Life as a Summons with David Brooks

            Lately, a book keeps coming to my mind that I think has some strong points on character that I have found helpful. I thought I would share one of the strongest points of the book.

            David Brooks (The Road to Character, 2015) refers to two different classes of virtues we write in the course of our lives. One class is the resume virtues. The resume is the career-oriented, ambitious side of our nature. We want to conquer. We want to build, create, produce, and discover things. We have high status and win victories. This resume focuses upon the external matters. We are creative and savor our accomplishments. We want to venture forth into the world and away from home. Brooks will opine that resume virtues in our culture suggests that our accomplishments can provide a deep sense of satisfaction. However, the desires of the resume virtues are infinite. We will never find genuine happiness and satisfaction focusing upon them. The second class of virtues is funeral virtues. They are the virtues we hope people might highlight at our funeral. We want to obey a calling to serve the world. These are the inner virtues, the moral qualities we want to develop. We want more than to do well. We want to be good. We want to love intimately, to sacrifice self in the service of others, to live in obedience to some transcendent truth, to have a cohesive inner soul that honors creation and our possibilities. We might renounce worldly success and status for the sake of some sacred purpose. A primary question we answer in the funeral virtues is why we are here. We often want to return home, savor our roots, and savor the warmth of a family meal.

The art of living is learning to balance the building resume virtues as they confront the funeral virtues. Confrontation is the proper word, for the resume logic is utilitarian. Effort leads to reward. Practice makes perfect. Pursue self-interest. Maximize your utility. Impress the world. Cultivate your strengths. The funeral virtue is a moral logic. You have to give to receive, surrender to something outside yourself, and conquer your desire to get what you crave. Success can lead to pride. Failure can lead to great success. In order to fulfill yourself, forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.  Confront your weaknesses.

The art of living will involve cultivating humility, a “going down” before you can “rise up.” This concern for pride going before the fall is part of the journey. Yet, the journey does not mean they receive healing of their weaknesses. One can find a vocation or calling. One can commit to some long obedience and dedicate oneself to something that gives life its purpose.

In Chapter 2, Brooks refers to the importance of responding to a summons. He refers to the idea of discovering your passion, trusting feelings, and finding purpose. The assumption in such language is that the answer is inside of us. Therefore, the first step in the business plan of your life is to take an inventory of your gifts and passions, set your goals, and adopt a strategy to accomplish the goals. As William Ernest Henley put it in his poem “Invictus,” 

I am the master of my fate

I am captain of my soul.

 

It appeals to our sense of individual autonomy and fascination with self. It answers the question, “What do I want from life?” In contrast, Brooks says, if we focus upon the funeral virtues, the question to which we respond is “What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do?” We respond to the summons of life. It begins with our embeddedness in a community of people, circumstances, and inter-relations. Frederick Buechner famously put it, “At what points do my talents and deep gladness meet the world’s deep need?” Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), said that it did not matter what we expected from life, but what life expected from us. We need to stop asking about the meaning of life and instead think of ourselves as those of whom life asks questions. He concluded that life had given him a moral and intellectual assignment. Such a calling or vocation feels like the person has no choice in the matter. In reality, of course, any of us can run away. We will usually do so with dire results. If one pursues it, however, one’s life becomes unrecognizable without the calling.

            Much food for thought (I know that is a cliché, but maybe a good phrase here) at this stage of my life. I need to chew on it for a while. I thought it might be good spiritual food for you as well.

Responding to a Call

Circumstances can be challenging, and we can hear the call of God in it.

Some of you might remember the 2004 movie Cellular, in which someone kidnaps a woman, but she manages to use a broken telephone to call for help and reaches a total stranger. She begs him for help, hoping he will not hang up. Well, the movie has many action sequences along the way, but eventually Ryan rescues Jessica. She thanks him and asks him if there is anything she can do to repay him. At that point, the two are attractive enough that you think a hint of romance is coming next. He responds, “Yes, don’t ever call me again.”

