Is the life you are living the life you are meant to live? There
is a brief Hasidic tale that divulges the human tendency to want to be something other
than what we are and the importance of becoming one's own true self. Rabbi Zusya, when he
was a very old man, said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me, 'Why were you
not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?'"
We arrive in this world with gifts, personality and proclivities. We are not blank
slates to be molded and manipulated into what we are not. We are born with our own gifted
form. We are born with what the biblical faith calls the image of God that is in each and
every person. We arrive with original giftedness.
Friday night we had a staff party at our house. Julia Neuder, now three months old,
took appropriate center attention. It may be genetic, given her Dad's flair for the
dramatic. As her parents know better than anyone else, Julia's personality is shining
through. She has likes and dislikes. She has clear ideas about what she does and doesn't
want to do. She has a distinctive way of smiling and crying and preferences about how to
be held. She favors redheads: Julia's a smart kid. Julia was born with certain
preferences.
In 20 years, the original gifts with which she has been blessed will shine through or,
somehow by choice or circumstance, be blocked. But no one can deny that she arrived in
this world with a certain set of predilections, personality traits and gifts. She has her
own voice.
The question before Julia is the same that is before all of us throughout our life
journey, "Will our lives reflect who we are created to be? Will our lives bear
witness to the original giftedness that is in us? We believe we are created in the image
of God and therefore are precious, cherished and infinitely worthy. Is the life we are
living the life we are meant to live?
As many of us know, it is possible to live a life that is not our own. For some there
are external obstacles that block living life fully as we were created to be. Systemic
prejudices block our developing our full capacities. These are the "isms" that
tear apart the human psyche with the dagger of bigotry and fear: racism, sexism, ageism
and homophobia.
Our original giftedness may be blocked from full expression by macroeconomic forces. A
changing economy leaves you high and dry and you find yourself against your will picking
up the pieces. Someone higher up the food chain hands down a decision that blocks the path
you know is truly yours to trod. A boss's order to downsize, a parent's decision to
relocate, a spouse's announcement of divorce, a physical accident or some other
circumstance may block your path.
Exterior forces beyond our control may block the full expression of our original
giftedness, but it is our insides, our internal beliefs and attitudes that more
significantly shape whether we live the lives we are meant to live. It is matters of the
spirit that most shape our destiny. Will we live in the belief that we are children of a
loving, creative God who has blessed us abundantly or will we not? Let us draw our
attention to our interior self and the obstacles there that block expression of our
God-giftedness.
We may be a survivor of exclusion or hate and choose to allow our pain to turn to
bitterness. We may allow the perpetrators of hate to steal our hope. We may accommodate,
settle for less, and allow our rage at injustice to turn inward because it hurts too much
to keep on hurting. We go numb. We deny our original giftedness because of our internal
beliefs about exclusion, hate or the absence of love.
We may deny our giftedness because we have learned the unfortunate habit of hiding
behind appearances. All around us appearance sells, fuels the economy and seems to select
some of our political leadership. Living for appearances is an illusion. It is as fleeting
as summer's beauty. Appearances are paper thin, but the soul is deep. Lying to souls
through false appearances does great violence to them.
We may choose a career that we think will make our mate, parents or some other
authority figure happy because it looks good to them, but we discover sometime during the
dark night of the soul that we'd rather be an artist than accountant, a mechanic than
merchandiser, an entrepreneur than engineer. We fear removing the mask. Imprisoned in
appearances, our gifts are locked up, and our soul is compromised. Souls don't like
compromise. They fight back with boredom, anger and depression.
We figure that appearance, money or power will establish happiness, but there is a
nagging suspicion that something more, something truer, something of the heart is gasping
for breath, yearning to see the light of day. Our original, unique giftedness is pushing,
pushing, pushing, seeking to emerge from the womb of God's creation in us despite our
fears that would block its birth.
Sadly, even the teachings of the church can block our living the life we are meant to
live as creative children of our creative God. Most of us have been told for years that we
should live up to the highest ideals of humanity: to be perfect, to be compassionate, to
be prophetic, to be like Mother Teresa, Dr. King, Dorothy Day and Caesar Chavez. While
you're at it, go ahead and be like Jesus Christ, himself. After all, isn't this what we
are all striving for? To live up to the most exacting standards of our Christian
tradition? Infinitely compassionate, perpetually hope filled, unwavering in faith and
disciplined in good deeds?
We strive to be like the heroines and heroes of humanity's ideals and stack up piles of
shoulds and oughts, lists of do's and don'ts. We look up to paragons of virtue and masters
of morality and hear one more sermonic harangue not just from the parents' mouth or the
pulpit's height but here inside, inside the head and the stomach where we store our pain.
"Do this and do that and go out into the world in peace and be like Mother Teresa and
Desmond Tutu!" We go home to the stack of bills needing payment or start preparing
dinner for the hungry mouths that demand to be fed and say to ourselves, "I can't do
that, but I should." We eat guilt for dessert and shame for breakfast because we
can't ever live these great lives, while we tell ourselves, "We should. We really
should."
We do want our lives to count for something. We want to contribute something that is
lasting to the world. We want to live our life so that our inner self, our spiritual self,
the place of our soul is in harmony with who we are and what we do. So the question
persists, "Is the life I am living, the life I am meant to live?
