Letting Your Life Speak

Recently I had the opportunity to speak at Governor Dummer Academy as part of its lecture series on Spirituality. As I considered what I might speak about that would possibly be of interest to an auditorium full of teenagers, I settled on the idea of vocation. After all, I reasoned, the quest for a vocation had occupied me not only during, but far beyond my teenage years; and, in a sense, it continues to occupy me even today. I recall how totally clueless I was at age 18 about how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. It seemed like a fitting subject for my talk, and one which I hoped would find some resonance among my young listeners.

The question, "What shall I do with my life?" is one which, for many if not most of us, never really goes away. It is a deeply spiritual question, as I hope to show; and, as I tried to reassure the students, it is not in the least unusual not to know the answer.

A fortunate few of us, I told them, may have talents which are so obvious that they determine our vocations once and for all, but most of us need to be far more patient about discovering what it is we are meant to do with our once-only lives.

For that matter, many of the adults I know are still wondering what it is they want to do when they finally grow up! As author Parker Palmer has ritten in his book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, ". . .Vocation is a subject that engages many of us for the better part of our lives." The search for one’s true vocation in life never really ends, nor would we want it to. That would mean either that we have died, or, worse, that we have stopped living. Neither alternative is very appealing.

I have recently read somewhere that current college graduates should plan on an average of seven career changes by the time they retire. While some may still progress up a ladder of career promotion, many will do so in very different places than where they began; perhaps even in very different fields of study or activity. They will not follow a traditional path, but, more likely, their progress will be full of twists, turns, and surprises. They will need to be adaptive, and to learn skills which can be used in a myriad of different occupations. Some of you, I know, have already experienced the truth of this prediction.

Even those in the traditional vocations, such as law and medicine and ministry, are not necessarily exempt any more. While a student at Harvard Divinity School, I counted among my classmates a chemist, an engineer, a lawyer, bankers, teachers, nurses, and others. These were obviously all high achievers, but for one reason or other they had not found satisfaction in their original occupations. They were looking for something more. In most cases, in spite of all their successes, they were (still) searching for their true vocations.

The word vocation, according to my dictionary, comes from the same root as the word "voice." Vocation is thus often defined as "calling." We say that we are "called" to the ministry, or to medicine, or to teaching, and so on. But who, or what, does the calling? Is it a literal voice that we hear, telling us what we should spend the rest of our lives doing? Is it the voice of God?

I wish I could tell you that it is, but I would suggest that if you are waiting for such a voice, you may be waiting in vain, and in the end you may be sorely disappointed. (As I told the students at Governor Dummer, the voice they think they are hearing more likely than not belongs to their parents.)

The Bible would have us believe that God literally speaks to those whom God wishes to call. Beginning with Moses, God speaks directly to those who will become the leaders and prophets of Israel. But, believe me, it is no panacea to feel God’s breath on the back of one’s neck, and God’s voice whispering in one’s ear!

If you remember the story, even Moses at first refuses to heed God’s call. It seems that he has a speech impediment, and fears that he will be unable to communicate with the people of Israel. He really doesn’t want the job. "O my Lord, please send someone else," he says. He has a pretty good idea how difficult it is going to be, and how stiff-necked his fellow Israelites are. So, he asks God to send someone else in his place, thus initiating what biblical scholars call the "reluctant prophet" syndrome. God, of course, will have none of it, and Moses goes on to become the greatest prophet and leader in the history of Israel.

Being a prophet is tough work, and dangerous, too, which probably accounts for the reluctance of those called to the work to finally take it up. But most of us, for better or worse, will not hear a literal voice telling us what it is that we should do for the rest of our lives. Maybe this is not such a bad thing. Perhaps we need to think of the idea of "calling" in a more modest and undramatic way.

Calling may not be a literal voice in the ear or hand on the shoulder, but it may still be a useful concept. I happen to believe that calling is real, but that it is much more a process of discernment, of gradual unfolding, if you will, than of divine intervention. Sometimes a more Zen-like, going with the flow, is what is required to hear the voice that is calling us.

