Way
(Following is the final editorial Dan Wotherspoon wrote for Sunstone. )
As many of you have already learned, I am stepping away from the Sunstone helm following the Salt Lake symposium this August. That moment will come after seven and a half of the most wonderful years in my life. As in every life transition, I’m heading into uncharted seas, excited for new adventures but still longing for the security of known waters.
That it’s time for me to move on has been made absolutely clear to me. My deepest self has been sending me clues about it for the past couple of years. Some of these hints have come in the form of funks and sleepless nights that began to arrive far too regularly and for too long now to be viewed as healthy should they continue. The time it takes me to recover my energy following the completion of big projects and events has lengthened considerably. I’ve also been increasingly unable to work as deep into the night or on as many weekends as I used to, which has caused production to begin to slip.
Other clues have come to me more as quiet whispers telling me that while this role with Sunstone was an important stop on my road to finding my true vocation—whatever it is that I’m “called” to be in this world—it isn’t the final destination. Like everyone still searching for their truest calling, I wish I knew more right now about the shape and specifics of what I’ll be doing when I experience that ultimate state of soul in which I’ll be my whole self in full partnership with God and the universe; but that doesn’t seem to be mine to foresee right now.
One of my favorite teachers on finding one’s vocation is Parker J. Palmer. In his book, Let Your Life Speak,1 Palmer describes the feeling that comes when one feels compelled toward the discovery of one’s true vocation: “This is something I can’t not do, for reasons I’m unable to explain to anyone else and don’t fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling” (p. 25).
Palmer then shares a pivotal moment in his own journey to discover his life’s calling. At the time, he was thirty-five and taking a sabbatical year at Pendle Hill, a Quaker community outside Philadelphia that is dedicated to helping searchers pursue the connection between their inner life and outward service to the world. Having just spent five years in Washington, D.C., as a professor and community organizer—what had seemed to him an ideal combination for finding a deep congruence between his inner and outer life—Palmer was confused about why he wasn’t feeling truly fulfilled.
As Palmer shared with fellow Pendle Hill residents his desire to come to understand his vocation, he became frustrated by their advice. Responding with “traditional Quaker counsel,” the residents kept urging him: “Have faith, and way will open.”
Finally, after a few months of deepening struggle with this question of his vocation, Palmer approached Ruth, a thoughtful older resident:
“Ruth,” I said, “people keep telling me that ‘way will open.’ Well, I sit in the silence, I pray, I listen for my calling, but way is not opening. I’ve been trying to find my vocation for a long time, and I still don’t have the foggiest idea of what I’m meant to do. Way may open for other people, but it’s sure not opening for me.”
Ruth’s reply was a model of Quaker plain-speaking. “I’m a birthright Friend,” she said solemnly, “and in sixty-plus years of living, way has never opened in front of me.” She paused, and I started sinking into despair. Was this wise woman telling me that the Quaker concept of God’s guidance was a hoax?
Then she spoke again, this time with a grin. “But a lot of way has closed behind me, and that’s had the same guiding effect.” (p. 38)
I don’t know exactly how I know it, but I have come to understand my sleeplessness and various other struggles with energy these past couple of years as “way” closing to me the option of staying in this amazing and fulfilling yet apparently not-quite-endpoint-for-me role at Sunstone.
Over the course of the thirty-plus editorials I’ve written for the magazine, I’ve shared glimpses into some of the various closings that guided me toward this Sunstone stop in the first place. Newly married and ready to be provider for my family and spiritual guide for others, I was certain that way was opening for me a career in the Church Education System. After being heavily recruited from my job as an instructor at the Missionary Training Center, I took all the CES preparatory courses, did the student teaching, and received high marks in my evaluations. About all that I had left to do was say “yes.” During my student teaching, however, I had reluctantly come to the conclusion—very surprising to me but very clear—that I just wasn’t meant to teach teenagers. There was an easiness that was missing, and when I shared that hesitation with my interviewer during one of the final hiring steps, he completely understood. “Seminary teachers are born not made,” he said, suggesting that a calling to work with teenagers is one of those intangibles that just can’t be forced.
