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By Rev. David Takahashi Morris
A teacher of mine told a story about visiting one of the villages of potters that dot the North Carolina countryside. He said he watched one potter at work, chatting with him. My teacher noticed that the potter made one bowl after another as he talked, perfectly shaped, delicate, almost identical. He tried to watch one from start to finish, to see all the steps from the shapeless mass of clay hitting the wheel to the bowl being placed on the shelf to await glazing. But the conversation distracted him, and he would notice that a new bowl was being started and realize that he'd missed some part of the process.
He said, "You work very quickly."
The potter answered, "Well, I've been doing this for 27 years."
"If you don't mind my asking, how long does it take you to make a pot?"
The potter picked up another piece of clay, put it on the wheel, and looked up at him. "27 years," he said.
Twenty-seven years to make every pot. A lifetime of study and skill, the simple but not easy gestures repeated over and over and over until they happen so smoothly and swiftly they can't be separated into their elements. But it's not just technique and practice. Twenty-seven years goes into every pot because artists feed their whole life into their work: Their sense of beauty; their ideas about what is important, their experiences of grace and suffering, celebration and mourning. The artist in Eric Carle's story drew himself into his work, and his work was filled with life and with all the beauty he had known.
We usually think of this harmony between life and work in connection with artists, artisans, and others in expressive professions-musicians, actors, storytellers. Yet others infuse their work with their lives as well: teachers, scholars, doctors, social workers, ministers, and many more. How wonderful, we think, to have an occupation you love, a job that allows you to truly be yourself and express yourself in the work you do every day. If we don't feel that way about our own work, we wish we did. If we do feel that way, we're grateful-sometimes.
The truth is of course a little different from the romantic picture painted by the artist or the potter, the romantic image of the teacher surrounded by avid and adoring students, of the doctor as a healing presence entering the room, of the minister living day to day in the presence of the sacred. It's not that those images aren't true to life; they are, sometimes. I am enriched and humbled and delighted by the wonder of what happens when we gather together. I have the same feeling when I'm teaching or counseling, celebrating the joining of lives, or making space for beginning to say farewell to lost loved ones. In my work I'm blessed with moments when the flawed self I am and the better self I aspire to be come together in the service of something that is holy to me. In those moments, my life is in my work.
But there are other times too, times when it's hard to think of work as an expression of our life experience and aspirations. Some days, work is just work.
It's true for all the professions we imagine as life-fulfilling: Ask any doctor who's wrestling with an HMO over whether an asthmatic patient needs a chest x-ray. Ask any teacher who's twisting a curriculum to fit the timetables demanded by standardized high-stakes tests. Ask any rabbi, priest or minister who's wondering with the Building and Grounds committee chairs why it's so hard to find new volunteers to blow leaves or stay for a Sunday spruce-up.
Yet even when the truth is less inspiring than we imagine, for some of us work is-for better and for worse-an expression of our lives. Who we are, who we have been, and who we hope to become are woven into what we do.
The word for this kind of work is: vocation. Though vocation is often used synonymously with career or profession, its roots are different. The ancient origins of the word vocation are all words for voice, for call, for speaking. A vocation is not a job, although it may be the work that we do. To echo a Quaker saying, vocation is our life speaking through our work.
Religion writer Sam Keen says four criteria help to identify a vocation: A vocation has a discipline-a set of skills and practices that have to be cultivated with practice and time; a vocation gives us delight when we are truly engaged in it; a vocation uses our natural gifts and abilities; and a vocation is a meeting between our own life, desires, and values and the deep need of the world.
Vocation may arise from our gifts; just as often it arises from our wounds. We may work with young people because our own youth was filled with loving and wise guides and companions-or because it wasn't. We may devote ourselves to ending hunger because our own life has been privileged and we wish that gift for others-or because the gnawing of an empty belly and the tears of hungry children are a real and painful memory for us. We may work in a healing profession because our own lives are healthy and sunlit-or because we have been scarred by illness, by depression, by loss.
The Quaker educator and writer Parker Palmer says that a vocation isn't something we pursue, but something we are called to by our own true nature. "Let your life speak," he says; but he doesn't mean we can simply do whatever we want. "Our nature makes us like organisms in an ecosystem," he says. "We thrive in some roles and relationships and we wither and die in others."
