excerpted ...
CH. 1: Listening to Life
Wm Stafford – ASK ME
For some, those words will be nonsense . . . But for others, the poet’s words will be precise, piercing and disquieting. They remind me of moments when it is clear – if I have eyes to see – that the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me. In those moments I sometimes catch a glimpse of my true life, a life hidden like the river beneath the ice. And in the spirit of the poet, I wonder: What am I meant to do? Who am I meant to be?
[when] I ran across the old Quaker saying, “Let your life speak,” . . . I thought I understood what they meant: ‘Let the highest truths and values guide you. Live up to those demanding standards in everything you do.’
. . . so I lined up the loftiest ideals I could find and set out to achieve them. The results were rarely admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque. But always they were unreal, a distortion of my true self – as must be the case when one lives from the outside in, not the inside out. I had simply found a ’noble’ way to live a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart.
Today, some 30j years later, ‘Let your life speak’ means something else to me, a meaning faithful both to the ambiguity of those words and to the complexity of my own experience: “before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”
My youthful understanding of ‘Let your life speak’ led me to conjure up the highest values I could imagine and then try to conform my life to them whether they were mine or not. If that sounds like what we are supposed to do with values, it is because that is what we are too often taught. . .
There may be times in life when we are so unformed that we need to use values like an exoskeleton to keep us from collapsing. But something is very wrong if such moments recur often in adulthood. Trying to live someone else’s life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail – and may even do great damage.
…
Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about – quite apart from what I would like it to be about – or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.
That insight is hidden in the word vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin for ‘voice.’ Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live – but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.
Behind this understanding of vocation is a truth that the ego does not want to hear because it threatens the ego’s turf: everyone has a life that is different from the “I” of daily consciousness, a life that is trying to live through the “I” who is its vessel. This is what the poet knows and what every wisdom tradition teaches: there is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to identify me, with its protective masks and self-serving fictions, and my true self.
It takes time and hard experience . . . to sense that running beneath the surface of the experience I call my life, there is a deeper and truer life waiting to be acknowledged. That fact alone makes ‘listen to your life’ difficult counsel to follow. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that from our first days in school, we are taught to listen to everything and everyone but ourselves, to take all our clues about living from the people and powers around us.
. . . We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.
ch. 2: NOW I BECOME MYSELF
What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been! How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our keep identity – the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation.
I first learned about vocation growing up in the church. . . . the idea that calling comes from a voice external to ourselves, a voice of moral demand that asks us to become someone we3 are not yet – someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach.
That concept of vocation is rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be ‘selfish’ unless corrected by external forces of virtue. . .
Today I understand vocation quite differently – not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. . .
It is a strange gift, this birthright gift of self. Accepting it turns out to be even more demanding than attempting to become someone else!
. . . ‘remember who you were when you first arrived and reclaim the gift of true self.’
. . .
From the beginning, our lives lay down clues to selfhood and vocation, though the clues may be hard to decode. . . Those clues are helpful in counteracting the conventional concept of vocation, which insists that our lives must be driven by ‘oughts’ . . . We find our callings by claiming authentic selfhood . . . The deepest vocational question is not ‘what ought I to do with my life” It is the more elemental and demanding, “Who am I? What is my nature?”
…
The human self has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. . . “Faking it” in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one’s nature, and it will always fail.
… true vocation joins self and service . . . the place where ‘your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.’ (Frederick Buechner)
Ch. 5: Leading from Within
‘Inner work in community’ – value of inner work; personal but not necessarily private, paradox of having relationships in which we protect each other’s aloneness (role of community); dominant role of fear in our lives . . .