That is, we need to engage the question of what we ought to be doing over an often lengthy period of time. Then, with luck, we will begin to hear the voice of our own lives telling us what it is we need to do. It may take longer than we expect, far longer than four years of college and even more of graduate school. It may even take more than a few years in the "real" world for us to discern what it is we are meant to do, and for some of us it may take a lifetime. (Remember the story of Fatima from the morning’s reading?) [Fatima the Spinner and the Tent, as told by Idris Shah.] The good news is that it is almost never too late.

So let us consider for a moment: what if the voice that is calling us turns out not to be someone else’s, but turns out in reality to be our own?

Let me offer for your consideration another way of thinking about one’s vocation. Someone has suggested that one’s true vocation is "something I can’t not do." In other words, it is something I must do. Religious writer Frederich Buechner defines vocation as "the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need."

Both of these definitions suggest that vocation is not simply about doing, but, at a much deeper level, it is about being. At its deepest level, vocation is about the question, "Who am I?" It is about being what Thomas Merton, the great 20th century Catholic writer and monk, called "one’s true self," that self that one is really meant to be, and that no one else can be. Each of us is precious and unique. Only you can be you.

Of course, what you must do may be precisely what others think you shouldn’t do. Others may have different plans for us than we have for ourselves--they often do--and they may be disappointed when their plans for us do not work out as they had hoped. (I have observed what sometimes happens when persons in mid-life decide to make a dramatic change in their career path. Relationships are sometimes destroyed, or, at the least, severely strained.)

There is a story from the Hasidic Jewish religious tradition about the Rabbi Zusya. All of his life, Rabbi Zusya had been a wise and respected teacher. But when he was an old man on his deathbed, Rabbi Zusya worried to his followers, "In the coming world, they will not ask me ‘Why were you not Moses? or, why were you not Abraham?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’"

The idea here is that one cannot will oneself toward one’s vocation. We can’t give our hearts to something just because someone else thinks we should. x. Sadly, we can live as if we were, but ultimately we cannot be someone else. We can only be ourselves. Vocation is not always something we choose, much as we might like to think so: rather, it is often something which chooses us.

Henry David Thoreau once famously wrote that most people "lead lives of quiet desperation." Parker Palmer talks about how, for many of us, "the life we live" is not "the life that wants to live in us." Lots of people will be more than happy to tell you what you ought to do with your life. And many of their ideas will be wonderfully idealistic. And if they fit who you really are, it will be wonderful. But if they don’t, it won’t matter how altruistic they are. Similarly, it won’t matter that you can get rich doing them, either. Money can do much, it can make many things possible, but it can’t make you happy.

No one can answer for you the question of your vocation. Only you can hear the voice of your calling. No one can tell you what you ought to do with your life. Ministry wasn’t my first choice of a vocation, but I discovered that it brought together most of my interests and passions in a way that nothing else does. That doesn’t mean that I wake up every day thrilled to be a minister! But more often than not, and more frequently as I grow older, being a minister feels like the real me.

In his well known poem "The Road Not Taken," Robert Frost wrote,

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Finally, I want to reassure you that more often than you might think, one’s true vocation is only found by trial and error: remember Fatima? In other words, sometimes we find our true vocation only because of our failures. Unfortunately, we live in a society where success is, if not everything, then almost everything. There isn’t a lot of room for failure. But the fact is, we can never learn much if we never fail or experience hardship or disappointment along the way.

And the reality is that we all make mistakes. We all do stupid things once in a while. We all take wrong turns along the journey of life, but often these wrong turns turn out to be the only way for us to reach our final destinations. We all have regrets about the road not taken. It is essential that we don’t despair because the way is hard or because we can’t always see where we are headed: life has to be hard sometimes in order that we might learn some of life’s most important lessons. As someone has said with truth, "Be kind. Almost everyone one you meet is fighting a hard battle."

If kindness were the only thing we learned along the way, that in itself would be sufficient for a lifetime. May we, in our struggles to hear the voice of our own calling, learn that lesson of kindness, particularly toward ourselves. And may we, on whatever road we have taken , find ourselves more and more living the life we were meant to be. God bless. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock