So, I’m back for part two – asking you to help me figure out if I’m walking the path of the pilgrim, the prodigal or the putz. In part one I described how my vocational significance, my personal “house of cards,” was blown away in the wind.
To recap: after being forced from a career which had blessed me with a sense of intense and transcendent meaning, I found myself entering a deep personal void akin to what anthropologists call liminality. It’s a period of high ambiguity that exists in the land between what’s over and what is next.
Periods of liminality are common. We all “age out” of previous stages in life. We all experience a big losses and tragedies. We wake up one day to the reality that a threshold has been crossed and there is no map forward and no bridge back. There is “no line on the horizon” (to quote Bono and the boys in U2). It’s as though we have been abandoned in a hinterland – an area lying beyond what is visible or what is known. It’s Tolkien’s Deadmarshes. It is an area of faint hope.
My threshold into the liminal came when I was relieved of my position at work. In trying to gain some understanding, I have attempted to describe this space ad nauseum in personal journals. My writings get emotional and complex. Dark thoughts emerge. Blame is cast. Demons are fought. It is a place of shame. I put myself and God on trial. It exhausts me.
For me, the liminal theme I keep coming back to is “fracture” (although you may have a better word). Something supremely significant – something that has been baked into my DNA – has been irretrievably broken. I am fractured. This broken thing for me is a sense of purpose. A sense of vocation. A sense of calling. It’s a big reason why I’m on this earth – and somehow it just evaporated into the ether one day. As you can likely tell, these are DEEP waters for me.
To be clear, the core issue in liminality is not the bitter taste of loss. It’s not grief (although grieving is an important component of the process). For me, it’s been the frustratingly evasive inability to successfully reinvent – to come out the other side. In my case, it’s been the inability to reinvent around a new career “north star”. And what’s been doubly confusing to me is that career reinvention is something I used to be great at (see previous post). Even this skill, it seems, has abandoned me.
I know what C.S. Lewis means when he describes what it means to be a man: “Every rope breaks when you seize it. Every door is slammed shut when you reach it. To be like the fox at the end of the run: all earths are staked.” Letters to Malcolm chapter VIII
As men everywhere can attest, what we do for a living – our vocational roles in this world – ARE wrapped up in who we are as a husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, providers, friends, neighbors, etc, etc, etc. Shrinks and sociologists debate over this, but being untethered from personal vocational mission – WHATEVER THAT MEANS INDIVIDUALLY TO US – amounts to oxygen deprivation. We’re on life support without it.
So let’s move on. Successfully navigating the liminal is a highly complex emotional skill. My highly evolved approach has been to play “Whack-A-Mole.”
Maybe you know the arcade game. Players use a mallet to hit toy moles, which appear at random, back into their holes. The idea is to pound enough moles to eventually win the game. Here’s a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0n8N98mpes
In my journals, I have listed over 20 tactics, techniques, seminars, books, strategies, classes and initiatives I have completed to successfully emerge from the haze of vocational disruption. These represent my moles. They are all the fads, tools and tricks I’ve tried to whack in reinventing the game of vocational significance. In short, they have all been of limited help. You’ve probably heard of many of them. But so far, and again in the words of Bono and the U2 boys, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
So, I made a decision awhile back. I’m kinda done chasing everyone else’s “take this pill and call me in the morning” solutions. I’m tired of whacking moles. That doesn’t mean I’ve closed my mind to outside resources. Far from it. But it does mean that my answer, my “singularity” exists “in here” and not “out there”.
And it’s “in here” is where I’ve gained some traction. I have struggled for months in attempting to articulate this. But if I have anything to offer those looking to make sense of vocational wanderlust, it’s this – look for a Who, not a What.
I have not found what I am looking for. But, unexpectedly, I am rediscovering WHO I am looking for. As it turns out, the answer to what ails me is not a what – as in what I’m meant to do. Instead, it’s a who – as in who can infuse this mess with meaning.
Since my college days, I have historically professed to be a Christian. By that, I simply mean that I have tried to be more like Jesus. I’ve had my “born again” encounter and I’ve always considered myself to be an evangelical. But who cares? The grind of the past 4 years has been so completely soul-wrecking to me that those labels lack much definition for me now. That guy has died a thousand deaths.
There is so much to say here, more than will fit into a 1,200-word blog post. In this process of navigating the liminal I have lost my faith a hundred times, yet my fidelity has remained intact. Pre-covid, I’d already back-burnered church attendance for the better part of a year but, instead, am now part of a meaningful fellowship that’s not really counting gold stars for attendance. I’m part of a Bible study that has expanded – not narrowed – my thinking. I have friends that process life without prescribing some religious pill. My kids have a dad that’s authentic, who no longer tries to force them into youth groups, Christian clubs or mission trips. They see a dad in whom they the struggle is real.
What I’m trying to say that, stripped of all the trappings, I have found a larger God – the one who I missed for decades. He’s well-equipped to sort through my baggage and craft it for higher purposes.
That said, life continues to be kind of a restless anthem for me these days. I’m still whacking a few vocational moles, with only incremental success. In my search to reframe what vocation means, I’ve done what we all must do in the interim – bow to the needs of necessity. I’ve done a number of things in the past four years to keep things afloat. There is absolute nobility and dignity in doing what’s necessary. I’m not discounting that, and I’ll continue to count it a blessing to be able to participate in fruitful endeavor. But’s that’s an entirely different area code from being at peace with it.
So, am I a pilgrim? A prodigal? A putz? Whatever you decide is fine by me. The only path I’m pursuing now leads farther up and further into the grace that is reemerging in my life. It’s my search for meaning. To whatever end…..