Visions of Vocation

Common Grace for the Common Good

Steven Garber

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780830896264
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Foreword Review's Annual INDIEFAB Book of the Year FinalistOutreach Resource of the YearChristianity Today Award of MeritLeadership Journal Best Books for Church LeadersBook of the Year from Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds BookstoreIs it possible to know the world and still love the world?Of all the questions we ask about our calling, this is the most difficult. From marriages to international relations, the more we know, the harder it is to love. We become cynics or stoics, protecting our hearts from the implications of what we know. But what if the vision of vocation can be recovered—allowing us to step into the wounds of the world and for love's sake take up our responsibility for the way the world turns out?For decades Steve Garber has come alongside a wide range of people as they seek to make sense of the world and their lives. With him we meet leaders from the Tiananmen Square protest who want a good reason to still care about China. We also meet with many ordinary people in ordinary places who long for their lives to matter: - Jonathan who learned he would rather build houses than study history- Todd and Maria who adopted creative schedules so they could parent better and practice medicine- D.J. who helped Congress move into the Internet Age- Robin who spends her life on behalf of urban justice- Hans who makes hamburgers the way they are meant to be made- Susan who built a home business of hand-printing stationary using a letterpress- Santiago who works with majority-world nations in need of capital- George who has given years to teaching students to learn things that matter most- Claudius and Deirdre whose openhearted home has always been a place for people- Dan who loves Wyoming, the place, its people and its cowsVocation is when we come to know the world in all its joy and pain and still love it. Vocation is following our calling to seek the welfare of the world we live in. And in helping the world to flourish, strangely, mysteriously, we find that we flourish too. Garber offers a book for everyone everywhere—for students, for parents, for those in the arts, in the academy, in public service, in the trades and in commerce—for all who want to discover the virtue of vocation.

1

To Know the World and Still Love It?

Would you object to
never seeing each other again
cause I can’t afford to
climb aboard you
no one’s got that much ego to spend

Aimee Mann, “Deathly”

There are days we remember to remember for the rest of our lives. We see something of unusual beauty or heartbreaking sorrow. We hear news of wonder and glory or of unbearable sadness. Or perhaps we heard or read something that we know is very important, and because of solidarity with history and the human condition, we know that we cannot walk away from it.

The way that Clydette Powell lives her life makes all of us stop. Several years ago she was asked by USAID and the White House to travel to Africa and spend three months assessing the impact of famine and drought on disease. A physician by training, she had taught at Harvard Medical School before deciding to live for many years in Cambodia, offering her medical skills through the work of World Vision. She eventually returned to the States, taking up the position of physician at USAID, responsible for all US programs for tuberculosis throughout the world. As she explained, “Why this matters now is that most who die of AIDS, die of tuberculosis.” So in the early days of Bono’s advocacy for AIDS in Africa and of the Bush administration’s decision to give $15 billion toward that need, Clydette’s judgments were crucial in the calculus of America’s response.

It was Christmastime when she returned. As she was a dear friend, we invited her to join us for lunch one day. Our tree was still lit, the fireplace aglow, and big, fluffy snowflakes were falling outside the bay window in our living room—the one our children called the “Peter Pan window.” After we sat and chatted for a while, she began to tell us of the horrors she had seen.

“It was outrageous!” she said again and again and again. I remember her words because the contrast was so stark. Christmas glory—and the greatest grief. How do you hold both in your heart? As I listened to Clydette, I wondered how she could know what she now knew and still choose to love her work and the world?

Washington, D.C., is my city. For years I have lived and moved and had my being in what has been the capital city not only of the United States but of the world. One hundred years ago it was not, and one hundred years from now it is unlikely that it still will be. As Rome was, as Constantinople was, as London was, Washington is. For now it is the city where Bono must come to plead for Africa—not Dublin, not London, not Paris, not Beijing, not New York, not Los Angeles. Washington is where decisions are made about the way the world will respond to the AIDS crisis, and it is to the White House and the World Bank that Bono has to make his case.

But if power is the coin of the realm, then cynicism is the atmosphere breathed. People with all sorts of hopes and dreams come to my city, putting their shoulders to history, working to bring their visions of the way the world ought to be into reality. “Potomac fever” is in the air—but with the potential for powerful work to be done, there is also the potential for cynicism to be born.

More often than not, people want to do the right thing. They want their lives to matter, their visions to shape the way the world works for the common good, at least as they understand the good. In a thousand different ways they want their ideas to have legs. That is what makes Washington, Washington.

Several years ago I was sitting in the Senate Dining Room in the Capitol Building talking with the novelist Tom Wolfe, and a few of us were asking questions about his life and work. One longtime journalist in the city asked, “What is the difference between Washington and New York?” Without a blink, Wolfe, a New Yorker, responded, “Washington is the city of ideas. People come here because of ideas, to debate ideas, to see ideas become reality.” That seemed remarkably perceptive.

