Book Review: Following the Path

As I child, it was one of the questions I dreaded hearing. Well-meaning aunts, teachers, and perfect strangers all ask children: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I never really had a good answer. “Teacher” was usually my most practical sounding response. But that never felt authentic, even when for a short while I was studying art education in college.

The truth is I never knew, long after I was past the age when I was supposed to have a career mapped out. However, at some point I realized that life is more complex than choosing one well-defined career and sticking to it.

In Following the Path, Joan Chittister provides insight on what it means to have a purpose, and how our calling transcends and yet permeates what we do for a living.

The search for happiness

Our calling naturally springs forth from our God-given skills, abilities and gifts. These are further shaped by our life experiences, both positive and negative ones. The activities we enjoy most are often keys to understanding our life's calling.

However, a deep-rooted happiness is more than just about enjoyable activity. “Don’t be fooled: enjoyment and happiness are not synonyms,” Chittister says, “Enjoyment is, at best, an answer to the rigors of routine; it is not the abiding sense of a life well lived. That comes with having lived life well at every level and to the very heart of its ultimate meaning.”

Furthermore, to confuse happiness with pleasure or finding the “perfect job” only leads to disappointment. “We expect it [happiness] from our families and when that fails, hope that by starting over again with total stranger—in another company and another city and another position with more pay—that we'll do better the next time.”

No, living our calling is not always easy. It can frustrating and downright miserable at times.

“Only when we stop thinking of God as playing a game with us, to see if we can get the very question of what to do with our lives right, do we begin to realize the call is a partnership. God gives us our gifts; we are meant to discover how to best use them for the sake of the world, both now and to come. God beckons us forward when we would fail ourselves and quit.”

Your call is not your job

Living our lives well means expressing our uniqueness in large and small ways. In fact, our calling may not even be hinted at in official job descriptions.

My friend Susan has a calling to homemaking. She takes great care to give her home a sense of warmth and welcome for her family, friends, and especially her three children, now grown with families of their own. She creates special decorations for every holiday and always has at least two Christmas trees up by the weekend after Thanksgiving. And yet, she has maintained a full time job outside the home all her adult life, not remotely related to homemaking. But even in her office, she naturally finds ways to bring a sense of home to an otherwise typical work space—from bringing surprise breakfast treats for her officemates to letting a sense of deep caring infuse the way she speaks with her customers.

“What is a call, then? It is a life lived in recognition of what we’re able to do, what we want to do, and what needs to be done for some good purpose.” says Joan Chittister.

The long and winding road

I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that we are not meant to see the path of life as a straight line.

“We are what we are, but the gift of self unfolds only as we go, often barely noticeable, always with surprise. It can take years before it becomes clear—the real gift that is hidden within us.”

Joan knew she had a gift for writing even as a young teenager. However, she says she didn't understand this an option. Growing up in the 1950's, she says few female authors were on the library's bookshelves, and women were not granted leadership roles in the church. She entered a monastery and spent a lifetime teaching, learning, and sharing God's love with others. Only later in life did she begin writing professionally.

Was she only meant to be a writer—and all other paths were a distraction? Certainly not. What we are called to at 30 may not be the same thing we are called to at 50. She says, "The fact is that life is lived in stages, and each stage has its meaning and its purpose. One builds on the other; one prepares for the other; each one is different from the other. And none of them can be rushed."

Perhaps only in retrospect can we appreciate the twists and turns of the path. “The song of life is born in every soul. But the song we are meant to sing does not come to us whole. It grows in us—louder, stronger, clearer, more fully—over the years, until we discover, finally, that our call has been within us all the while. Learning to hear the song within us, finding the call within us, and then bending our lives to follow it to the fullness of ourselves is the key to happiness, to meaning, to fullness of life.”