            Receiving a call can be difficult.

            Most of us do not have circumstances as difficult as was the man in the movie. However, we have our difficult circumstances to face.

            In Hamlet, the play by Shakespeare, Hamlet experiences hesitation in a challenging call. 

The times are out of joint

oh cursed spite

that ever I was born to put them right. 

            Yet, out of such difficult circumstances, we may well experience a summons. In that case, we are no so much looking deep inside. We listen to the people and circumstances that are part of our lives. We respond to what we hear if we are attentive.

I was in college, wrestling with what I was to do with my life. I knew I enjoyed studying and learning. What was I going to do with what I enjoyed? At a church service, I felt the tug in my heart that God wanted me to devote myself to what in 1970 we called “full-time Christian service.”

            Some of us run away from the call. Dallas Willard put it: 

Our failure to hear his voice when we want to is due to the fact that we do not in general want to hear it, that we want it only when we think we need it.[1]   

Running away will have harmful effects in the way we lead our lives. To run away from the call will also mean running away from that which will provide deep satisfaction in life. Some of us need to ponder the witness to our lives that we desire. What do want family and friends to say about us when we leave this earth and receive a new life with God?

Some of us need to cut through some misconceptions. Dan Cumberland[2] identifies three myths to avoid when trying to discern God's call: 

Myth 1: Your calling is a job

-- Your calling is larger than a job, for the calling provides a direction and impact to your entire life. You will express your calling in your job, but in other parts of your life as well.  

Myth 2: Your calling is somewhere out there; you just have to find it

-- Your calling is somewhere out there, which is the partial truth in this myth, but you have to be attentive to what is “out there.” We need to be attentive to the people and circumstances of our lives. We will hear the summons “out there” if we listen to our hearts. It is not in the wind, the fire or the earthquake. It is in a still small and familiar voice.  

Myth 3: Your calling is a place of obligation

-- "Your calling and life's work are places of freedom. God has a reason for you to be here, so your calling will be life giving.  

            The call that we hear may actually bring some difficulty into our lives. It may well push us to our limits and beyond. For that reason, we may well want to run away. Of course, calling moves us beyond a job and a sense of obligation. It moves us toward deep satisfaction, as we are attentive the people and circumstances of our lives, listening and responding at a deep level.

 

            Frankly, reflecting upon calling a calling to which we respond should get us thinking about the end of life. To what do want people to testify about us? For what do we want those who love and care about to remember about us?

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[1] --Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God.

[2] --Dan Cumberland, "3 big myths about calling: Ideas to avoid when figuring out what to do with your life." Relevant, April 14, 2015. relevantmagazine.com. Retrieved August 10, 2015.

Volunteering or Calling

An article came across my desk back in 2001. It offered a few examples of volunteering. The stories may well point to something deeper.

James is 13 years old. He lives in New York City. His family has gone through hard times. His father lost his job as a butcher when the owner of the shop suddenly died. They were evicted from their apartment. His parents split up, and James and his brother have lived with their mother in two different shelters.

Nevertheless, James is one of the lucky ones. He has a friend, a mentor, who has been with him for six years now.

Her name is Sara Mosle, who describes herself as a "volunteer." She taught in the New York City public schools for three years and since then has volunteered as a mentor to some of her former students. At times, the group has been as large as 12 kids. A few were Dominicans, the rest were black. She is 36, and white.

She has introduced these youngsters to words and experiences like chopsticks, Avery Fisher Hall, the Staten Island Ferry, Mexican food and Duke Ellington.

She is the kind of person the federal government has in mind when it urges the private sector to assume some of the traditional services of the state. Sara knows the political lingo, such as "A thousand points of light," "charitable choice" and "compassionate conservatism." She understands Colin Powell's powerful endorsement of volunteerism. Therefore, when the government called, Sara answered.

