Tag: crisis

“Voxistential” Crises and Grappling with the Dark Side of Vocation

The term “voxistential” blends “existential” with “vocation,” highlighting the need for meaning-making in life. It critiques the oversimplification of both concepts in popular culture and emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the dark sides of calling, exploring the interplay of hardship and authenticity within vocational reflection, as discussed by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore.

Yes, I’m trying to coin a new word. Googling “voxistential” will only take you to definitions of “existential” and maybe to a 2019 article from the magazine Vox about whether climate change is an existential threat. But I’m taking a cue from my oldest son who made up the word “crenescence” a couple years ago and used it casually around the high school lunch table just to see if it would catch on. (The word allegedly meant something like the opposite of irony, but not quite the same as coincidence. And no, it never caught on.)

By “voxistential” I mean to bring together “existential” and “vocation,” from vocare, “to call,” and the Latin root vōx, meaning “voice.” Traditionally, both words point to a similar idea—namely, that a person needs to find or make meaning and purpose, especially when life doesn’t hand them ready-made answers or pre-cut patterns. The meanings of the words have drifted apart in recent years, perhaps because we have overused each one. Recently, though, wise scholars like Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, author of Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling, are reviving existential questions within vocational reflection.

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Playing Devil’s Advocate: Vocational Wisdom from The Screwtape Letters

Reading The Screwtape Letters can help us preempt our demons; it can help us see our blind spots and remind us that good things can be traps and seemingly bad things can contain blessings. I’ve found that having students write their own Screwtape letters offers them an eye-opening way of looking at the circumstances of their own lives. Playing devil’s advocate to one’s own vocation is a generative exercise.

In a previous post, I wrote about assigning “Learning in Wartime” in a vocation seminar when COVID first hit. I wrote about how profound that text was for my students and about their moving responses to Lewis’ sermon. Here, I want to describe the next reading I assigned, The Screwtape Letters, which was equally engaging to students, similarly insightful about vocation, and provided them with an essential skill for persisting in the right direction: playing devil’s advocate.

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A Moment of Grief and Gratitude

Doug Schuurman’s vision of vocation is particularly timely for me in its “reevaluation of [the] mundane.” As someone who has spent the past four months trying to simultaneously change diapers AND work for an employer, his reminder of this deeper meaning was such a gift.

A reflection on the legacy of Doug Schuurman

An image of the Wind Chime Memorial Tower at St. Olaf College.

Do you know the kind of person who has a calming presence—they may not talk much, but their simply being in the room has a quiet effect on people, making them feel more comfortable in the group, curious about the people around them, eager to see the best in each other, willing to be vulnerable?  

One of the delights of returning a few years ago to my alma mater, St. Olaf College, has been reconnecting with my faculty members. The ones who inspired me as a student still inspire me as a colleague; the ones who intimidated me still intimidate me. But that quiet presence is something that holds me more in awe now than it did then. 

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Reaffirming Our Vocational Authenticity with Courage and Humility

The coronavirus pandemic that has upended semester calendars, teaching practices and scholarly research schedules provides an important opportunity for us to reflect upon our vocational authenticity. In fact, it is exactly in such moments of dislocation that we are most challenged to reflect upon and make sense of our convictions as teachers and scholars and to renew our commitments to its meaning and purpose in our lives.

Of the many types of distractions that clear my mind during the pandemic lockdown, I have found it especially entertaining to re-read Louise Penny’s Three Pines mysteries. The series, set in a fictional Canadian village in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, features Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec as he and his team, often with the assistance of the villagers of Three Pines, investigate and solve crimes that deal with murder. If you have read these mysteries, you will remember that Gamache has often told new agents of the police force the four statements that can lead to wisdom in their lives and success in their work: (1) I was wrong. (2) I’m sorry. (3) I don’t know. (4) I need help. Gamache hopes to ground the new agents in humility and an openness to critique and change that can develop them as effective and humane investigators. He is challenging the new agents to develop an honesty and genuineness in their communication with others as they investigate crimes, one that arises from a morally aware personal character and that shows respect for the persons involved in the incident. In turn, this personal authenticity creates an investigator that is grounded in human sensitivity and professional effectiveness.

It struck me that these statements might also be useful for reflecting upon vocational call. Clarifying and living out a vocational commitment involves a fundamental disclosure of authenticity—an awareness of meaning and purpose in our lives is rooted in that which we value.

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The Grace of Troubling Questions

I did not discover that my church actually had a human founding and a human history in the United States until I was roughly twenty years old. But what was that history? What were our roots? What were the cultural and religious forces that had produced this tradition and, by extension, the forces that had shaped me? These questions were hardly academic. These were questions that assaulted my very sense of self since my sense of self was so completely bound up with my church’s claim to be true and right while others were false and wrong.

Finding good work to do—work that can enrich and satisfy the soul, not just for a moment but for a lifetime—is an incredible gift of grace.

That gift can enter our lives in such mysterious ways, however, that we often fail to see it for what it is. In fact, grace can sometimes appear in such profoundly negative ways—in defeat or despair or rejection, for example—that we often resist the very grace that can make us whole.

In my case, the grace that opened up a lifetime of good and satisfying work first appeared in the form of deeply troubling questions about the church in which I was raised, the Church of Christ.

