The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [158]
Working in corporate finance was just a job for me; for him it was a real vocation. It flowed from a clear desire—an attraction to the business world, a desire to immerse himself in it and succeed. It was also an early indication that I might not be in the right place myself: for those who will succeed are those who love what they do, who find in it a real vocation.
As we’ve seen in previous chapters, desire is an essential element in the spiritual life. That’s why Ignatius asks you to pray for what you desire at the beginning of each prayer in the Spiritual Exercises. The very first exercise includes the invitation “to ask God our Lord for what I want and desire.” It’s also why William Barry writes, “Retreat directors, I believe, do their most important work when they help their directees to discover what they really want.”
God calls each of us to different vocations. Or, rather, God plants within us these vocations, which are revealed in our desires and longings. In this way God’s desires for the world are fulfilled, as we live out our own deepest desires. Vocation is less about finding one and more about having it revealed to you, as you pray to understand “what I want and desire.”
Desire, of course, has a bad reputation in religious circles. But selfish wants are not what Ignatius is talking about. As Margaret Silf notes in Wise Choices, “There are deep desires and there are shallow wants.”
One way to distinguish between deep desires and shallow wants, and to more fully understand our vocations, is to reflect on what you are drawn to over the long haul. You can use the techniques of the examen to look at where you’ve been drawn. You may ask yourself, What desires have lived long in my heart? What do I most enjoy doing? What are my dream jobs?
Latent and sometimes locked within each human heart is a dream waiting to be born.
—Jacqueline Syrup Bergan and Marie Schwan, C.S.J.,
Birth: A Guide for Prayer
If your job requires you to hunch over a desk crunching numbers but you have long dreamt about working more closely with people one on one, your desire may point to your true vocation. Maybe you’re meant to work in human resources or counseling. Conversely, if you’re a harried teacher who dreams of doing something more solitary, your desire may point to your vocation. Maybe you’re meant to be a writer—or, if that is impracticable, maybe to spend some time writing. Recently a friend told me that he had started to volunteer in a prison as a lay chaplain, though his current work is as a financial manager in a large corporation. His volunteer work gives him enormous reserves of joy and energy, and he grew enthusiastic just talking about it. You could see the elation in his face as he discussed his volunteering.
Sometimes an image may help you uncover such desires. Let me suggest one that has helped me over the years.
When I was in elementary school, our science teacher once asked our class to visit a nearby stream and draw out a glass of water, whose contents we would bring into class to peer at under a microscope. But before we could use the microscope, said our teacher, we would need to set the glass on a windowsill overnight: the water needed to clear. Plunging a glass directly into a pond will bring up all sorts of dirt, leaves, and twigs. Even after a few hours the water will still be cloudy. But if you let it settle, things become clearer.
Can you sit with yourself and let some of the dirt, leaves, and twigs of your life—your selfish wants—settle down so that things will be clearer? Or here’s another watery image: think of skimming things from the surface of your soul, getting rid of what is preventing you from seeing clearly, seeing what lies deeper down.
I was astonished to run across this precise metaphor—which I thought was my own!—in A Time to Keep Silence, published in 1953 by the British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who visited the La Grande Trappe, the original Trappist abbey in Normandy, France. In his secluded cell, he wrote, “the troubled waters of the mind grow still