My friend J loaned me this book about a month ago, unsolicited, when I told her I had signed up to volunteer at hospice because I felt called to work with those facing life-threatening illness.
Last night, having finished The Shack and hunting around the apartment for something to read for a while before lights out, I pulled Callings off the shelf.
Please let me read to you:
Unfortunately, we often simply tune out the longings we feel, rather than confront and act on them. Perhaps we do not really forget our calls but we fear what they might demand of us in pursuing them. Anticipating the conniptions of change blocks us from acknowledging that we do know, and always have known, what our calls are. Perhaps we also fear the hope that such calls evoke in us, and the power that we know is dammed up behind our resistance. ….
Saying yes to the calls tends to place you on a path that half of yourself thinks doesn’t make a bit of sense, but the other half knows your life won’t make sense without. This latter part, continually pushing out from within us with a centrifugal force, keeps driving us toward authenticity, against the tyranny of fear and inertia and occasionally reason, against terrific odds, and against the knocking in our hearts that signals the hour.
We find ourselves compelled to follow the sometimes blind spiritual instinct that tells us our lives have purpose and meaning. We find that we must act on this imperative despite the temptations–to back down and run for cover–that will divide even the most grimly resolute against themselves. We must persist with the sort of hope about which playwright and former Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel spoke when he said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”
…
Generally, people won’t pursue their callings until the fear of doing so is finally exceeded by the pain of not doing so, but it’s appalling how high a threshold people have for this quality of pain. …
Perhaps the main reason that we ignore calls is that we instintively know the price they’ll exact. In order to become authentic, we’re goling to have to give up something dear: a job, a house, a relationship, a belief, a lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed, the prestige of being a big fish in any size pond, security, money, precious time, anger at somebody, or just he pleasures of cynicism.
In recent years, a lot of people have taken as a personal motto and policy statement Joseph Campbell’s admonition to “follow your bliss,” believing perhaps that by doing so their lives will be blissful. Unfortunately, “follow your bliss” is more about following than about bliss. The flat-out truth is that if you follow your bliss you’ll have your bliss, but nothing else is promised. Having your “bliss” is not a trifle, for grievously few people possess it. But all calls lead to some sacrifice because even just one choice closes the door on another, and some calls lead to much sacrifice, which may feel anything but blissful. If you’re unwilling to make sacrifices, though, you can end up losing a great deal more than whatever you might have sacrificed.
The natives of some Asian countries have a tradition of trapping monkeys, by placing a piece of fruit in a gourd, with a small hole bored in it side, that is tied to the ground. Monkeys reach in for the fruit, but by grabbing it, and thereby making a fist, they can’t get their hands out of the gourds. The natives then bag them and eat them. If the monkeys would only let go of the fruit, they could escape, but for some reason this doesn’t enter their monkey minds, and it costs them their lives. We are only a notch up the evolutionary ladder and often act as if we, too, are hardwired with the same suicidal attachments.