These two stories are not just a matter of volunteering because one feels guilty if one does not. They recognize that for many people, that for which they volunteer comes out of a sense of calling. The people with whom we have interacted, the circumstances of life that have challenged us, the need that we have sensed in the world, become the occasion to hear a calling. In that sense, it was not just a matter of listening to what is “inside” us. Rather, we need to listen to what is “outside” us.

Time is finite for all of us. Listening to such a call and responding with Yes builds the virtues to which we would like people to testify at our funeral, in the manner that David Brooks (The Road to Character, 2015) writes. These virtues point the way to deep satisfaction of having lived our lives.

Maybe, instead of wondering what will make us happy, we need to ponder a different question. Are we responding to a summons?

Share the Call

           

            Several events have come together over the past two weeks that have made me reflect upon the notion of calling, for which a synonym is vocation, life’s work, or even mission.  

            Bishop Mike asked clergy throughout Indiana to reflect upon our call on Pentecost Sunday, May 24, 2015. During the months since he encouraged clergy to do this, I have wondered how I would share. After all, I have told the story in every church, usually more than once, how I sensed the call of God on my life at the close of a worship service when I was 18 and attending Miltonvale Wesleyan College in 1970. It was a quiet nudge, and I am grateful I listened. I had another nudge or hunch to talk with the District Superintendents of the South Indiana Annual Conference in 1976 while I was a student at Asbury. I eventually learned that mom and Pastor Joe Matt, of Austin, MN, had been praying that I would be open to what they thought God wanted in my life. At that point, I became grateful for their prayers.

Yet, I have never wanted anyone to think that a sense of calling or vocation was open only to clergy. One can find a sense of calling in many tasks, jobs, and careers. One person who has recently taught me about this is Marcel Proust.

Among the surprises in the journey of the past few months has been the reading of a long novel. I started it in the summer of 2014 and did not finish until spring 2015. I had a long stretch where I had gotten bored, so I stopped. I knew I would come back - eventually. Thus, it took me a while, but I final read Marcel Proust (1871-1922) Remembrance of Things Past, more recently retitled, In Search of Lost Time. The novel is part of a lifetime reading plan list on which I have been working since the mid-1990s. Most people, I think, rather than reading all seven volumes, stop with the first volume, Swann’s Way. Surprisingly, the lifetime reading plan suggested this. However, this would be a mistake, for one would miss the primary thrust of the novel. I have learned that one might adopt the reading hypothesis that the long novel is in the form of an ellipse, one focus being the search and the second the visitation. The tale about time is the tale that creates the relation between these two foci of the novel. The character of the novel arises out of the apprenticeship to signs (defined by Gilles Deleuze as signs of the social world, signs of life, signs of sensuous impressions, and signs of art) and to the irruption of involuntary memories. It represents the form of interminable wandering, interrupted by the sudden illumination that retrospectively transforms the entire narrative into the invisible history of a vocation. Time, which seemed lost in the wandering, becomes something that is at stake again as soon as it is a question of making the inordinately long apprenticeship to signs correspond to the suddenness of a belatedly recounted visitation, which retrospectively characterizes the entire quest as lost time.[1]

