Peter Edman
We often think of calling or vocation as something we either choose or discern from our talents. This is how I approached the issue when I was younger and my friends and I were asking what we should be doing with our lives. But maybe there’s a different way to look at it, another dimension we need to consider.
I’ve recently been conversing via e-mail with Dr. Gilbert Meilaender at Valparaiso University, and he called to my attention the “letters to Derek” that he published in the Christian Century in the summer of 2003. I was able to find one on the web and found that, as often happens when I read something from Dr. Meilaender, I was presented with a new approach to a topic—in this case, calling. The quote below is from “Living into Commitments,” the second of these open letters to his adopted son.
Much too often we suppose that the way to live is to think through what we want to do and then figure out how to do it. People talk constantly about setting goals. . . . Thinking this way does not really prepare us well for living as responsible people, because the truth is that life seldom works like that.
Much of the time we’re already committed in important ways before we really decide what our “goals” should be. And, because we’re already committed, other people have expectations based on those commitments. The trick of life is not to figure out who I am and then decide what sorts of commitments such a person should make. The trick is to become the person who can carry out the commitments I’ve already made. Don’t imagine that the point of life is to set goals. Think, instead, that its point is to be faithful to the commitments already built into your life. People who make goals central are people who think the most important things in life are consciously chosen. People who make faithfulness central are people who realize that, quite often, our obligations come to us in ways that are unexpected, unchosen, and even unwanted.
Meilaender suggests that there is something fundamentally human, fundamentally joyful, in this mystery. It reminds me in another context of Chesterton’s essay, “A Defense of Rash Vows.” (Oddly, when I looked this up just now, the first link was to an abridgement presented by computer columnist and science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, who posted it just about the time that the Letters to Derek came out. Must have been something in the air that year.) Anyway, while Chesterton is talking about choice, a large part of his point and Meilaender’s is that our fullest humanity—which has to do with honor, integrity, responsibilty, humility, courage—seems to be tied to something other than control and planning. There’s a givenness, a need to trust to God’s providence. And the real thrill comes, paradoxically, only with commitment.
3 Responses (comments are closed) • Fodder, Meaning and Calling, Thu 25 May 2006
Meilaender so cogently expresses the truth that life is first and finally a gift, and then it is a task.
The Greek playwrights understood this when they insisted that all stories begin “in medias res"--in the midst of things.
Another Meilaender quote from the same series: “Sometimes this doesn’t work out, though. Then we have to remember that we are not just bodies who have to accept whatever happens, but we are also free to step in and try to help when things go wrong. That’s what adoption is for, and that’s why you are adopted. Your parents just couldn’t take care of you, and so you needed to be taken into another home where you could have a mother and a father. You needed to have parents who could and would love you unconditionally, for without that kind of love no child can flourish (as, indeed, you have flourished).
So the “natural” connection of parents and children is important, but human beings are not only “natural” but also “historical” beings. I was not your biological father, but after you’d been living with us for a few years--after we’d shared that much history--I had nevertheless become your true father.”
Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
P. J. O’Rourke
al mcdonald: It will be ineresting to see other views and elaborations.....
Dan Russ: Meilaender so cogently expresses the truth that life is first and finally a gift, and then it is a task.…
TTF Staff: Another Meilaender quote from the same series: “Sometimes this doesn’t work out, though. Then we have to remember that we…
A Cultural Manifesto and Showcase
China, Tibet, and the Olympics
The Rise of Global Civil Society: Building Communities and Nations from the Bottom Up by Don Eberly.
A sweeping and hopeful overview of the extraordinary new forces that are prying open closed societies and cultivating democratic norms across the globe.
Orthodoxy: Georgetown’s Father Schall reviews G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy on its 100 year anniversary. “In coming to believe in Christianity, Chesterton, as he tells us, did not read a single Christian book in the process. Rather, he read book after book of those who maintained that Christianity could not possibly be true. After he had read many of these tractates, he suddenly realized that the intellectual opponents of Christianity were constantly contradicting themselves about what they were opposing. Chesterton, the most logical of men, figured that anything so odd as to be opposed for the exact opposite reasons must either be quite strange or, in fact, rather normal and true.” A helpful introduction to a lovely book. (James V. Schall, SJ, InsideCatholic.com , 2008 05 05)
Where Were Obama’s Friends?: Friendship under fire: “As for the supersized candidates, what strikes one most about them is their ‘aloneness.’ They look so solitary. Indeed, it is possible that the old and honorable notion of ‘standing with’ a candidate like Obama simply didn’t occur to his famous supporters this week. Everyone has become used to watching celebrity stars and athletes take it in the neck on their own. Even someone running for the nation’s presidency looks like just another personal crack-up.” Makes one pause. (Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal , 2008 05 01)
There’s no way you’re going to convince me: Catholic professor Scott Carson covers the current debates on evil between N T Wright and Bart Ehrman on Beliefnet: “[H]aving had a look at this most recent exchange I have to say that it continues to astound me how simplistic and thoughtless the popular treatment of the problem has become. . . . It’s as if generations of sophisticated and complex theological and philosophical argument amount to nothing when compared to the emotional attitudes of a single individual living in a highly particularized time and place. . . . Just as atheists and agnostics are often—perhaps way too often—tempted to assume that believers only believe for emotional or psychological reasons, so too, it seems rather obvious to me, every non-believer almost certainly has emotional and psychological reasons for not believing that will trump any and every legitimate argument posed against them.” (extensive links from the article to the primary sources) (An Examined Life , 2008 04 27)
The Way We Weren’t: “The fifties really were a time when the culture broadly affirmed Christianity as a Good Thing. I was there. I saw it; I heard it. And yet some kind of demurral is strongly indicated: some sign of recognition that no human society, whatever its good intentions and methods, has lived unburdened, unencumbered by the crushing weight of human fallenness. Good as life may appear to have been in the cities and universities of France and Italy in the thirteenth century, or amid the sweaty fervor of the camp meetings in nineteenth-century America, or among the fierce faith of the emancipators, always human pride and general nuttiness were there to spoil the broth.” (William Murchison, in Touchstone , 2008 04 23)
• Not on Sale (2008 04 14)
• Seven New Deadly Sins, Suitably Updated (2008 04 10)
• The Pope Comes to America (2008 04 09)
• Both Read the Same Bible (2008 04 09)
• Muslims Outnumber World’s Catholics (2008 03 31)
on 2006 06 20
It will be ineresting to see other views and elaborations.....