June 17, 1999 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Cathedral Within: Transforming Your Life by Giving Something Back
By Bill Shore
Personal fulfillment comes from working toward a goal that sometimes takes several generations to achieve, maintains the author.
ALSO SEE:
Charities’ Big Challenge: Surviving for the Long Haul
He urges readers to look beyond quick-fix solutions to society’s problems.
Mr. Shore, executive director of the antihunger organization Share Our Strength, looks to the cathedral builders of earlier times for inspiration. He describes the awe he felt in Milan, Italy, standing in the great cathedral, which took 500 years to construct.
“The way the cathedral’s stone and glass have come to be fit together suggests something monumental not about the cathedral as a building, … but about the forces of humanity marshaled on behalf of this creation,” he writes. “How powerful would it be to crack the atom of that transformation?”
To reap meaning and purpose from life, Mr. Shore writes, one must work for something similarly grand in scope. Extending this philosophy to charity, he provides examples of people whose faith in their causes makes their organizations praiseworthy and likely to endure.
Among them: Nancy Carstedt, executive director of the Chicago Children’s Choir, whose work recruiting inner-city children Mr. Shore says has improved the lives of troubled kids and helped her fight clinical depression; and Michael Brown and Alan Khazei, founders of City Year, which places young people in community-service jobs.
Mr. Shore’s tone is conversational, and he often relays anecdotes about his own family and his experiences at Share Our Strength to make his points. He concludes with a directory of organizations that he says are committed to passion — and permanence.
Publisher: Random House, 201 East 50th Street, New York 10022; (212) 751-2600 or (800) 726-0600; fax (800) 659-2436; World-Wide Web http://www.randomhouse.com; 294 pages; $21.95; I.S.B.N. 0-679-45706-2.
