Biography
Dr. James W. Fowler is Director of The Center for Ethics in Public Policy and the Professions and Professor of Theology and Human Development at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Ordained in the United Methodist Church, Dr. Fowler has had a distinguished career as a religious educator. He held teaching positions at Harvard Divinity School and Boston College in the early 1970's, and has taught at Emory University since 1977. He is an authority in the fields of religion and psychology, and ethics and public life, and is the author of several books. He lectures frequently both here and abroad. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Calling, Identity and Bliss"
I would like to read to you from Paul's letter to the church at Ephesus. I'll be reading from the fourth chapter, verses one through six.

"I, therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling - one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all, and in all."

The apostle Paul writes in the fourth chapter of Ephesians, "I, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you therefore to lead a life worthy of the vocation to which you were called." The context of this verse in the letter to the church at Ephesus is plainly concerned about congregational unity. Here Paul's great metaphor of the church as the "body of Christ" is being appealed to as the purpose and basis for unity in the church. But it is the premise that lies behind the writer's appeal that most interests me. That premise: Each of us has been called to a vocation, and we are to lead a life worthy of the vocation to which we were called.

What is the vocation to which we have been called? How are we to walk the walk of our lives so as to be worthy of our vocations?

Vocation is bigger than job or occupation or career. Vocation refers to the centering commitments and vision that shape what our lives are really about. Vocation, rightly understood, gives coherence and larger purpose to our lives. It gives one's life integrity, zest, courage and meaning. Vocation links us with the purposes of God. Vocation is the fulfillment of the identity process.

To be in vocation is to find a purpose for one's life that is part of the purposes of God. Vocation is the response a person makes with his or her total life to the call of God to partnership. As such, vocation involves our lives in relation - our friendships, our family memberships, our love relationships, our marriages. It involves our lives in public - our roles as citizens, as members of voluntary associations, our actions for justice and care for the common good. Vocation also includes our ways of regularly finding re-creation - the use of our leisure and times for renewal and restoration. Vocation includes our participation in religious community - our lives of worship, study, prayer, praise, and service. Finally, vocation includes the work we do - voluntary or paid - in childhood or retirement, as well as during the prime years of our adulthood. In vocation, all of these aspects of our lives find a kind of orchestration and a coherence as we grow in the devotion of hearts to responsiveness to God. In vocation, partnership with God constitutes the core of our evolving identity - the very construction of our lives.

As I reflect upon this matter of vocation in our lives, I find that it involves four great paradoxes:

1. I find it paradoxical to the point of amazement that a cosmic God, creator of a universe 15 billion light years in extent, should be concerned with us as individuals, knows us each one, and calls us into relationship and partnership. Listen to how Psalm 139 expresses this paradox:

                You created my inmost self,
                You knit me together in my mother's womb...
                For so many marvels I thank you;
                A wonder am I, and all your works are wonders...
                You knew me through and through,
                My being held no secrets from you,
                When I was being formed in secret,
                Textured in the depths of the earth..."

Here we have to do with the paradox of the Infinite and the finite: the high and the low. Here we're invited to see our lives, whatever the context of our service and living, as full of potential significance, due to our callings to be part of the work of God. In our faithfulness and commitment we can be employed in the larger pattern of God's being and action toward the redeeming and the fulfillment of creation.

2. A second paradox of vocation lodges in the beginning of that text from Ephesians that I read at the beginning: "I, the prisoner in the Lord ...". Because of the history of the apostle Paul's frequent imprisonments, we might tend to take this self-characterization literally, limiting it to his actual times in jail. But those actual imprisonments stand as tangible consequences of a much deeper relationship involving captivity in Paul's life. That relation had a prehistory in the young Saul's role as a Pharisee in persecuting and trying to root out the adherents of a new sect centered on Jesus of Nazareth who they took to be the Messiah. That relation took a decisive turn on the road to Damascus. The risen Christ captured Saul on that day, and in that captivation Paul found perfect freedom. (Acts 9)

In being captured by Christ, Paul was freed from bondage to lesser gods. Vocation is our call to an allegiance - a captivity, a captivation, if you will - that frees us for our deepest service and our most creative investment of ourselves. Here we are in touch with the paradox of a captivity - a captivation, if you will - that leads to freedom.

