Did you have a time when you asked what you would do with your life? Did you find an answer, then stop asking? I thought, when I was younger, that’s how it worked. People got jobs and that settled it. Fireman. Teacher. Pilot.
As a college student, back when it wasn’t weird to be unsettled, when we were supposed to be dreaming about who we would become, I wrote a poem reflecting on this question, arriving at an answer of sorts: “To be loved, to love, to matter, to be part of something bigger.” Yes, my current self says, but, could you please provide some details?
Questions of vocation still provoke me, sometimes sending me tail-chasing, wondering what to do with my one wild and precious life. After all, even being settled in a job doesn’t fully resolve that. That now-ubiquitous phrase can land not as a playful invitation but as pressure. OK MARY OLIVER (and carriers of cutesy tote bags everywhere) YES I KNOW I JUST HAVE ONE, OK! I know it is precious. All the more reason to strive to get it right. Yet with so many possibilities, it can feel impossible to commit. In a world where so much is broken, the yearning to respond to everything can lead to paralysis. What should you do? Sound familiar?
This is the dilemma faced by Esme, heroine of the novel The Dictionary of Lost Words and a lover of words. Raised in the shadows of the great project of compiling the Oxford English Dictionary, on the eve of World War I, she literally sits beneath the table where her father and other editors work to review and define words. One falls, rejected. She collects it. Bondmaid. What does it mean? Why is it excluded?
This leads her on a journey from the cozy confines of the room where academics draft proofs to the streets and markets, where she begins to catch words that are not deemed suitable for the O.E.D., because they do not have sufficient academic or literary province. They haven’t been written down because they are used by the people who don’t feature in what society records, largely women, often poor. She makes it her business to pay attention to these words and to gather them, ensuring they, and the people who speak them, are not lost. Meanwhile, the work to gain women the vote goes on all around her—she sees women like her protest, even get arrested for their efforts for the cause, while she barely manages to discreetly stuff a few flyers in post boxes after dark. Why can’t she take a stand like the women around her?
Her godmother Ditte counsels a broader view: “Once the question of women’s political suffrage has been dealt with, less obvious inequalities will need to be exposed. Without realising it, you are already working for this cause. As grandfather said, it will be a long game. Play a position you are good at, and let others play theirs.”
This wide-angle perspective reminds me of the way New Testament writers describe the interconnection of Christians across time and space as a body. More than a diverse team, the body touches the world as a collective. When you, my Christian brother, love your enemy or feed the hungry, in a kind of mystical way, so do I. (And soberly, when you harm a child or belittle a stranger, so do I, but this is a topic for another post.)
The suggestion of a grand tapestry that the little threads of our various contributions are woven into is a helpful antidote to the indecision of my overthinking. It reminds me the part I am called to in any given season likely has implications I cannot foresee. It frees me from the manic urge to try and play shortstop, pitcher, outfield and umpire all at once. The question of what position shall I play? becomes less pressing. The question increasingly becomes, how do I live the way I am supposed to?
To this, Jesuit priest Joseph Whelan answers, fall in love:
Nothing is more practical than
finding God, that is, than
Falling in Love
in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination,
will affect everything.
It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.
When I zoom back in from the grand tapestry, to the little threads of individual interactions, actions, words, I find, just as the humble cell is the building block of life, the foundational thread of any grand tapestry is love. Janet Hagberg, author of The Critical Journey, writes of how her mission statement as a business leader evolved as she went deeper into a journey of spiritual growth. (I’ve leant the book out at the minute so I can’t offer the exact quote.) It started as something like “lead effectively to achieve key results with compassion and integrity.” The next year it had become something like “lead with compassion and integrity.” Over time it kept evolving toward the abstract: “simply love.”
That makes it sound simple—it’s not. There’s difficult work in adjusting the scope from the micro back out again and discerning how “love must be made real in act,” to quote T.S. Eliot, the concrete actions that weave it into a bigger story. But zooming in and remembering the base fabric of love gives me a foothold, imbues small, hidden acts with dignity and purpose.
All this preoccupation with my own vocation feels a bit self-indulgent. Clearly other things matter more. Enough navel-gazing. But if the one wild and precious life is our source material, finite, limited edition, vocation is how we make use of it in the world. To wrestle with vocation is to wrestle with how we show up in the world, how we use that precious source material to love. “We see our vocation then, however prosaic, as a form of Charity,” writes Evelyn Underhill, using “Charity” as to mean self-giving love; vocation is “simply a call to express the creative love infused into us, in this or that way. For Charity introduces the soul into a vast organism, built of all striving, loving spirits; an organism which is destined to be possessed and used by God, for creative and redemptive work within the world.” If that’s true, perhaps reflecting on my vocation is one of the most un-self-preoccupied things I can do.
What position do I play? I’m not always sure. But I’m sure I always ought to strive to play it with love. Maybe my college self was onto something.
***
One more thing about love: it takes work.
“The fire of Charity, lit in the soul, needs careful tending. The first tiny flame must not be allowed to die down for lack of fuel; and we may have to feed it with things we should prefer to keep for ourselves.”
– Evelyn Underhill, the House of the Soul.
If you are seeking to keep the flame of love alive in your soul, don’t do it alone. Find a little fuel in the upcoming Advent retreats, virtual or in person. I’d love to see you there! Click the image below for more details & to register.
