I have spent much of my life answering the questions "what am I here for?" and "what am I called to do?" In many respects, I think these are actually the most central questions to Christian Ethics. Most people allow their lives to be governed, from the day they achieve memorable consciousness until the day they lose it, by the force of inertia. This, I think, is the concrete manifestation of "original sin," and I think all other sinful behaviour stems from it. The man who is unhappy with his marriage and cheats on his wife does so because it is easier to find a mistress than repair a marriage. It was easier for Bernie Madoff to run a ponzi scheme than to make good investment decisions for his clients. Genuine success in business is a lot of hard work. Inertia, and its human personality trait, laziness, tell us there is an easier way. Addiction to drugs and alcohol are another clear example of inert sin, as they provide an ersatz solution to every one of life's problems, all wrapped up in one simple little substance. Vocation, quite literally, means "a calling." It is the thing that we were born to be doing. But vocation is not just a calling, but a calling away. Rarely are we born into the circumstances in which we are to perform our calling. Rarely do we grow into it as a natural process. This mode of living and thinking is perhaps the most grave manifestation of our original sin. After all, what could be more offensive to our Creator than to let the gifts He gave us rust and decay? Our tendency in life is to grow wildly, like a tree, with a branch shooting out here and another there, weeds growing at the base of our trunks. Our lives instead should be like a bonzai tree, carefully twisted and turned in well-planned detail, and responding to the unexpected curves as they come about, constantly uprooting any of the weeds that may inhibit our growth, and cutting off branches that are bound to die or have died already. Such intentionality has been the hallmark of greatness throughout history, but it is among the rarest of all humanity's deeds. Responding to our respective vocations, then, requires an intentional confrontation with our own laziness. We must consciously eschew the easy path, we must each day fight the natural tendency of regressing to the mean, and as a result bear and endure a tremendous level of legitimate suffering. In most cases, we must make the decision to leave our families and friends, the comfort of our childhood circumstances, and in many cases, we must even leave our homeland itself. We tend to have two unique problems when it comes to responding to our vocation. The first is that often our vocation is for many years unclear to us. We may have inclinations at various points in time, and sometimes we are even presented with a sort of "divine hint." But the process of discerning our true vocation can be long and arduous. For the lucky few, the brilliant physicist, the prodigy violinist, the magnificent artist, vocation is clear. For the rest of us, it rarely is so simple. Sometimes, too, we look for a vocation that fits neatly into a job description. But we are born with so many talents that such a narrow focus will not do our calling justice. It is for those of us who seem to be pulled in many directions at once that the discernment of vocation can be most difficult. Then, we are likely to suffer a long process of trial and error, of fine tuning, and in some cases making wholesale changes, abandoning a path that we once thought was ours, and diverting completely anew.
The other problem is that so often we know what our vocation is, and yet we ignore it. Too many painful decisions, too much risk, too much worry, "what will people say?" and all of the other excuses our inert innerself makes for not striking out on our own personal life journey. Common also is the unpleasant truth that pursuing our vocation means a lot of unfulfilled dreams in life. When we set our hopes and expectations on what we are supposed to do, there is virtually no chance it will be achieved in our lifetime, and we do not see the benefit of what comes after. Moses did not live to see the promised land. King Solomon described the vocational problem thusly,
"Concerning the condition of the sons of men, God tests them, that they may see that they themselves are like animals." For what happens to the sons of men also happens to animals; one thing befalls them: as one dies, so dies the other. Surely, they all have one breath; man has no advantage over animals, for all is vanity. All go to one place: all are from the dust, and all return to dust. Who knows the spirit of the sons of men, which goes upward, and the spirit of the animal, which goes down to the earth? So I perceived that nothing is better than that a man should rejoice in his own works, for that is his heritage. For who can bring him to see what will happen after him?
We have only a finite period of time on the planet, and it is well that we are kept unaware of how much time it is. Parkinson's law tells us that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." By not knowing how much time we have left, we are forced to assume (if we are rational) that it could come to an end at any time. As such, we must behave as if our vocation must be pursued with the greatest urgency. Urgency requires us then to prioritize our activities and behave strategically. When building a house, most people are constrained to operate within a budget during construction. Since in most cases, many of the resources used for completion are purchased on credit, the person is also constrained by time as well is finance. Our lives operate in much the same way if we desire to pursue our calling. Each idle minute that ticks away without our focus and dedication to that thing which we are meant to do is a moment of sin, of giving in to our nature of inertia. This does not mean that we are not to enjoy any leisure at all. We must orient ourselves to a proper balance of focus and relief. The Judaic notion of the Sabbath (which Christians have all but come to ignore, and which Jews tend to ignore the purpose of in giving in to a legalistic view of it) recognizes that we cannot work without rest. "Sabbath" indeed shares a root with the word "sabbatical" and we all need short intermissions each week combined with more infrequent periods where we disconnect, reflect, and refresh ourselves. But I fear that in the current era, we have forgotten how to work as well as rest. We never dedicate our attention to anything. We are constantly divided, our minds running in many directions at once. What with email, facebook, twitter, text messaging, phone calls, the 24 hour news cycle, and the crisis of the day in our jobs and families, what time is there for real focus on our calling? And how little time is left for true rest? In the Anglican liturgy, all of the various forms of the penitential order include a request for forgiveness for the things we have left undone. Most people probably read this and think about specific interactions where they perhaps could have been more helpful, or other micro-instances of the sin of omission. Rarely do I think we really consider the meta-context of our life and calling, in that every day we allow inertia to prevent us from doing the things necessary to respond to our calling. "The burden" of this, as the prayer goes "is intolerable." Or at least it should be.
The beauty of responding to one's calling is that there is no "freeloader" problem. In many aspects of life, people refrain from doing certain things because they are afraid somebody else might get a free ride. But in this case, there is no such problem. The world assuredly is enriched when one of its inhabitants follows his or her dream, but nobody will enjoy the unique blessing of living life with a purpose unless he himself is pursuing his own calling. There are approximately 7 billion people living in the world today. That is more people than have lived in the entirety of human history combined. How many of us pursue each day our vocation in life? How might the world be radically changed if but 1% of us did? And how would each of our lives be more fulfilled if we did so?
Posted via email from The Invisible Sand
