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This episode begins with the idea that “each family acts as a vessel of fate with an inherited plot that begins all over again each time a child is born. For the infant is not born into a vacuum as much as dropped into a particular stage of a family drama that has been playing out over generations.” Meade considers the issues of “family fate” that can restrict and obscure, but ultimately provoke the discovery of the threads of fate and destiny in each person’s life.

Ancient Greek dramas, as well Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, can be seen to follow the movements of fate down through generations of families. Part of our fascination with royalty involves an intrigue with family dramas that play out on the level of history. Yet, on another level are part of the age old, psychological enactments of family fate, including all the back stories and internal plots that become external scandals.

The old philosophical idea was that family is fate. Thus, being born into a particular family also means being pulled into an ongoing drama that began long before we enter the scene. Each family acts as a vessel of fateful issues with inherited plotlines that begin anew with each child born. For, we are not birthed into a vacuum as much as dropped into a particular stage of a family drama that has been playing out over generations.

Each family carries its own elements of fate, typically in the form of unfinished issues, unconscious motives and even unlived lives that pass down through successive generations. In that sense, each family represents an ongoing attempt to struggle with fateful issues in order to heal certain wounds and break patterns that restrict meaningful growth and creative energies.

Just as in stage dramas, elements of fate will arise at critical turning points in the course of our own lives. Just as someone born into a royal family must struggle to find their own unique sense of identity in the midst of all the pomp and circumstance and just as someone entering the world as an orphan must struggle to find some threads of the human family, each of us must struggle to find that which is unique and essential to our own lives. Typically, we must leave our family of origins in order to find those who can recognize, bless and confirm the original thread of fate and destiny that brought us to life to begin with.

Rather than something fixed and predetermined, fate carries the sense of an oracular capacity, an inner speech and essential revelation waiting to awaken within us. In this old understanding, the life-thread of our soul ties us to the eternal realm on one end and a destiny or life destination at the other end. Fate is like an inner koan, the archetypal pattern and essential enigma of each soul. It is the puzzling question that our life secretly tries to answer and can only reveal by being fully lived.

Fate is a mysterious presence within each life and something we encounter in all serious undertakings. Whenever we try to change or grow a greater life, we encounter issues of our family fate as well as the specific limitations that accompany our own inner gifts and natural callings in life. Fate appears as whatever restrains, restricts or even imprisons us. And yet, fate is also the territory where we must go if we are to awaken to our inner destiny and true purpose in life.

We are human by lot and divine by origin. We are limited by fate yet driven by destiny, each person a living puzzle as well as a divine experiment. The pattern set within our souls gives us our essential chance at finding meaning and feeling fulfilled. In the midst of the confusion and uncertainty of the world around us, the inner pattern is the underlying source of unity waiting to be found within us.

We were given a unique thread of meaning and purpose to begin with. When we face the limitations of our fate, we also begin to move it; when fate moves, destiny moves closer to us. In the end, the question becomes: did we find and follow the inner thread of our being? Did we become who we were intended to be when the Sisters of Fate first pulled the unique thread of our life into the ongoing drama of the living world.

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