The roles and relationships we thrive in are not limited to any specific list of professions and callings. In an essay called "Breakfast at the Victory," the philosopher James Carse describes Ernie, the owner and cook of a small Manhattan grill. Ernie has only one leg, and in years behind his counter he has pared his movements to the minimum, a sort of twirling dance between the coffee maker, toaster and griddle that somehow results in plates of food on the counter, all the while taking part in five or six ongoing conversations. For a few months just before I entered seminary, I worked as a tile setter's assistant with a master setter from Southern California. Bob kept life at bay with clouds of profanity and cigarette smoke, but when he was visualizing a layout that would create a complicated and beautiful pattern of color and shape, or setting the tile on a three-walled tub-which took him about half an hour if I'd done my prep job right-he was completely alive to what he was doing right then. This is different from just a sense of responsibility or a commitment to getting the job done right. It is love and life, and you know when you're in its presence whether you're watching a baseball player chasing down a ground ball for a double play, a moving van driver stacking an impossible number of boxes on the truck, a surgeon holding a heart in her hands, or a violinist holding an audience in thrall.
Where do you find a sense of vocation?
Perhaps you've found it in work you are already doing. Some of us have the wisdom or the great good fortune to discover our vocation early in our working lives, and to find work that welcomes our true selves and nurtures our natural growth. If this has been your experience, welcome it, and accept it for the great gift it is.
But perhaps this has not been your experience. Perhaps you push yourself out the door every day to spend another endless series of hours in a job that feels too small for your soul. It's worth asking whether you might be withholding something of yourself, something that might make the difference between drudgery and delight in the work you're doing now. I know I have to ask myself daily, whether I'm holding something back. Am I angry about doing this because I shouldn't be doing it, or because I don't want it to matter to me? We often resist hearing the call of vocation. But there is an old saying that the secret to having what you want is learning to want what you have.
But perhaps you really are doing work that is not hospitable to you, in roles and relationships that are not your natural habitat. Many of us don't have the good fortune to match our occupation with our vocation. What will you do about it?
Perhaps you can leave-but perhaps you can't, at least not right now. Discovering our vocation does not automatically mean we are ready to drop everything else in our lives and follow it. Some vocations never bring a living wage, let alone enough to support a family, and some require costly or lengthy preparations. Our vocation may never become our occupation.
But vocation must be served, for it is who we are. For most of us, there are ways to serve our vocation outside the office or store or factory, outside the hours that belong to the time clock and the balance sheet. We can give volunteer hours; we can block out some time for our own pursuits; we can take a class or teach one, we can embark on a self-directed course of reading or practice. It isn't enough-it's never enough-but it is something. Julia Cameron imagines a frustrated musician who says, "I can only practice a couple of hours a week. Do you know how old I'll be by the time I really learn to play the piano?" "Yes," Cameron answers, "Exactly as old as you'll be if you never learn."
Perhaps you're in an even tougher place. Some of us find ourselves working for institutions that want to substitute their definition of value, or ethics, for our own. Are you are trapped in an occupation that does violence to your deepest values and your sense of self? When we're caught in this way, we may not have any real choice but to leave. It may seem impossible-it may be impossible for a while. But if we don't find our way out, our spirits will rebel, our energy drain away, our resentments emerge either in our work-or worse, in our relationships with our families and friends. As the hours of the American work week creep up and up every year, this issue becomes more and more critical. If our work has no room for our life, it will gradually sap our life away from us. So we must make a change.
"Let your life speak."
Where do you find your sense of vocation? Where do your life, your gifts, and your delight intersect with the needs of the world?
The artist does not set out to draw a whole world, a whole life story for himself. He starts with a star, and the world and his life lead him on from there. Where is the star that's waiting for your hand to bring it into being?
Don't look for the most virtuous, noble calling you can think of. Don't assume you must uproot yourself and your family, sell all your possessions, and become a migrant graduate student or an itinerant computer programmer. Give yourself time, and quiet, to listen to the voice of your life, the voice of vocation. What do you wish you were doing right now? What are three things you can do today that will lead toward it-on whatever timetable the Universe offers? Pick up a hammer and nails. Pick up the phone. Pick up a brush. Pick up a book. Just a little thing, just one little step. The Universe will offer you the next step-and the timetable.
Let your life speak. Hear the voice of vocation. Answer its call.
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