Frederick Buechner famously wrote that vocation is “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet,” and everyone thinking about vocation ever since then has had to deal with the fallout of that pithy summary. For better or worse, it’s a touch-point for thinking vocation that cannot be forgotten once encountered.
Meanwhile, another famous writer, Sigmund Freud, popularized thinking around anal retentiveness. Without going into all matters fecal, Freud though the civilised child in the development to adulthood had to learn to sublimate excrement just as primitive humans of the European past must once have done. But meanwhile another psychological thinker whose work has proven more “provable” than Freud had the actual poop on mortality, that it is the denial of death, rather than the denial of feces (or sex) that is the root of culture.
You may be wondering where I’m going with all of this… but be patient. It will become clear, I hope.
An avocation of mine (closely related to my vocation) is the reviewing of books, and in this instance, I’m experimenting with a mashup, bringing together volumes written/edited by friends.
If we were to attempt to bring Buechner’s definition into conversation with “death,” we might conclude that death is “where your deep meaning and the world’s end meet.” Which would be an argument (the argument I’m making) that although we don’t necessarily think vocation and death together, we probably can and should.
Looking at these two books in a shared review accomplishes such a glance.
Stating this starkly is crucial, I think, because of the various meaning-making aspects of this life, vocation and death are top of list. It is the ongoing and constant struggle of vocational discernment that troubles and quickens us; it is the inevitability and ever-drawing-closer of death that pushes us to such discernment.
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So we have before us two books, each one assembled in the quite unique way some books are assembled.
Called Beyond Ourselves: Vocation and the Common Good, is a collection of essays edited by Erin VanLaningham. It’s a project out of the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education, and benefits from the equipment academics engaged in undergraduate study bring to the task of writing and collecting. It’s a bricolage of topics, but with a final editorial hand that gives us a shape and a direction and continuities.
Everyday Armageddons: Stories & Reflections on Death, Dying, God & Waste is also a “collection,” but from the pens of just two writers, Matthew Holmes and Thomas R. Gaulke. Holmes offers the short stories, informed out of his long experience in death and dying as a nurses’ aide, hospital and hospice chaplain, cemetery president, funeral home assistant, and emergency medical technician. Gualke then offers “theopoetical” interludes after and between stories that explore the theological and poetic insights of the stories.
In her introduction to the volume on vocation, VanLaningham asserts that “educators ought to suggest with greater persuasion and persistence that the dominant narrative of personal success and achievement that grips so many students’ pursuits be contextualized and challenged by the myriad ways to live a good life. In the context of vocation—the discovery of one’s calling in contribution to community and global needs—living a good life certainly depends on how we consider obligations to and care for others and our world” (1).
Fair enough. So as I was paging back and forth between these two volumes, I opened to the story “Liz, Pete, and the Things We Do for Love,” and found myself in awe. The story concludes with Liz needing to bare-handed remove a bowel-impaction from Pete. She is covered in shit, struggling not to vomit. As she works to get it all out, “it kept coming, as if it had been up there his entire life… the nausea didn’t let up for Liz. Her hands were covered.”
After finally completing the task and taking a long shower, Liz discovers that Pete has died. Before she calls hospice, she lies down next to him and sleeps, “a second between them past life, death, and illness.”
The story of Liz and Pete is harrowing, an early marriage followed by tumultuous years of divorce and separation before reunion. It’s not anything that might be written if one were to begin with the Buechner definition of vocation. And yet it’s perhaps the most profound meditation on vocation I’ve read in decades.
Meanwhile, over in the mostly clean essays of the vocation volume, in an essay on formation throughout our lives, author Matthewes writes, “The language of liberal arts asks, what might true freedom look like, beyond its frivolous forgeries? In contrast, the language of vocation questions whether there is another, deeper kind of freedom than the one “the world” presumes—whether that “world” is the busy world of the ‘liberal arts’ or simply our everyday ‘world,’ with its various substitutes for true freedom. But both are inescapable for us, and we should put them in complicated conversation with one another. Doing so forces us to confront a terrible dilemma: how to understand ourselves as both called and free?” (295).
Gaulke has a theopoetic meditation on that. He notes that after multiple choratic interludes in her history with Pete, Liz arrives, not be desire, but by circumstance, at her third choratic crossing… the man who had once been so attractive at the bar where they met, now, “there he was. No leather.. No hero. Just this. A human undressed, glorious-exposed. A mortal. Filled with the breath of the divine. It was a moment—and that is all—and in it, she loved him, truly, and with depth.” Enough to dig out impacted shit and then carefully clean him.
Reading these two books in tandem has left a spiritual mark. Although the first is a rather academic and pristine inquiry into the meaning of vocation, the authors launched their journey writing it at the harrowing site of the death of George Floyd. Meanwhile, the book on death, though harrowing in its topics (and sometimes gruesome) is still a book after all, with all the cleaning up such productions entail.
But somehow the two together have meant for me as a reader a kind of unclear enlightenment, as if I now understand for the first time in new ways how to think vocation (think it in light of death) and also live meaningfully in anticipation of death, because that is how vocation moves.
That’s one strange review and I don’t know how all the authors will feel about the mashup, but I sure did appreciate reading them together, with all the complexity it introduces.
Where do you locate these intersections of death and vocation in your search for God in memory? I see them in Mary at the tomb, dumbfounded by death of illusions and her new life of vocation to tell all. Also, I encounter intersections of the two wherever I have resisted acknowledging the death of relationships because I fear listening to the call that grows inside.
Quite a blend!
Richard Groves. in _The American Book of Living and Dying_, notes 4 Spiritual Pains we wrestle with at End of Life.
Meaning pain
Forgiveness pain
Relatedness pain
Hopelessness pain
I can very well see Meaning pain and Vocation being of the same chord.