More on Enough

There used to be two kind of insufferable guys who came on the radio on weekday mornings, one was Brian something and the other was I forget. But one of them always used to say that the biggest uncovered news story is always the same...that 842 million people in the world are starving and there is enough to feed them. Which is sad but which also stuck with me as an idea. There’s enough, it’s just not in the right places in the right amounts.

That has been a lot on my mind recently, as Andy spoke about the idea of ‘calling’ and what we are called to do, and as I have been reading about the idea of ‘vocation.’

“Vocation’ soothes me. I love how it untangles the purpose of one’s life from one’s livelihood. How your breadwin can be your vocation or not, or how vocation can run alongside work for money but not have to run into it. How people have a lot of vocations.

How we know what we are called to do and we don’t like it.

I might, as I did once, hear about all those starving people, and being young and not having any real stories around cast myself as a savior. I might, as I did, roughly grab the vocation of feeding them all and demand the quickest route to the most fed. I might, as I did, work for non-profits, ask to be sent to the saddest poorest place, with the saddest poorest people, to get the most food in the most mouths as fast as I could with little regard for my own actual gifts and their cultivation or use.

We want to be something in the face of not enough, don’t we? That’s why it’s so easy to get people to volunteer to ladle soup for the homeless and so hard to get them to volunteer to file the backlog of their social service paperwork. One lets us perform ‘be.’

That’s why you can get donors for programming- they’ll buy the sacks of rice or the medicine or the schooling, but not the copy paper for the home office. Not the salaries of the people who manage the distribution.

The stories we have elevate some vocations and marginalize and shame others. I live in a world that doesn’t really revere the vocation of parenting, for example, despite the fact that it was devoted parenting that allowed most of us many of the blessings we have. I work with students every day who have vocations for the arts, or for helping professions or for gardening that their parents have shamed into a corner, depriving us all of the enough we need.

And though we know- as Andy said this week- we know we are called to earnestness and humility, the shame that comes with them will train us out of it.

No, dude, you're really doing me a favor. 

There are stories designed to shame us from small vocations, and there are stories that are made to let us off the hook for the charity and empathy that we know we’re called to offer.  We’re daily called to small acts of generosity that are just too hard. Spare change is hard. Not getting a really good catty remark is hard. Not taking a little extra for ourselves is hard.

Wouldn’t we rather be called to epic-scale martyrdom? Why is it so much easier to imagine yourself risking your life to save a stranger than giving somebody a dollar? Is it because there are no stories for that? No one ever said “‘tis a far far better thing I do” about not being a shithead to a co-worker. There’s no epic climax music for choosing against taking something inconsequential that still isn’t really yours. No great oil painting of someone putting their trash in the trash.

There are so many available imaginings of the vocation of self sacrifice.

The scary truth is that our vocation is self.

All the religions want us to submit to the will of God, or god, or “god.” Maybe we know inside that if we could find a way to behave in accordance with god’s will, we would improve the distribution.

Instead we strive for extremity, mis-distributing all that is needed.