3. Now, a third paradox has to do with our lives in religious communities: how we become individuals through our participation in communities. For now we can state it this way: It is through learning to stand each other in church that we are fitted for partnership with God in our vocations. This awakening to vocation, the forming, shaping and integration of an identity that includes our relatedness and responsiveness to God, can never be simply an individual achievement.

In church, when it is church, we are among friends who know and shape their lives within the Christian story. In interacting and struggling with them and in trying to discern with them what God calls us to be and do, we awaken, begin to form, and launch out in the risks of vocation. In church, when it is church, we find support, strengthening and accountability in our pilgrimages in vocation. Paradoxically, we become true individuals in relation to God and the neighbor, through community.

4. Now we come to a fourth paradox. This must be seen in relation to our common understanding of self-denial as being close to the heart of discipleship. "If any one will come after me, let that person deny the self, take up the cross, and follow me." For centuries that passage, and others like it, have led Christians to assume that to follow Christ, to be in partnership with God, necessarily goes against our natural inclinations and desires. We have been taught that our natural wills and dispositions are corrupt and selfish. Through heavy stress on the doctrine of original sin we have had hammered into us that we are inevitably "totally depraved" and that "there is no health in us." Thus, in thinking about how we might align ourselves with the purposes of God, we probably assume that our own desires and longings must be negated if we are to be faithful.

Now, to be sure, there are times and circumstances when following God's call puts us into danger, hardship, or even requires our death. A Steve Biko, who died of torture at the hands of South African police because of his commitment to liberation for his people, haunts my mind. The judges who died in Colombia, South America, because of their commitment to exercising the legal process to imprison drug lords gives us such examples. Yet, at a deeper level, we may say of these persons - and of millions of others - that though their commitments and activities have brought them suffering and death, in those commitments they were pursuing what they most deeply and truly wanted to be doing, what they were most deeply and truly called to be doing.

The fourth of those wonderful interviews of Joseph Campbell by Bill Moyers is titled, "Sacrifice and Bliss." There Campbell talks about vocation, and how what God wants for us and from us is connected to what we most deeply and truly want for ourselves.

Moyers asked Campbell how he found his special calling in life. Campbell answered that he discovered as a young man three great terms in the Sanskrit language, which he says is the language of spirituality, par excellence. The first term is Sat, which means "Being", ultimate Being, and our participation in it. And then there's Chit, which means "consciousness", awareness. And then there is the term Ananda, which means "bliss or rapture". Campbell said, "I thought as a young man, I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is, where my bliss lies, so let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me to both my consciousness and my being." Campbell was then in his eighties and facing death from throat cancer, but he said with a twinkle in his eye, "I think it worked."

Moyers then asked Campbell how one finds one's bliss. Campbell answered, in effect, that we find our bliss by following our own deepest gifts, our longings, and leadings. Then he referred to Sinclair Lewis's novel, Babbitt, and pointed to the last line of the novel. There Babbitt speaks and says: "I have never done the thing that I wanted to do in all my life." Campbell says, "That is a man that has never followed his bliss." And then he tells the story: Before he was married he had already begun his teaching career at Sarah Lawrence. He ate out virtually every night. One Thursday night in his favorite Greek restaurant, he saw a mother and a father and son, about age 12, sitting at the table next to his. He couldn't help overhearing the conversation. He heard the father say, "Drink your tomato juice." The boy said, "I don't want to drink my tomato juice." The father then said more loudly, "Drink your tomato juice!" And the mother says, "Don't make him do what he doesn't want to do!" And the father says, "He can't go through life doing what he wants to do - if he does what he wants to do, he'll be dead! Look at me - I've never done a thing I wanted to do in all my life!" And Campbell said, "And I thought, my God, there's Babbitt incarnate!"

