My vocation story
My most wide-lens, big picture vocation is this: to help people directly experience interdependence.
Yes, I know, modest. Maybe I’ll never get there, and that’s OK. But it feels like a mission: the highest, best use I could have as a human being.
I see interdependence as a sacred wholeness of which we are all a part. A tragedy of modern human life is that we experience ourselves as separate and increasingly isolated from one another, Nature, and the cosmos. The many crises we face result from this belief that we are separate.
It’s been helpful to revisit how I came to this vocational “call.” It allowed me feel clear and confident about how to focus my coaching practice.
In this blog, I share my vocation story so you’re clear about what motivates me. Perhaps it will prompt reflection on your own journey too.
Gladness + bliss + hunger + work
Frederich Buechner (you remember Fred, don’t ya?) famously said that vocation is “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” I’ve always loved that poetic sentiment. The phrase sits right alongside one of my all-time favorite quotes, this time from Joseph Campbell:
Follow your bliss.
This is how I’ve tried to approach my career from the very start: by doing something I love that helps others. This has felt counter-cultural in a way that gives me hope. Life can be blissful and not selfish at the same time.
I didn’t have much hope for work growing up. My father used to say, “if it was fun, they wouldn’t call it work.” His perspective was rooted in society’s extractive, patriarchal norms about what it means to earn a living. He was often not a happy guy, and seemed to hate his blue collar job.
I didn’t want to be like that. Luckily, there was another voice in the house with ideas about work. My sister Julie would say, “I don’t want to work from 9-5 so I can live from 5-9.” You go, sis!
I knew which approach I wanted to take…
Meanwhile, I was the only one of my siblings (I’m the youngest of TEN) who attended a private Jesuit high school. They’ll tell you I was spoiled. But I did work-study and my parents apparently had a little more money by the time I came around, seven years younger than the others.
I never felt comfortable at my high school, though I did learn how to study and value my own intellect. Even as a student, I felt uneasy being part of what was–and is–basically an old-boys-club factory, churning out generations of lawyers, doctors, and top-down decision-makers.
While the Jesuits have a respectable history of intellectual curiosity and service to the poor, I wouldn’t say the overall vibe was “meeting the world’s deep hunger.” When push came to shove, rich kids who went to country clubs got away with being jerks and the rest of us tried to lay low. Their families donated a lot of money and were influential in the community. The Jesuits didn’t seem to have much interest in standing up to them.
For whatever reason, I knew early on that I didn’t want to just make money with my career. I wanted to be of helpful use to the world. I think my mom and the Jesuits helped me realize that.
Coming of age as the Cold War ends
In college, I created my own major in Theology and World Religions. I didn’t know what I would do with it, but I was following my bliss.
My final thesis was “Truth in the World’s Religions.” I wanted to know if a common teaching could be found across the world’s great spiritual traditions. Was there any recurring wisdom that spanned across history and culture? Was there such as thing as a trans-cultural human spirituality, that was free from the “baggage” of any particular tradition?
I was motivated by the end of the Cold War, which created a lot of existential anxiety. The year I graduated from high school, I was given a copy of Samuel Huntington’s essay The Clash of Civilizations, which appeared in Foreign Affairs magazine. I still remember that thick, oddly-sized magazine with a grey cover and red lettering. It made me feel smart. I hoped the idea of a shared, human spirituality might head-off the coming era of cultural and religious conflict that Huntington predicted would follow the Cold War.
I really believed in the power of ideas, and thought I had a good one. I was totally naive about how my little paper could have any effect. Not to mention the fact that I myself was part of a cultural and historical context that greatly limited my own thinking!
Truth and interdependence
So here’s what I landed on about Truth.
Truth is relational: it is experienced more than understood, through relationship. All existence plays out in relationship that is mutually causing and mutually defining. In other words, the basic nature of everything is interdependence. Nothing exists in isolation.
But don’t take my word for it! Here are some favorite examples of this Truth that continue to inspire me:
The traditions of indigenous communities from around the world cultivate a sense of deep inter-relationship. Being from the Great Plains, I was especially drawn to Black Elk, a wičháša wakȟáŋ (“medicine man, holy man”) of the Oglala Lakota Tribe of central North America:
I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there, I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.
~exerpt from Black Elk Speaks
Similarly, Buddhists describe cultivating a state of awareness that transcends attachment to the personal self, sometimes translated as “emptiness.”
Thich Nhat Hanh coined the phrase “interbeing” to define more clearly what it means to be “empty of a permanent, separate self.”
