For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote an intriguing exploration into the transformative power of purpose through personal crisis.
When he sent in his submission for the John Templeton Foundation’s 2004 essay contest, August Turak had already been a successful entrepreneur and CEO, a mid-1970s student of Zen Buddhism, a mentor to college students, and a failed amateur skydiver (one attempt, ankle shattered). What he was not, in any sense of the term, was a published writer. A betting person might have given him rather long odds to win the $100,000 prize for the best essay on the “power of purpose” — the contest was open to professional writers and already-published works. Indeed, when the Foundation’s board members contacted him that September to tell him he’d won, the conference call took on a slapstick air with everyone talking at once. “At first I was sure it was my buddies playing a prank on me,” Turak recalls. But it was no prank. Turak’s essay, “Brother John,” had been judged the top submission, and that September, Turak was feted at an award ceremony at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York City, accompanied by the subject of his essay, Brother John, a 65-year-old Trappist Monk from Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina.
Turak’s essay described a visit to Mepkin Abbey in 1997 during the midst of a season of personal despair that he considers his two-year “Dark Night of the Soul.” His skydiving accident made him face his mortality for the first time, and triggered a full-blown crisis of purpose. “I realized that I had been on a so-called spiritual path since I’ve been in college, but now when I really needed it, all I cared about was what the doctors had to say,” Turak says. In the midst of that depression, Turak got a call from a Duke student he’d once mentored, saying that he was spending his summer as a monastic guest at Mepkin Abbey. Intrigued, Turak himself made inquires about visiting the abbey.