From Vulnerability to Wholeness

I once heard it said that in order to achieve an acceptable life before God and man we need to know who we are and whose we are.  If we think we are just an accident of nature and the current end product of a very long evolutionary chain then our moral ecology will adhere to one set of values.  If we believe we are children of God with a spark of divinity and have a much higher potential than we currently demonstrate we will have another moral code and hopefully strive to live up to it.  

In either case (or somewhere in between) we will live by a set of internalized norms, assumptions, beliefs, and habits of behavior embedded in an institutionalized set of moral demands. 

 

On the one hand, we will live a competitive existence looking out for ‘number one’ and will try in any way that is expedient for us to try to get to the ‘top of the food chain.’ Worldly success is our ambition. But we are vulnerable to many uncertainties because many others will be vying, with us, for a ‘top gun’ status.  Eventually there will be someone younger, or smarter, or prettier, or stronger or who has better ‘connections’ who will supplant us. And then the question that Jesus posed: “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Matt. 16:26)

     

On the other hand, we will live life essentially as a moral drama—a struggle to be integrated and congruent with our vision of a moral ideal. 

In either case, we find we are vulnerable and have weaknesses that make it difficult to achieve our goals whatever they might be. 

Speaking from the life-as-a-moral-drama point of view, I would submit the following as a structure for moving from vulnerability to wholeness:

1       Recognize that I am a child of God—really still an infant.  However, I am  ‘wired’ or pre-programmed with a conscience, a body made in God’s image, a spiritual set of instructions (scriptures), can be affiliated with God’s authorized Church (a social structure and script), and, if I was fortunate, with a mother and father who, if they were following their scripts, provided well for my early needs.  They protected me, nurtured me, and taught me and thus laid a groundwork for my ‘higher education’ which was then largely up to me to accomplish.  But even with this favorable beginning I still live in a fallen world—one that has much evil in it—and to survive I must put on the full armor of God every day because I will still be vulnerable without it.

 

2       One who subscribes to this moral framework is anchored by permanent attachments to important things—things that last and that are bigger than self—not just to the transitory “lusts of the flesh.”

 Contrary to pop psychology, we look inward only long enough to “cleanse the inner vessel,” and then look outward to see what life asks of us and needs from us.  Finding it, we organize our lives around this moral framework—and then we commit to it and deliver ourselves to it.  It becomes our ‘calling’ or ‘vocation.’   We are no longer “tossed to and fro” by every wind and by “the sins that so easily beset us.”  We become anchored. Then, accepting the help offered along the way (because we are not an island unto ourselves—we are not the ‘captains of our own destiny’) we become whole by helping whatever it is that is within the sphere of our influence also become more whole. Service to a noble cause becomes our driving force.     

Your Vocation or Calling

Upon graduation from high school young people are typically told to ‘discover yourself,’ ‘follow your passion,’ ‘define what you want from life,’ ‘establish a career trajectory that will bring you a life filled with fulfillment,’ etc., etc.  The rhetoric suggests that by achieving material ‘success’ you will in fact be successful and ‘live happily ever after.’ 

President John F. Kennedy famously suggested a different focus:  “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Another focus, somewhat akin to President Kennedy’s suggestion, I would suggest is not asking, “What do I want from life?”, but instead asking “What does life want from me?”  My hero Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “People wish to be settled.  It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.”

We have all been thrown into a specific place, and time, and circumstance, among certain people, and needs and challenges and we need to figure out how we should proceed with the physical, moral, and intellectual tasks put before us.

Writer Frederick Buechner put it this way: “At what points do my talents . . . meet the world’s deep needs?”

I submit that this life is a test and an opportunity to see what we will do with our talents and for whose service they will be used. 

 

Consider the perspective of World War II prisoner Dr. Viktor Frankl from his book Man’s Search for Meaning:  Life, he said, has not stopped expecting things (a proper response) from any of us—no matter how wretched our circumstances might be.  He told his fellow prisoners that someone was watching them—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or God—who did not want to be disappointed. 

Our vocation or life calling probably will not bring great material ‘success’ to ourselves; it may be something as common but as important as being a good mother, or a conservationist, or teacher or social reformer, or nurse or truly dedicated Church member; or something as uncommon as a great statesman or explorer or pioneering scientist.  In fact, we may not even choose it (our job or occupation or career) as our most significant life work but it will present itself to us; it will choose us.  As David Brooks has said, such people who respond to their ‘calling’ “submit to their vocations for reasons deeper and higher than utility. / Such a person becomes an instrument for the performance of the job that has been put before her.”

It is the response of our greatest efforts to the call of felt necessity.  Regardless of what it is, it will bring something of great value to other of God’s children and have intrinsic worth. Ralph Waldo Emerson was, as always, on point: “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods [like his friend Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond], the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

Not only Frankl’s ‘watchers,’ but we ourselves should have a good sense if we are meeting the measure of our creation—and that is discovering our true vocation.