Thus, we come to the second part of the twin foci of the ellipse that is the form of this novel. We come to the final volume, “The Past Recaptured,” (“Time Regained”). We learn that the hero of the story suddenly realizes, in an epiphany or visitation, that his speculation on time has its anchor in the narrative as a founding event in the vocation of the writer. An epiphany that seems to come from outside Time brings the hero to the threshold of time regained. Only the decision to write ends the tension between the time lost/wasted and time regained. The visitation becomes a meditation on the origin of aesthetic creation. It becomes a contemplative moment. Time regained in the sense of lost time revived arises out of fixing this contemplative moment in a lasting work. Artistic creation offers its mediation. The decision to write transposes the extra-temporal character of the original vision into the temporality of the resurrection of time lost. Time becomes the artist that works slowly.[2] Another way to say this is that the narrator recovers the full meaning of his past and thus restores the “lost” time. He has no longer wasted the time he lived, for now it has meaning, as the time of preparation for the work of the writer who will give shape to the unity of his life. The irretrievable past he has now recovered in its unity with the life he yet has to live. Here is an example of how the modern person wants the future to redeem the past, as the future makes the past part of a life story that has a purpose in the midst of a life that seems like senseless wandering. One can take up the past in a meaningful unity.[3] This narrated unity is one in which Proust has struck a deep chord in contemporary imagination.[4] Outside of this epiphany, and prior to it, he cannot bring his life together into the usual story of achievement. The routines of everyday life seem boring. Any job career seems empty. Only by cohering in a way that cuts across time, which joins widely separated moments of epiphany through memory, can his life have a sense that forms the basis of a recovery of the past that stops the wasting of time.[5]

For the hero of this novel and I assume for Proust as well, the sense of calling or vocation focused on his work as a writer. It indeed becomes the life’s work of the author. The discovery of something deeper than simply a job or career is the longing of many people in this technological age.

In fact, a member of the Cross~Wind congregation suggested that I read a recent article by David Brooks. For me, it indicates how deeply this notion of vocation appeals to us today. In describing “a moral bucket list, the experiences one should have on the way toward the richest possible inner life,” he describes the need for a “call within the call.”

We all go into professions for many reasons: money, status, security. But some people have experiences that turn a career into a calling. These experiences quiet the self. All that matters is living up to the standard of excellence inherent in their craft.[6]

Such a notion has religious overtones. People have a calling from God to serve in their unique way. The calling may change and evolve over a lifetime. Some may have a calling to parent young children at one stage, and then have a calling to be leaders beyond the home. Some may serve God in “secular” careers, bringing their sense of the divine to work. Such notions are quite “normal” in the world of the church today.

Several months ago, I had thought I might preach from Ezekiel 37, the well-known vision Ezekiel had of a valley of dry bones. The first phrase took on new meaning. The hand of the LORD came upon me, we find in Ezekiel 37:1. The expression is frequent in the Hebrew Bible, and is a favorite of the prophet Ezekiel (1:3, 3:14, 3:22, 8:1, 33:22, 37:1, 40:1). The phrase also denotes the divine presence in a negative way — the hand of the LORD is often “against” someone or something (e.g., Judges 2:15; Ruth 1:13; I Samuel 5:9). The expression has clear directive implications, with the “hand of the LORD” functioning synonymously with what we would call “divine providence” or “the divine will.”

For Proust and Brooks, calling or vocation arises out of you. They have understood an important aspect of calling. Yet, Ezekiel wants us to turn our gaze away from ourselves and to the sense of a divine will for our lives. Of course, we may be good at something, we may need to make money doing something, we may love to do something, and we may even see the need in the world that we can help address. Yet, a sense of calling or vocation is at the center of this discussion. I am not just writing about a job or career. I am writing about my sense of my life’s work. In doing so, I am asking the reader about his or her life’s work. The sense of call within a call, the experience of an epiphany, may come early or late in life, but I hope it will come. It may be a dramatic, unmistakable moment. It may also be a quiet nudge or hunch that we think might be from God. Am I open to feeling the hand of the Lord upon me? If I am, will I be willing to follow where the hand of the Lord leads (nudges) me? This is far more than simply for clergy, although that is important as well. In any job, in any task we accept, let it be with a sense that the hand of the Lord is upon us.

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[1]  (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1984, 1985), Volume 2, 131-32.

[2]  (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1984, 1985), Volume 2, 141-47.

[3]  (Taylor, 1989), 51.

[4]  (Taylor, 1989), 106.

[5]  (Taylor, 1989), 464.

[6] David Brooks, “The Moral Bucket List,” New York Times, April 11, 2015.