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"Ask me whether what I have done is my life."
the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me.
And in the spirit of the poet, I wonder: What am I meant to do? W...
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me-it meant living a life like that of Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks or Mahatma Gandhi or Dorothy Day, a life of high purpose.
"Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent."
There may be moments in life when we are so unformed that we need to use values like an exoskeleton to keep us from collapsing. But something is very wrong if such moments recur often in adulthood. Trying to live someone else's life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail-and may even do great damage.
Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about-quite apart from what I would like it to be about-or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.
That insight is hidden in the word vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin for "voice." Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling the who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at
the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live-but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.
The difficulty is compounded by the fact that from our first days in school, we are taught to listen to everything and everyone but ourselves, to take all our clues about living from the people and powers around us.
We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.
What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been!
How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity-the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation.
The deepest vocational question is not "What ought I to do with my life?" It is the more elemental and demanding "Who am I? What is my nature?"
The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. "Faking it" in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation.
It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one's nature, and it will always fail.
True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as "the place where your deep gla...
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As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal
case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race.
Vocation at its deepest level is, "This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone else and don't fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling."
I have become clear about at least one thing: self-care is never a selfish act-it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give it the care it
requires, we do so not only for ourselves but for the many others whose lives we touch.