In classical Christian parlance, to address this question is to engage in the
discipline of discerning vocation. Vocation is not a job or a career or a choice of
college majors. Vocation is a calling. But the call is not from some exterior voice or
external demand or outside expectation whether from a parent, pulpit, teacher or book.
Vocational call is from within the self and from God. Discerning vocation concerns hearing
an inner voice, an inner calling, listening to the place deep within where God is calling
to you in your original giftedness. We - the church, you and I - are in the business of
discerning Christian vocation.
Vocation in its Latin root means voice. Remember Julia's distinctive voice? Discerning
vocation is the process of giving voice to the interior depths where God is at work in us.
How do we listen to this voice? How do we listen to its whisper? How do we amplify its
tone so that it is clear and pure and perfect?
First: come to understand that vocation is something that sounds in all of us. All of
us. Not just the professional clergy, but all of us: young and old, whether we are a
student with our whole future ahead of us, or in a nursing home bed seemingly confined to
few choices. Vocation is for the retired, those gainfully employed and those who are not.
Vocation is for those at rest and for those who scramble so hard and fast they barely have
time to think. All of us have that divine voice within, if we listen to it, if we care for
it, if we choose to listen with ears of faith.
How do we listen to that inner voice? Oh, would that it be easy, we pray. It is not
easy. In the mystery of the human journey and God's providence, we spend our lifetime
seeking to discern our vocation. At times we fully know the inner voice that says that the
life we are living is in full accord with the life we are meant to live, but at other
times the task will be hard, the path shadowy and the way occluded.
Parker Palmer, a Quaker theologian and gifted writer, says that a first step to
discovering this inner voice is to reject the notion that vocation "comes from a
voice external to ourselves, a voice of moral demand that asks us to become someone we are
not yet someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach" (Parker
Palmer, "Let Your Life Speak"). Dr. Palmer says the notion that vocation is
somehow caught from forces outside ourselves is rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood and
poor theology that some forms of Christianity have been dispensing for millennia. The
classical doctrine of original sin can be twisted to mean that the sinful self will always
be "selfish" unless corrected by external forces of virtue, authority and
control. We pin up a list of virtues from the latest bestseller or the Ten Commandments
and think that somehow we will keep raging selfishness and cultural chaos in check. We try
harder and harder to be good girls and good boys believing in a simplistic moralism that
doesn't work. It never has. It never will because the motivation to do better is driven by
fear not love. Such moralism sells books and may elect Presidents but it doesn't bring
joy. Vocation received from outside oneself can only lead to disappointment, guilt and a
type of violence to self. Reject it.
Authentic vocation is discerned through a different practice and a new type of
understanding. Christian vocation is not an accomplishment to be achieved, but a gift that
is received. Vocation is not scrambling for the gold pot at the end of the rainbow, but
accepting the treasure of true inner beauty that we already possess by virtue of being
uniquely created in the image of God.
Vocation comes from listening to the voice "in here" where each one of us is
called to be the person we are born to be. One of the best ways to discover our voice is
to go back and remember the gifts we had as a child.
From the beginning we are given clues as to who our authentic self is. For example, as
a child I was always drawn to the world of ideas. I read encyclopedias, built rockets and
created dozens of projects from building a duck pond to designing a still with my
chemistry set. I read newspapers at age seven, sold guppies to classmates at nine, debated
theology and politics at age eleven, and constructed and raced go-karts at age fourteen.
Throughout my childhood I imagined grand fantasy stories, big whoppers. A clue to my sense
of vocation is that I better be in a place where grand ideas are discussed, stories told,
projects created and I can exercise my entrepreneurial spirit and love of action. Place me
where I can use those gifts and I will be good for the world and good for myself. Your own
childhood will give you similar clues.
The details of your childhood may be hard to reconstruct, but your early life gives
important clues to your vocation that too often gets buried by the process of growing up
and the inevitable pressure to fit into slots, gain social acceptance, and conform to
expectations at school, home, work and church. Recalling and cherishing the early clues in
our lives of what brought us joy is essential for claiming the gifts that God has placed
in us whether we are nine, 29 or 99.
Another key step in claiming our original giftedness and vocation is to decide that we
will act in our exterior lives only in ways that are congruent with the values we hold
deeply on the inside. When we act out of inner integrity, we claim a power that is God's
creative power in us. When our outer deeds conform to our inner being, God dwells within
and our gifts flourish with power. When we cast off the thirst for external award and
approval, we discover peace. We are filled with the knowledge that because we are
infinitely loved by our Creator, there is nothing that can damage us. We choose to live
courageously, not because we are never afraid, but because we are not controlled by our
fear. God's gift of faith in us will see us through.
The God I have come to believe in is a wonderfully creative, creating God. This God
creates in you and me all that is necessary for a full, complete and satisfying life. This
God does not expect us to live some abstract ideal beyond the ordinary circumstances of
our common life. This God does expect us to live fully with the gifts we have been given
since we emerged from our mother's womb. To this God I dedicate all that I am: my gifts,
my joys, my limitations, my life. Through the blessed original giftedness that is in each
one of you, I ask as a brother in the faith, that you do so as well. Thanks be to the God
who gifts us with all we need, who gifts us abundantly for the good of ourselves and our
world through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen
