The Great Adventure, the Vocation of Life

Thursday, September 26, 2013:

To recognize the nature of your mind is to engender in the ground of your being an understanding that will change your entire worldview and help you discover and develop, naturally and spontaneously, a compassionate desire to serve all beings, as well as a direct knowledge of how best to do so, with whatever skill or ability you have, in whatever circumstances you find yourself.

Sogyal Rinpoche

Glimpse After Glimpse

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It was around the time all good Catholics got the slap on the face by the Bishop and took the Confirmation Sacrament. The priest came to our Catechism class after that slap and gave the boys “the talk”. No, ‘the talk” wasn’t about the birds and the bees; it was about committing ourselves to a Vocation. A Vocation is "Catholic speak" for the Priesthood or entering an order to become a monk. The talk was quite serious and it caused me to consider what it was that I could commit my life to. I believe I might have considered the priesthood… or entertained the idea of cloistering myself in a monastery… at least until my adolescent hormones awoke in me a desire that wasn’t at all about the celibacy of taking “the vows”. But, instead, I began to think about a vocation as a lifetime commitment to a higher calling outside of  Churchy business. I understand now that a vocation can be akin to what Joseph Campbell meant by his admonition to “follow your bliss”.

            We think, in the secular world, that a vocation is the same as a career. We speak of “vocational training” as preparing us for a job and a job can be a trade or any occupation: Yeh, an occupation, like we are temporarily claiming a territory. Perhaps that priest poisoned my thinking but a vocation has always meant to me a higher calling above and beyond how I put food on the table. If I follow my bliss it doesn’t matter how I put food on the table or what I do with my hands if what I am doing serves that higher calling. Following my bliss isn't merely about what we used to say in the sixties, "Doing your thing." I am grateful for that lecture so long ago because what that priest infused in me was to seek out that which it would be that is powerful enough to compel in my heart the adventure of a calling beyond "doing my thing".

            The time will come when I will go to the grave and, whether or not I succeed or fail in my calling, I will have the satisfaction that I didn’t throw away the one chance I had at the adventure I was called to in my life. The chanteuse, Edith Piaf, sang it so well with all her heart, No Regrets. That is the greatest blessing I have to hold on to; I have loved and I have been loved. To the best of my skills and abilities, I have been on the great adventure of life.

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