But because that is true, it is likely that those who come to the “city of ideas” will join the generations before them that realized the sober truth that the work of Washington is a very messy business too. As Otto von Bismarck, the nineteenth-century Prussian statesman, noted several generations ago, “If you want to respect law or sausage, then don’t watch either being made.”1

Ideas about who we are and how we live together is the stuff of this city. Laws are imagined, laws are debated, laws are legislated. And it is like making sausage—very messy, very ugly and very smelly. For good-hearted people it is very difficult to know this city and to still love it. In fact I would argue that it is the most difficult task anyone who lives here faces.

Which is why, of course, hearing Clydette’s account of her months in Africa weighed upon me so heavily. Now that she had seen so much, could she, would she, still give herself to the vocation of loving and serving God and his world “with gladness and singleness of heart,” as the Book of Common Prayer calls us to?

A Good Question—No Cheap Answer

A few days later I was at a college in the Midwest, speaking at a Veritas Forum. My conversation with Clydette still heavy on my mind, I chose to speak about the task of learning in a world that is marked by very difficult realities. I began with Clydette’s story, our dinner with her and her repeated words, “It was outrageous!” I asked the students to consider the connection between education and vocation, in particular wanting them to ponder if what they were learning about the world had the intellectual substance that years of living in the world would require of them. Were their ideas strong enough, real enough, true enough, for the complex challenges of the world?

I showed some of the movie Magnolia, at the time one of the most fascinating films among university students. Brilliantly imagined, the story is about the nature of the universe, whether it is one of chance and coincidence, or of choices and consequences. But written into its heart is the question, Can you know the world and still love it? Or, very poignantly, Can you know me and still love me?

And to press the point, I asked, “Will you be able to know the world, as my friend Clydette knows it, and still choose to love it?” Were they learning in such a way that their disciplines would form the foundation for a life of engagement, of stepping into the mess of the world, understanding it and choosing to serve it?

After the lecture, I noticed some young men who were a bit older than the typical undergraduate. They were a group of musicians who called themselves Jars of Clay. I knew of them, but did not know them, and they had their own questions to ask. So we talked and a conversation began that continues to this day. Over the months, they asked about books and essays to read and I was increasingly impressed with their moral seriousness. One day we talked about Africa and their desire to put their creative energy behind an effort to address its complex need for clean blood and water.

And then months later we talked again. They were on their tour bus and were making their way through concerts along the West Coast. They told me that they just played guitars and keyboards, and while they had an honest concern for Africa, they did not know what to do about it, given their gifts and time. Did I have any ideas? I told them that a week earlier I had been in Phoenix, Arizona, speaking at a conference called “The Faces of Justice,” and had met a young woman named Jena Lee from Whitworth College who had impressed me with her articulate passion for Africa. Since they were going up the West Coast to Washington on their tour, I suggested they meet my young friend, which they did.

It is a long story, but when Jena graduated that spring, she moved to Nashville to work with the Jars of Clay guys to begin Blood:Water Mission. Those early months were hard ones for everyone—especially Jena. There were many tears and heart-searching questions about the very idea. Could we? Is it really possible? This is so much harder than I wanted it to be! And it was. But she held on, and slowly the vision was born.

Years later there are more than a thousand different projects in Africa that have grown out of Blood:Water Mission’s work. Jena has done a remarkable job, taking the band’s life and hopes, connecting them to hers, and birthing an organization that is healthy and responsible. The board has grown, and one of its prized members has been Clydette, who is still at USAID doing her work on the global threat of tuberculosis. She has brought all that and more to bear for the sake of the vision and work of Blood:Water Mission, with gladness and singleness of heart marking her vocation.

To know the world and still love it? There is not a more difficult task that human beings face. If it is one thing to hope for Africa, to be willing to step into its dreams and needs, it is something else altogether to have the staying power to keep at it over time. If it is admirable to respond to the needs of a village in western Kenya, afflicted by deaths from AIDS and absolutely no access to clean water—and in the physiology of health and disease, they are integrally related—then it is something else altogether to continue to care for the people and their needs when it moves from vision to reality. The complexity of responsible love in the name of justice and mercy leaves us with no cheap answers to any of the important questions.

To Teach What It Means to Know

How do we see what is awful and still engage, still enter in? How can we have our eyes open to reality and understand that we are more implicated, for love’s sake, now that we see? As Clydette and Jena have been my teachers, so has Simone Weil. In the 1940s, on the last night of her life, Weil wrote, “The most important task of teaching is to teach what it means to know.”

They are weighty words. To say something is “the most important” is to commit oneself. We judge and evaluate, and then we step in, arguing that when all is said and done we believe that this matters more than anything else. In politics and love, in economics and education, in the whole of life, we live by our judgments.

To teach what it means to know? Found in the journal at her bedside, these were the final words of Simone Weil, the French philosopher who died in the 1940s. While her social position would have allowed otherwise, her own passions and commitments led her to the decision that while others suffered during the war years, she would eat only that which was available to the ordinary people of France. And simply said, she starved herself to death.