We inter-are with one another and with all life…our body is a community, and the trillions of non-human cells in our body are even more numerous than the human cells. Without them, we could not be here in this moment. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to think, to feel, or to speak. The whole planet is one giant, living, breathing cell, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis. Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos to manifest—whether a star, a cloud, a flower, a tree, or you and me.
Once aware of it, I found this theme of interconnected oneness wherever I looked. In Christianity, Jesus’ “last supper” is commemorated through the ritual of communion, representing spiritual union of the faith community with Christ. In Hinduism, “the Chandogya Upanishad (7th-6th c. BCE) explains Ātman as that which appears to be separate between two living beings but isn’t, that essence and innermost, true, radiant self of all individuals which connects and unifies all.” The Islamic scholar and mystic Ibn Arabi wrote, “When an individual understands that there is no separation between human and God they begin on the path of ultimate oneness.”
Understanding vs experiencing
If you haven’t already noticed, describing this Truth is tricky.
Terms like “interconnection” and “interdependence” feel like bland intellectualizations. What do they even mean? Like memorized prayers from my Catholic upbringing, the words can feel like rote prescriptions, creating a mental numbness that works against what they are trying to communicate.
Luckily my college studies were accompanied by practical experiences that got the ideas into my BODY.
I volunteered on three tribal reservations, where I witnessed a communal way living and spiritual practices that echoed Black Elk’s teaching about “the sacred hoop…that made one circle.” I was moved by the painful gap between the spiritual vision of indigenous communities and their experience of historical trauma and its impacts. While participating in social justice classes and student groups, I learned how government policies and other systems reinforced poverty and racial injustice. Alcoholism, obesity, suicide rates, and infant mortality were among the observable effects. Meanwhile, one of my teachers, a member of the Turtle Mountain Tribe from Montana, invited me to participate in a sweat lodge ceremony. It was an honor and gave me a visceral sense of the power ritual could have.
The most profound and direct experience of interconnection occurred in 1996 while on college service-learning trip to Guatemala. I immediately recognized it as a profound confirmation of the wisdom I was learning about Truth in the world’s religions.
Oneness that walks down the street
At the end of a month-long stay in San Lucas Toliman, Guatemala, my friend (who I would later be married to for 20 years) and I took a walk through a large cemetery. We discussed insights from this formational trip. It seemed we could have taken the trip 50 or 100 years prior and witnessed the same community-oriented, subsistence lifestyle. An individual was performing a ritual in the cemetery that included burning a sweet-smelling substance. It was easy to imagine they were honoring their ancestors as had been done for centuries.
This served to heighten our sense of connection across time.
As we left the cemetery and walked through the village to our group, something magical happened. It was as though we witnessed an unfolding of life’s interdependence in the people and scenes all around us. We saw a young girl in traditional clothing twirling in the street, an old man carrying a tremendous pack with a strap around his forehead to keep it in place, a younger man in a loud pickup with the stereo blaring. We kept commenting that, “this too belongs, this too is part of the whole that keeps unfolding. This is all one.”
We became giddy and deeply moved. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced.
When we returned, our friends noticed our altered state and asked if we were high. Neither of us were substance users, and we insisted it was simply a beatific walk and conversation. (Though I now wonder if we were affected by the substance being burned in the cemetery, which could have had consciousness-altering traits.)
Why interdependence matters
As I moved into graduate school, I was motivated by the contrast between the spiritual vision of interdependence and the reality of social injustice. I thought interdependence had clear implications for who we lived our lives. If I really believed everything was interconnected, how could I ever stand silent in the presence of harm? Wouldn’t that be like watching my hand be wounded without doing anything to stop it?
I began to see the outlines of competing priorities between “the world as it is” and “the world as it could be” as described by the world’s sacred wisdom traditions:
As I left academia, I knew I wanted to devote my life to the insight of interdependence. I wanted to work at the intersection of personal and social healing, where the inner and public life meet. I believed that was the best way to devote my life to Truth.
While I was not seeking to be ordained in any religious context, I clearly understood my vocation as responding to a deep call. I now see how my calling has resonance with the bodhisattva vow, as articulated here by Shantideva here (via Jack Kornfield):
…for the boundless multitudes of living beings
May I bring sustenance and awakening
Enduring like the earth and sky
Until all beings are freed from sorrow
And all are awakened.~Shantideva
So that’s my vocation story….that’s why I’m here trying to do this work.
What’s yours?