Then Moyers follows up by asking, "What happens when you follow your bliss?" And Campbell says, "You come to bliss." He continues, "In the middle ages, a favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune. There's the hub of the wheel, and there's the revolving rim of the wheel. For example, if you're attached to the rim of the wheel of fortune, you will either be above, going down, or on the bottom, struggling to come up. And you'll never know where you'll be on that revolving wheel. But", Campbell said, "if you're at the hub - and in the picture they use to illustrate this, the hub comes out of the heart of the person - if you're at the hub of the wheel, you're in the same place all of the time." And then Campbell immediately illustrated his point by talking about marriage. He says, "That's the sense of the marriage vow. I take you in health or sickness; in wealth or poverty; going up or going down. I take you as my center and you are my bliss - not the wealth that you might bring me, not social prestige, but you. That," he says, "is following your bliss."

When Campbell taught in a boys' prep school he would talk to the boys who were trying to make up their minds as to what their careers were going to be. "Do you think I can be a writer?" a boy would ask, and Campbell would say, "Oh, I don't know - can you endure ten years of disappointment, with no one responding to you? Or are you thinking that you're going to write a best-seller at the very first crack? If you have the guts to stay with the thing that you really want, no matter what happens, well, go ahead."

But then Dad would come along, he said, and say, "No, you ought to study law, because there's more money in that, you know." "Now, that," said Campbell, "is the rim of the wheel, not the hub, not following your bliss. Are you going to think of your fortune, or are you going to think of your bliss?"

Understood deeply enough, Joseph Campbell's advice is of a piece with St. Augustine's counsel to: "Love God and do what you will." The preacher, novelist and essayist, Frederick Buechner, put the same idea in more Biblical and Christian terms. And I quote:

"Vocation comes from the Latin vocare, "to call", and it means the work one is called to by God. There are all different kinds of voices calling you to do all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God, rather than that of society, or the superego, or self-interest. By and large, a good rule for finding this out is the following: the kind of work God usually calls you to do is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do, and (b) that the world needs most to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing deodorant commercials, the chances may be that you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you've probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by your work, the chances are you've not only bypassed (a), but you probably aren't helping your patients much, either." Then he says, "Neither the hair shirt nor the soft birth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

Vocation: Finding a purpose for your life that is part of the purposes of God. "I, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you therefore to lead a life worthy of the vocation to which you were called."

Amen.

Interview with James Fowler
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: I must pose the same question that Bill Moyers asked Joseph Campbell in his well known interview. How did you, James Fowler, find your special calling in your life?

James Fowler: Well, I awakened to vocation in a family where this idea was taken seriously, and struggled as a student in high school and college to shape what I might do. I was involved in student politics at Duke University where I was an undergraduate, and I thought seriously about going into law and politics. However, my fascination with theology and philosophy made it difficult for me to give that up to study torts and contracts.

So I went on to theological seminary, not clear whether I would be a pastor or whether I would be a professor, or whether I would still go into politics. Then I did graduate study at Harvard and was pulled into a fascinating place called Interpreters' House, by a man named Carlisle Marney, and had the extraordinary privilege at age 28 of listening to people talk about their lives in real depth, the ups and the downs, the pains and the joys of their lives. I began at that point then to link developmental psychology with theology, and out of that came the research on faith development that I have devoted most of my career to doing. I've been fortunate that I have found that bliss that comes with people taking me seriously and finding what I was offering helpful to them as they reflected on and tried to help others reflect on the pilgrimages of their life and faith and vocation.

Talbot:   A distinguished career worldwide, in religion and public life, and now as director of the Center on Ethics and Public Policy at Emory. What are the most significant challenges as we look at the role of faith and public life these days?

Fowler:  One reason I'm very glad to be at the Ethics Center is I think we're losing public life. We're losing what Father Walter Ong called campuses, open fields where people can engage in combat without resort to arms. That is to say, we don't have the places to talk with honesty and depth about the issues that matter on the human agenda .

Talbot:  What are those issues?

Fowler: Well, in this country at the present time, racism is one that is clearly on our mind; the environment is a critically important issue; but how to take and keep the intelligence and the abilities that people have somehow devoted to care for the common good is, I think, the underlying challenge that we have. And a time when magnifying our own achievements is paramount.

Talbot:  To care for the common good. Thanks so much for that message, Dr. James Fowler.