Not a suicide—that would make it something other than it was. It was more that she was not a healthy person; her friends saw her as frail. And while in a different day under different conditions she might have made other choices, with an unusual starkness grounded in love she decided to live very simply, as simply as those who suffered. In the quietness of her own room, still very much alive to the world and all that it required of her, she became increasingly weak until one night, after writing in her journal, she went to sleep and never woke up.

Where did this seriousness of heart come from? Why did she see the world as she did? Why did the weightiness of the world mean so much to her? And why would knowing become that which mattered most?

Weil was born to a prominent Jewish family in the early years of the twentieth century. By age ten she had decided that she was a communist. Whatever we now think a century later about the Marxist legacy, at the time it meant that she was surprisingly thoughtful and passionate, especially about the needs of those who suffered and groaned. It did not seem right to her that some should have so much, and some should have very little.

As she grew older, eventually studying at the Sorbonne, her beliefs in the communist vision deepened. She read with passion, wrote with eloquence, and finished as the best student in her class, outpacing even the brilliance of Simone de Beauvoir, who later came to prominence herself as both a philosopher and the lover of Jean Paul Sartre. Weil knew, however, that as committed as she was she had yet to even meet a flesh-and-blood communist. So when Leon Trostky came through Paris that summer, it seemed to the young Weil that all her dreams would be satisfied.

But the night he spoke became a line-in-the-sand moment for her. The longer she listened the more sure she was that, while he was a visionary for her cause (“Trotsky, after all!”), he loved his ideas more than he loved people. He seemed to be enamored with “humanity,” but was indifferent to the lives of ordinary men and women, the proletariat of Weil’s own passions. The following day she left Paris and her communism.

Weil spent the next years getting to know the farmers and factory workers of France, the ones whose hopes and dreams her communism was to have defended. She persistently stuck by her commitments, but over time she wanted something more—a more sustainable reason to love the dispossessed. If the ideas of Marx and Lenin and Trotsky failed her and her country, was there an answer to be found anywhere?

She discovered it finally in the God who cries, the God who has tears.

A strange answer? Perhaps, but for her it finally satisfied the deepest longings of her heart—she wanted a good reason to love what she knew. Her passion was imbued with new meaning and she began to write, putting together a body of work that will stand for generations to come.

Among many essays that she wrote, there is one that I have loved most, called “On the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” The title seems unusual to us, I admit, but its insights are profound, speaking to all of us, whether we see ourselves as students or as lifelong learners, as the vocation of student starts at the beginning of life and continues on to the end of life—at least if we are people with ears that hear and eyes that see. Weil argues that it is in learning to pay attention that we begin to understand the meaning of life and of learning. What does she mean?

To pay attention is to see what matters and what does not matter. It is to discern rightly, to choose well. Yes, it is to know as we ought to know, to know in a way that leads us to love. She calls this kind of study sacramental, as it is a kind of learning that is born of a love of God for the world—and in it a calling to love as God loves because we know as God knows.

Her vision is formed by the story of the Good Samaritan, because in it she sees the primary issue as one of having learned, or not learned, to pay attention to things that matter. The novelist Walker Percy might have called it “The Story of the Man Who Got All A’s and Who Still Flunked Life,” as its meaning is cross-cultural and cross-generational, an affliction of everyone’s soul. The story of the Good Samaritan is told within a conversation between Jesus and an expert in the Judaic law. This man begins by asking questions that are not fully honest, as he himself knew the answers to his own questions. In response to Jesus’ assertion to “love your neighbor as yourself,” the expert asks, “So, who is my neighbor?” And Jesus says, finally, “While I am not interested in this kind of conversation, at all—because you don’t seem morally serious—I will give you a story.”

So he tells of a man on his way to Jericho, who while walking down through the hills east of Jerusalem is beaten and robbed. Two religious leaders, men much like the expert in the law, walk by and do not see a neighbor. They see a man, but do not see a neighbor—someone their law requires them to care for—and they pass by, having justified their indifference religiously, historically and sociologically. They had not learned to pay attention.

In contrast, the Samaritan does see a neighbor and stops to care for him because he has learned to pay attention, to understand what he sees and why it matters. Weil also calls this kind of seeing sacramental, because it is a kind of learning that connects heaven to earth. Sacraments always do that—they give us the grace to understand that the universe is coherent, that things seen and unseen are equally real, equally true. And they allow us to understand that the most ordinary elements of life can be made holy—even our learning, even our labor, even our love.

When we see all of life as sacramental, as the graceful twining together of heaven and earth, then we begin to understand the meaning of vocation, which in their very different ways are what the stories of Clydette, Jena and Simone Weil are each about. We can begin to see that all of life, the complexity of our relationships and responsibilities—of family and friendships, of neighbors near and far, of work and citizenship, from the most personal to the most public—indeed, everything is woven together into the callings that are ours, the callings that make us us.

The “Come and See” Pedagogy

This is a book about the most difficult task, the most important task. There is nothing we are asked to do that requires more of us than to know and to love at the same time. Mostly we choose otherwise. Mostly we choose to step away, now knowing as we do. Whether it is in the most familiar of relationships, as i...