A version of this post was delivered at Wisconsin Lutheran College’s winter commencement this past December, where Paul marked his retirement and celebrated more than 25 years working in higher education.
Among the foundational tenets of vocational discernment, here are two: our vocations are dynamic, and our vocations are ambiguous. For many, the inverse of these principles can also be true, shaping our impulses to think of discernment as being fixed or final. If we think about vocation in these terms, we start making assumptions that are misguided and possibly damaging, such as, discernment happens only once. If we think about discernment as a singular event, we put ourselves under a lot of pressure to get our calling right, perfectly right.
But if we think more accurately about the dynamic nature of vocational discernment, then we ought to keep in mind its fluid quality. If we picture discernment as a substance, then we see that it is amorphous and pliable, depending on the shape of the life that contains it.
I was reminded to imagine the fluid quality of vocational discernment as I read Catherine Raven’s marvelous memoir, Fox and I, published in 2021. An award-winner writer, Raven is also a biologist, researcher, and former national park ranger. As she tells her story about her interactions with a fox near her remote cabin, she references the writing of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In fact, Raven daily read Saint-Ex’s The Little Prince aloud to her fox.
As I read Fox and I, I dipped into The Little Prince and Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand, and Stars, and I enjoyed all of them. Raven extends a notion inspired by Saint-Exupéry common in children’s literature, with more than a little liberty: children are innocent and have imagination while adults are dull and compromised. As Raven writes, describing the contractions of growing up and maturity:
“During young adulthood our future is as malleable as soft clay … Our imagination continues to shape our future until we grow up; then we slip into the mold society has cast for us, and we become hardened … In this process of being recruited by society, our imagination for the future contracts.”
But is what she claims about contraction true? As our students mature and commence their post-graduate lives, they often consider how they have been formed up to this moment. Some skills, talents, interests, and opportunities have been developed or grown while others have been discouraged or fallen away. Each of our students has a story in this regard, and over the course of my career, I have advised almost 400 of them. I know that each of their stories has had its mix of contraction and expansion.
Students can ask themselves whether the accumulation of responsibility and the regular demands on time and energy that accompany their “being recruited into the adult world” have worked against their imaginations. Or, perhaps that one reading assignment or that semester of working with a particular professor or that meaningful internship exercised their expanding imaginations?
Contraction and expansion: some things close down; some things open up. We might think of graduation in the way that it signals a contraction or an expansion. Is the graduate opening up to future possibilities or closing down around the next step?
Neither contraction nor expansion is essentially good or bad. Sometimes one thing is contracting while another is expanding. Even as an education comes to a point of closing down at graduation, the graduate can imagine, and act on, the opening up of whatever may come tomorrow.
Let’s just say that maturation is not necessarily accompanied by a fixed contraction of imaginative function. Moments in time can be arbitrary and contrived, and the process of the imagination’s contracting and expanding is not bound by these moments. We can imagine falling in love or committing to a deep friendship or changing jobs or taking new risks at any age or stage of our lives.
The more I measured Catherine Raven’s idea, the more I think she seems to be posing young adulthood and mature adulthood as either-or. Maybe you’re thinking, like me, that you don’t like that false choice. Maybe you’re wondering why you can’t be malleable and hardened, contracting and expanding, younger and older, at the same time? Beware of false choices. We should try to hold options for the future in a fluid tension or balanced contradiction.
I was also reminded of the fluid nature of discernment as I sat by my father’s hospice bed last fall. In one of our conversations, my dying 94-year-old father told me that when he was younger, he seemed much more certain in his opinions about many things. But as he got older and closer to his death, he told me that he became more uncertain. My dad’s struggle was about letting go of his personal commitments and his opinions and holding even tighter to his Christian faith and love.
Is a progression like my father’s, from greater certainty to lesser certainty, a closing down? The contractions of aging, for example, might also be viewed as expanding into new gifts and joys. Too often we measure contraction and expansion by the personal control we have or don’t have over something. Too often—because we desire to be in control—we want our discernment to be more fixed and less fluid. None of us are as self-made and self-determined as we might like to believe. It’s my opinion that we acquire many of the most important insights too late; we have become hardened or fixed too soon.
When we gain experience and acquire practical insight from life, we should be careful about contracting from within from our desire to be in control of things. We should watch that our heuristics and assumptions don’t prime us against the power of expansion. For example, think of the vocation of friendship: when a relationship with a friend gets messy, is it our habit to contract, as we judge and manage our risk? Or do we imagine that the difficulty might be an opportunity for real growth? Whenever we are surprised in our vocational pathways, we can see it as a threat and close down, or we can we step back, consider it more fully, and explore how it could help us expand.
Finally, because I am a Christian, I must consider what Holy Scripture has to say about contraction and expansion in the life of Christian faithfulness. The “old man” writer of Ecclesiastes looked back on life and viewed the things that were once satisfying to him—his projects, pleasures, and possessions—as being meaningless in the face of death. “What does a man gain by these things?” he asked. He perceived that God gave these things to people to keep them busy and for their good. God also set eternity in humankind’s hearts, and humans sense that there must be something more than this life. And only God does things that last forever.
To faithful people, including the young person and the discerning one, the writer of Ecclesiastes repeated, “Fear and love God your Creator; be joyful and do good as long as you live.” The Apostle Peter, in his first letter, wrote that not only did God give us an awareness of things to be fulfilled, but he also told us about things into which even angels long to look. Might angels long to look into the contractions and expansions of our futures?
My faith might have a different object or a different creed than yours. Because the revealed object of my faith is worthy of worship, I thank God for being the Lord and giver of all life’s contractions and expansions, which I encounter anew every morning. These gifts are not given once and then withheld. They can provide us all with changing opportunities to live in our vocations all lifelong.
Paul Burmeister is a recently retired professor and administrator at Wisconsin Lutheran College; his career in higher education spanned more than three decades. Paul is a regionally-exhibited painter, a project management consultant, and a NetVUE Faculty Fellow. For other posts by Paul, click here.