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Vocational Discernment Is Not a Luxury

The discernment of vocation is not a luxury; rather, it is an imperative born out of a deep awareness of the insistent realities we experience in our lives and our response to them.

Like many people, I find that in this time of pandemic crisis information helps me to feel calmer and more able to cope with the stress of the unknown. While the facts and figures provide a necessary base of knowledge, I find myself most drawn to pieces that offer experiences of and reflections upon how people are making meaning in the midst of the staggering numbers of infections and deaths and the economic disaster that has been a result of this public health emergency. I search for these reflections as a lifeline to hope and for the things they teach about courage, commitment and calling.

One of the most moving pieces I have read highlights the experience of vocational commitment of hospital chaplains who work in New York City area hospitals in the center of the pandemic storm. I was particularly struck when, after detailing the rigors and extreme challenges of chaplains’ work right now, the author comments, “If anything can shake a person’s faith, it seems an indiscriminate epidemic like this would be just the ticket. Why does a person in one bed die while the person in the next bed recovers? And yet not one chaplain I spoke to said this outbreak had done anything to diminish his or her faith or sense of purpose.”

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Work and Sabbath at the Dawn of Covid-19

During this unprecedented pandemic that has evacuated our campuses and sent us all home, we may not be able to offer sophisticated vocation programs. But insofar as vocation is about “whole personhood,” those of us committed to vocation in higher education are more than equipped to offer and to encourage this basic practice: to meet students where they are. In order to do that well though, we must be able to meet ourselves where we are.

In preparation for helping my congregation both think about and live into new ways of being the church, I have been re-reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World. It is a lovely text—accessible yet profound, grounded in deep knowledge of the Christian tradition and also of the earth. Many chapters have spoken to me, but especially timely is “The Practice of Saying No.” It meditates on the gift of Sabbath practice and how difficult it is to choose to engage in such a practice when our world is calling us constantly to either produce or consume. How radical it is just to stop, to sit, to observe, to breathe… to say no to the cycles of production and consumption that dominate our society.

Now that many of us have been forced by the Covid-19 pandemic into a withdrawal from our usual activities, the chapter reads differently than it has in the past. On the one hand, social distancing and shelter-in-place orders have slowed our participation in commerce and literally called us home. On the other, most of us have moved our jobs from our offices into our homes, in some cases right next to family members and their work. How do we manage the contradictions and blurred boundaries brought about by this collective upheaval? There are some striking reflections making the social media rounds about the silver linings of this crisis, specifically how it might bring us back to some simpler ways of living and sharpen our eyes for what is truly important. Especially notable is Lynn Unger’s poem Pandemic, which explicitly names the calls for social distancing and sheltering in place as opportunities to reconsider the practice of Sabbath.

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Character and calling in a time of crisis

No doubt you have seen the advice, attributed to Mister Rogers’ mother, that we should look to the helpers in those times when the news is scary. As the frightening realities about the spread of the Covid-19 virus have unfolded over the last few weeks, there are also plenty of stories of heroes and heroines on the national and local level. Paying attention to their stories and especially to the virtues that they embody in this harrowing situation can be an opportunity for students to consider how the virtues intersect with calling. Here, I’ll mention two examples, but there are many others now just as there will be in the weeks and months ahead.

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“For Such a Time as This” – with Apologies to Esther

1945 Purim greeting (postcard) from the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art, University of California, Berkeley; reproduced at https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/9-things-you-didnt-know-about-purim/

Purim is coming soon, beginning on the evening of March 20th this year. That’s the Jewish holiday when we read the Scroll (aka Book) of Esther, which itself describes some of the traditions—days of feasting and joy, and of sending portions one to another, and gifts to the poor (9:22). But most Purim customs come from the tone of the book, a kind of burlesque with reversals, exaggerations, bawdy humor and caricatures. So we dress up in costumes, spin satires, and (as adults) drink a bit too much. When reading the Scroll of Esther in the congregation, we drown out the name of the villainous Haman with noisemakers (groggers)—as if we can silence the force of evil.

Purim is one of my favorite holidays, mostly because it weaves profound messages into all the silliness. One of them is that, even with all our discerning and planning and preparing, sometimes our vocation finds us rather than the other way around. It happens to Esther. 

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The Massacre Generation

The annual “Mindset” list is an attempt to capture the milieu of the incoming class, offered to faculty and staff as a tool for understanding the new students arriving on campus. The class of 2022, we are told in this year’s list, have always been able to refer to Wikipedia and have lived in a world where same-sex marriage is legal somewhere. The world they know does not include Enron but has always included a vehicle known as a Prius and a television show called Survivor. Most of the 60 factoids on the list are light-hearted, referring to popular culture and some to political events.

But there, at number 4, is an item one could easily miss if breezing through the list. Nestled between the observation about Wikipedia and an image of people appearing to “talk to themselves” in public, is this statement: “They have grown up afraid that a shooting could happen at their school, too.”

A vigil in Parkland, Fla., after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. (Brynn Anderson/AP)

The class of 2022 has lived in a world where mass shootings are recurring events. They have lived with a fear that it could happen to them at any time. Continue reading “The Massacre Generation”