"Who am I? Where do I come from? Where is my life going? What do I value? What should I be doing with my life?" Such questions surface at various times in our lives. Typically, we suppress, deny, or postpone giving them an answer. Where can we begin? It is tempting, when such questions arise, to lose ourselves in more general discussions of the “meaning of life”, when life confronts us with a question far more intimate – and unsettling: "Who am I? What is the meaning and purpose of MY life?"

A good place to begin is your own experience. For instance, you might ask yourself: "When I was a child, what absorbed my attention so much that the time literally just flew by? What makes me feel alive? What fills me with joy and gratitude? What stories, movies, songs, and works of art speak to my heart? When I was young, who did I want to grow up to be like? What do my friends tell me they like best about me? Finally, what is it that I always find myself doing – no matter what I do?" These are not easy questions to answer. But as we attend to our experience, patterns emerge: through introspection and self-reflection, yes, but also in the context of community, through the perceptions of others who know and care about us, and through the many needs of the world around us, crying out to be answered. In The Sacred Journey, Frederick Buechner connects care of self and generous service to others in defining vocation as "the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hungers meet."

In Christian circles, we use this word "vocation" to describe that inner voice: that dynamic of call and response through which we hear God calling us by name, and guided by God’s light, discern the response we will make to that invitation. Unfortunately, the church has often restricted it to the “state of life”, leading to the mistaken notion that only clergy and vowed religious “had a vocation.” (More recently, we have expanded this to include the call to marriage and to single life.) In the secular world, “vocation” has typically been reduced to the identification of a set of talents or skills, equipping us to do some particular work. The danger of both these perspectives is that they give priority to “doing” over “being”. More subtly, they can reflect an image of God as distant, making demands on me, imposing on me a mission that may have little to do with my true nature, my needs and desires.

Quaker author Parker J. Palmer, in his book "Let Your Life Speak," reminds us that “in the end, vocation is not a goal to be achieved, but a gift to be received: accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation comes not from a voice 'out there' telling me to become something I am not, but from a voice 'in here' inviting me to be the person I was born to be, to live out the name given to me at birth by God." To explore this question further, come and join Catherine Cherry and Fr. Raymond this Wednesday, February 25th at 7:00 p.m., for our Faith-CAFÉ: “God Calls You By Name: Become Who You Are!”