Is this all there is?

Nothing disquiets the soul more than a feeling of being unfinished, adrift, rudderless at the same time. There is something more we’re meant to do in life, we’re sure, but no way, apparently, to dispel the aura of aimlessness in which we have begun to live. I go to work every morning but no amount of money could really make me like it, feel good about being there, able to convince myself that being there is where I’m meant to be.

There is a cosmic sense of frustration about knowing myself to be on the way to somewhere—but in the dark. I do my best at everything I do, however mundane, however humble.

I avoid class reunions because everybody else there talks big plans about big things, but nothing big has ever happened to me. Nor have I begun yet to realize that there is a distinction between going to work and pursuing my call. So I go through life disappointed with the job but unable to realize that the call, for me, may be far and wide away from any paid occupation anywhere.

I have yet to understand that my call may start after work ends every day. My call may be to organize games for street children, or write to prisoners, or make casseroles for the old woman next door, or learn another language in order to help refugees adapt to the small white town in which I live.

The point is clear: my sense of worth and purpose in life is tied up with the quality of life I provide for others, for the planet, for the human race. Solving equations all day long, or encoding a computer all day long can also be boring, can also seem worthless, unless I’m doing these things in order to be some small part in curing an insidious disease or finding a formula that reduces the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

It may be something as simple as producing materials that ennoble the human mind rather than pander to it, selling and creating things that enhance life rather than destroy it. And, yes, making hamburgers for those who can pay for them can also be a call, provided that working in this place is what enables me to care consciously for someone else in some other way.

In the end, it is passion and purpose—passion and purpose—that are of the essence of a vocation, a call to do something that makes me a conscious co-creator of the world.

Is it too late to start over?

What happens if we should begin again and do not? One thing is sure: the risks of not pursuing our deepest gifts, our strongest passions, our need for higher purpose in life also are serious, not only for ourselves but for those around us as well, whose happiness quotient will be affected by our own. Frustration with what is, the ennui that develops in the face of what has never been, and the sense of emptiness that comes from leaving behind part of ourselves that could have been pursued but was not, are serious breaches of life.

Obviously there is a public risk in allowing ourselves to grow slowly, steadily into the resolution of the self, but there is even worse risk if we attempt to ignore it. Frustration triggered more by what is missing in life than by what we are dealing with there saps our energy for anything else. We get irritable with others. We get even more disgusted with the self in us that we have learned to dislike. Inertia fills the space where love of life used to be. Emptiness colors and smothers everything we attempt to do.

Clearly, “It’s too late for that now” is too great a burden to bear. When is it too late to start over? Never. Not as long as we are alive and seeking even more out of life. Beethoven, deaf as stone, knew that and went on composing long after he could hear what he wrote.

Life is lived in stages. Everything in one stage is simply a prelude to the next, where the lessons will be even more life-giving than before and past learning will take on new value.

“We are always beginning to live,” the Roman poet Manilius wrote in the first century, “but are never living.” We are always becoming, never at any given moment totally and finally complete. The only answer, then, to the question of whether we should start over again is to do what we must in every stage and be ready, when the time comes, to go on living fully in the next one.

–from Following the Path: The Search of a Life of Passion, Purpose, and Joy by Joan Chittister

Testing the mettle of the self

Dailiness tests the mettle of the self. The ability to go back to the same task, day after day—taking care of the children, doing the shopping, hawking a product, stacking the shelves—with new attention to the task, with new concern for the outcome, takes a special kind of faith, another kind of trust.
 
It’s learning to bring your whole self to something that makes the difference between a happy life and a dull life, a holy life and an empty one.

Life is not made up of crises; life is made up of little things we love to ignore in order to get on to the exciting things in life. But God is in the details. God is what it takes in us to be faithful to them. God is in the routines that make us what we are. The way we do the little things in life is the mark of the bigness of our souls.

It’s when we go on in the heat of the noonday sun that we know what it’s like to walk the dusty roads of Galilee. It’s when we go on without firecrackers or music that we understand what the desert is like. It’s when we go on despite the fact that quitting would be more satisfying that we know that God has taken control of our lives. Then, we are being used for something greater than ourselves.
Dailiness is the great deep pit out of which the character of our lives takes its most lasting shape. It is the repository of our greatest graces and site of our worst losses. It is the treasure house of all our yesterdays and the reserve out of which we draw strength for all our tomorrows.

(Joan Chittister- Called to question)

A Place Called "Home"

In each of us there is a place where we go in the middle of chaos to escape from the fray. It is that “home” place, that hiding place, that soft place where no memories of it come with ragged edges and no thought of it is tinged with fear. It’s an empty beach, perhaps. Or a hidden place on the bluff above town where we remember being able to see everything while no one could see us.

It is the place of our dreams and the hope of our hopes.

It’s that place to which we return in our minds to change life in the middle of too much life for us to take just then.

It’s that natural place within us where the roar of the water or the silence of the mountains or the warmth of the desert or the moss of the swamp soothes our souls and makes us feel human again, at one with the universe again, in control again.

Whatever it is, wherever it is, it calms us and makes us new again.

 

Gratitude Is the Key

"I learn by going where I have to go..." 

All of life cannot be planned. Our life is God's and gratitude is its key.

Giving thanks to God is good psychologically to keep our thoughts light and full of energy. It is not true, psychologists tell us, that we think the way we feel. On the contrary, we feel the way we think and thoughts can be changed.

Giving thanks to God is good spiritually. That is the beginning of contemplation.

Giving thanks to God is good socially. It makes us a positive presence in a group. (Only negative people want to be around negative people.)

We need to stop and thank God–consciously–for the good things of the day. We spend so much time wanting things to be better that we fail to see our real gifts. There are banquets in our life and we don't enjoy them because we are always grasping for something more: the perfect schedule, the perfect work, the perfect friend, the perfect community. We have to realize that God's gifts are all around us, that joy is an attitude of mind, an awareness that my life is basically good. Dissatisfaction is too often a sign of something wrong in me

RELIGION AND HAPPINESS

What, if anything, does the average person learn about happiness from religion, the only discipline whose entire intent is to describe eternal happiness?

Religion, unlike any other system on the planet, sets out to teach us how to live, how to make choices and come to decisions that are, in the end, eternally good ones. However much religion may have dabbled in other systems along the way, it is not about the governance or economic security or intercultural relationships or the business of national growth. It is the only institution on the planet that makes happiness primary and takes happiness seriously. Religion, in fact, puts happiness first and foremost, beyond everything else on its agenda. Religion purports to be what Aristotle insisted was the very essence of life—the meaning and purpose of life.

The fact is that religion shapes attitudes. It directs us to elements of life that we should be developing, or it closes some of them off to us. It can set out to develop us as moral agents and spiritual adults, or it can suppress the religious imagination to the point of religious servitude.

Cultivating within ourselves the ability to distinguish one response from another has something to do with becoming both psychologically whole and philosophically astute.

What religion teaches us about happiness and how we can achieve it will, in the end, shape our very notions of life and growth. More than that, perhaps, it has the capacity to lead us through the darkness of pain and enable us to recognize pleasures that offer more than dulling boredom or inadequate and immature spiritual development.

The role and place of religion in life have both a personal and social impact. Religion's definition of happiness and the way to achieve it is no small concern for the world. It tells us a great deal about ourselves and even more about the God we believe in but cannot see except, perhaps, in the shadows we cast for one another because of the religions we say we follow.

— from Happiness by Joan Chittister (Eerdmans)