Following the Path by Joan Chittister

Author:Joan Chittister [Chittister, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307953995
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-16T22:00:00+00:00

There is only one success—to be able

to spend your life in your own way.

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

11.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO

HAVE A CALL?

“You’re going where? To do what? For heaven’s sake, why?”

“I’m not really sure. I only know that unless I try this, I’ll never be happy.”

Call is an awesome word. It rings of the divine and smacks of destiny: it is the thing we feel we can’t avoid doing, even when we didn’t want to do it in the first place. It is the concept that makes decision-making a kind of cosmic dice game, a round of hide-and-seek, as if someone somewhere knows what we are meant to do and is waiting to see if we’ll get it right. And woe to us if we don’t. Responsibility for what we do in life, from this point of view, falls somewhere else. Not on us.

There is no doubt, of course, that a lot of what happens to us in life seems to be happenstance, out of our control, determinative. And it is. It always has been.

Who knows when it happened? Most of us don’t even know who did it. But one thing we can be sure of: if we’re where we are today—maybe even who we are today—it’s because someone somewhere—a great-grandparent, a grandparent, a parent—found themselves at a turn in the road, and took it.

For some reason unknown to us, perhaps not even fully conscious to them, someone in our history found themselves at the end of one road and facing two others. Then, choosing the road on the left rather than the road on the right, they began their lives all over again. And that has made all the difference—not simply for them but for us as well.

They left Poland or Russia or Ireland or Germany or Italy or Africa or Mexico or England. Or they left a job and a state and a home. Whatever it was, they left something they had no intention of leaving long before they thought they had finished with it. Until along came the unforeseen. Along came the crossroad. At that point they left one life behind and made a new one. In most cases they weren’t transported or forced; they weren’t sure where the road would lead and they weren’t guaranteed success. They simply knew that life for them was somewhere and something else than what they had known. They simply knew that they were unfinished and required to do something else. They knew that they had to take responsibility for their lives at a time when the future was unclear and the past was no longer the answer to it.

It is this process of taking responsibility for the fulfillment of our lives that is the fundamental process of answering the call for the more that now cries for attention within us.

Clearly, the question that lingers as a result of those twisting, turning histories of the vagaries of our family backgrounds is a simple one: would we—can we—make the kind of hard choices

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