Even after that closing, however, I felt certain that my true vocation was still to be found teaching religion in some form or another. So forward I went with stops at Arizona State for a master’s and Claremont Graduate School for a doctorate.
My time in Arizona marked a closing to the simple faith I had brought into my study of religion. I became overwhelmed by the strong evidence of human temperaments and agendas in scripture, while at the same time becoming entranced by the astonishing beauty and power of faith traditions besides my own. Arizona State also closed for me the notion that finding capital-“T” kinds of truth was easy; I came to realize that divine markers are accessed in much more subtle ways.
My Claremont years were filled mostly by my continuing to get more and more familiar with the new religious world I found myself in. I took exciting courses and mulled over big issues, but way kept drawing me back to a focus on Mormonism. I eventually wrote a doctoral dissertation that allowed me to spend a couple of years concentrating on my favorite parts of Mormonism—sensibilities about the expansiveness of human nature and our deep interconnectedness with each other, God, and the physical world. It was wonderful. Surely way had opened, and it was all going to be smooth sailing from there.
I was wrong. To use Ruth’s words, “way closed behind me” in the form of a painful next few years during which I was not able to land a full-time university teaching job. My dissertation committee members spent about ninety minutes of my two-hour defense speculating about the kinds of academic posts there might be for someone who specializes in Mormon theology, so I should have guessed right then that finding a fit might be tough. Given the recent unfolding of Mormon studies at several universities, I occasionally find myself thinking that I just graduated about fifteen years too early. But to say that would be to deny that this closing off of an academic career was my being guided to discover and grow in new areas.
If I had to pick just one thing I gained during my time at Sunstone, it would be confidence in my confessional voice. Perhaps the biggest battle of my life—one still ongoing—has been to come to understand that real strength is found only in one’s vulnerability, in laying bare pretenses to surety and unassailable virtue. Though I began to sense within my first couple of years of academic training that truth isn’t reachable solely through intellectual power, I know that I would have had a much harder time heeding the sound of my soul’s wisdom were I to have landed an academic post. Instead of the classroom, way opened into the confessional.
If it is nothing else, the Sunstone editorship is an extended immersion in the confessional, the sacred world of spiritual autobiography. Sunstone publishes and provides symposium platforms for many, many personal essays—but even its more scholarly articles provide windows into the author’s journey. Why did she choose to study this subject? Why did he approach it in this way rather than that? What does this author’s tone reveal about his confidence in his conclusions? What can we learn from this study about what she values most?
I first became drawn to Sunstone by certain people I met in the magazine’s pages and at symposiums who seemed grounded in both the universality of mind-heart-spirit and the particularity of Mormonism. I know now that I was attracted to these individuals because—though often very different from me in temperament, interests, and life experience—they weren’t afraid to share their adventures in spiritual warfare or the scars they had received. They were for me the “wound-ed healers” that Henri Nouwen writes about: people who are able to offer strength and healing precisely because of the injuries they’ve received, people who are willing to “put [their] own search at the disposal of others” and “allow others to enter [their] life” and see how they connect with each other.2
I am far from having fully learned how to be completely open and vulnerable and welcoming to guests in this manner, but very certain that way closed those other doors so that I might be opened more to this aspect of my vocation. Nevin Compton Trammell’s poem “I’m Tired, I’m Whipped” speaks vividly to me about the convoluted journey that led to my discovering and embracing my confessional voice:
I’m tired
I’m whipped
too dumb to quit
too smart
to let life go by
I’m working hard
to find truth
in my own backyard
I’ve done everything
but die
Took the long way around
on a short ride to town
found a pass
where few have been
Gained a love
lost a friend
scraped my knees
learning to please
started out with no choice
somewhere
somehow
found my
voice
Nouwen writes that no host can predict how they will be affected by a guest they invite to their table, “but it is exactly in common searches and shared risks that new ideas are born, that new visions reveal themselves and that new roads become visible.”3 I’m wistful about the approaching close of my time at Sunstone but nervously thrilled for the way that is opening in my new job. Way has never yet failed to provide a great adventure.
NOTES
1. Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000).
2. Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer (New York: Image Books, 1979), 99–100.
3. Ibid., 100.
Subscribe to RSS
