When the news of Frederick Buechner’s death started making the rounds this week, I saw post after post of what his writing had meant to so many. And everywhere was this quote, one of his more popular, one that hits most of us right in the gut when we think about wanting to live a life of meaning and purpose.
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Sounds quite wonderful.
When I consider my own western, individualist, middle-class, white girl take on this, it makes me delighted to think that I am freed up to discover what my deepest gladness is— and that I can pursue it. Of course, on its own my deep gladness might be self-indulgent and self-serving, but the answer to this will be to use my gift (the pursuit where I have discovered my deep gladness) in a way that helps others.
And here is where I run into trouble. Because I think of so many I admire who didn’t exactly follow this sage advice. Then my Protestant, Calvinistic, Enneagram 4-plagued-self wonders, could God ever call us to something that is not found in this enticing vortex of gladness and need?
One of my heroes, Eric Liddell, was a world-class athlete and Olympic Gold runner who left his athletic career to serve in China. The famous line from Chariots of Fire, has him saying to his doubting and concerned sister, “Jenny, God made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.” There it is: the deep gladness. Eric was telling her, God gave me this gift, and when I use it, I think God is pleased.
But then he leaves it all at the height of his running career. Sure, he used his running gift in China as well. There is a stadium still standing here in Tianjin that he helped design. There were races he took part in that likely gave him a platform to preach. And there was the internment camp he lived in during the Japanese invasion, where he organized running games and events to help stave off the boredom of the many children imprisoned there.
But then he died in the camp. And his wife and three young girls, who had evacuated with their mother to Canada before the invasion, never saw him again.
He’s one of my heroes because of the strength of his character which did not crack in the hardest of times, and because he seemed to love God deeply. But he also struggled at the end, doubting perhaps the decisions he had made. Giving up so much, for what? Was it enough? The human struggle, after all.
And there is Dietrich Bohnoeffer, a man of immense intellectual gifts, whose deep gladness was somewhere in the realm of passion for theology and discipleship, and also beauty, and the mountains of Germany. He felt compelled, dare we even say “called” (he would not have given it that term) to stand up to Hitler, and to join a movement to put an end to the Führer. Bonhoeffer was caught, imprisoned, and days before the Allied Liberation, executed by a firing squad.
In his prison poem, Who Am I, likely written during the final days in his cell, his own questions and doubts rise to the surface. They are the doubts of a man stripped of everything, purpose, beauty, friendship, even answers to life’s great questions. Did I do the right thing? Am I a fraud? Was it enough? At the end of everything, he too is so human.
This week, our three oldest kids worked at a day camp put on by a local Chinese kindergarten we work with. The hours were long, and the work exhausting. Our son spent much of the day folding his 6’5 frame into little pre-school sized chairs, helping campers with their crafts, or snacks, or keeping them from throwing themselves across the room.
The truth is, we made them volunteer, believing that it is not always natural to give up our time or energy to serve others, and that we have to make ourselves do these things sometimes. It was certainly not their deep gladness.
I come back to the question of whether Buechner was right: do we find our calling where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger?
What a joy if it does. What do we do if it doesn’t? Do we leave a faithful post to pursue something that meets our deeper desires? Do we doubt our work, and lament our lives, if they were full of service but were perhaps short on joy?
Another example, and a final one. Mary anointing Jesus feet with perfume.
It says in Mark’s gospel that the disciples were indignant, seeing the expense of the perfume and feeling it was a waste of resources. Surely Jesus would have preferred the money had been used to help the poor.
It’s logical enough. Jesus is all about good stewardship of finances. And how many things does he say about loving your neighbor and caring for the poor? Yet in this instance, he has a far different take on Mary’s act than anyone would have expected.
He commends it. He claims to see and know her motive behind it. He says she did it out of love for him. And that this, doing this thing because she loved him, was more important that anything else.
It reminds me of Jesus questions to Peter that I wrote about last week, centered only on this: Do you love me?
At the end of the matter, is this what God is after? I certainly don’t claim to have explored all the nuances around this, all the things we can and should consider. There is the whole matter of “if you love me you will do what I say,” to consider. It’s not just, do you have nice feelings for me?
But I know that lately when I am plagued by the worth of what I’ve done, or the questions about what comes next, I keep coming back to the way Jesus talks to those who follow him. He who sees underneath and all around the things we set our hands to do, it seems that he wants us to want Him, above all. And that there is something in the the wanting of Him that will lead us in the right direction.