
values become your destiny.
Yes, surely we are our destiny. We are a combination of our antecedents, our
history, our education and experiences, all of which offer us a way to wisdom and
the opportunity to make choices.
Those choices form our destiny, our being. We are the love we are given and give
back. Life is reciprocity, life is communion. We weave our life together with
others and form the destiny of our community. In a sense, community is a tapestry
of all our destinies.
Howard Thurman said that fate is what we are given, and destiny is what we do
with it. We are reminded of the prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, which appeared
first in French in a small French devotional magazine in 1912 and seems to have a
multitude of possible origins yet remains an inspiration to all of us:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Martin Luther King Jr. said in his letter from a Birmingham jail:
All mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an
inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever
affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
We are together in this great experiment of humanity. We have an opportunity to
travel together on this journey which defines our destiny as creatures made in the
image of what each of us understands as God.
Every language has a way of saying, “God willing”
Inshallah, in Arabic
Dios mediante in Spanish
Si Dieu veut, in French
Dio voglio, in Italian
Bog dast, in Russian
Buddhists ask only that we be kind and wish each other well.
Hindus in India may say inshallah in Arabic, but have different ways of expressing
any concept of an almighty.
In short, our destinies and our journeys are interwoven with very different textures
and colors, but we find wholeness in each other.
As the lyrics of the last movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony remind us:
Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.
Joy, beautiful divinity
Daughter of heaven
We walk into your grace
Your magic binds us again
From all that would separate us
All people will be brothers and sisters
Everywhere and in all times
We celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day on October 12th and remember again how we are connected. We have dismissed Columbus Day because Columbus did not represent equality, equity and brotherly love.
We repudiate colonialism in favor of freedom for all. That is our true destiny as a community.
Our wholeness as individuals is dependent upon our wholeness as a community
As Mahatma Gandhi once said:
Pay Attention! The future depends on what you do today.
Or Willliam Shakespeare, who in Julius Caesar says:
It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.
May we find strength in the stars and on earth In our families and our friends In our beliefs and ideas and in ourselves to create a destiny of healing and a life of wholeness.
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