Rock cairns are wonderful metaphors for vocation, and especially vocational discernment. The rock at the top of the cairn is rectangular in shape. It lines up with the opening beneath it. That rock and that opening point from one cairn to the next. At any given point in time all you can see is the cairn behind you and the cairn in front of you. There is no clear path to follow. But, if you trust the cairns (and the people who placed them there) you can safely get to the top of the mountain from which there is an amazing view.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the voices I hear. Or perhaps more accurately I’ve been thinking of the voices I don’t hear and that we collectively don’t hear.
This fall semester I am teaching a course on theology and suffering. The course is titled “Sin, Suffering, and the Silence of God.” It is a course I teach every few years, so it was on the schedule for this fall long before Covid-19 swept across the world. The students in this class are amazing–they always are. It is a seminar for upper-level Religious Studies majors and it is cross-listed for Counseling students. The students who take it want to be there; the class gives them a space to ask questions they want to wrestle with.
This year, as we have begun the fall semester in a hybrid format, meeting in small groups, once a week only, masked, and socially distanced, a course on suffering takes on a different level of meaning. We began the semester acknowledging our individual and collective losses. We have, in only a few short weeks, lamented and grieved together.
A new series of videos available through Youtube offers a helpful resource for thinking about the question, “What Makes a Life Worth Living?”
One of the things the Living Well Center for Vocation and Purpose at Lenoir-Rhyne has done in response to Covid-19 is to re-create our most popular, in-person event as a virtual one. Two years ago we began a speaker series called “Lives Worth Living.” We invited four speakers a year to come to campus and respond to the question “What makes for a life worth living?” This event was held in our campus chapel and attracted not only students but a considerable number of community members. After the speaker’s lecture we had a Q&A or discussion time and on the following morning we offered students an opportunity to have coffee and follow-up conversation with the speaker. This quickly became a community-building, transformational “third space” for us, from which I have received numerous accounts of vocational “a-ha” moments.
In the movie Cast Away (2000), Tom Hanks’ character Chuck is on a plane that crashes and finds himself relatively unharmed, alone, in a life raft. The raft washes onto the shore of an uninhabited island. He quickly learns to provide for his basic survival needs–food, water, shelter, fire. But he soon realizes that surviving means something more than having just the most basic of physical needs met. Several FedEx boxes wash up on the same shore; Chuck opens one that has a “Wilson” volleyball in it. He paints a face on the ball and begins to talk with Wilson as a real person. As the movie moves forward, Wilson becomes more and more of a real character. One of the most touching scenes in the movie is when Chuck has built a raft and he and Wilson are out at sea. Wilson blows off the raft and is moving away from Chuck and the raft. Chuck risks his life trying to save Wilson, crying out desperately for him. And when he cannot get to him he sobs, “Wilson, I’m sorry! Wilson!!”
Cast Away provides a powerful metaphor of our very human need for community. We are not, and cannot be, discrete individuals detached from those around us. And yet, community does not happen simply because we are surrounded by people. Urban loneliness is a serious and growing problem. Community needs to be crafted and nurtured; despite our need for it, it does not appear to be our default setting.
