A Prayer for Vocation 3 comments

By Dave Griffith

In his 1999 Letter to Artists, Pope John Paul II cites the words of the Polish poet, Cyprian Norwid: “beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work is to raise us up.” He goes on to refresh our memory of the Platonic notion that beauty resides in the good and the good in beauty.

Re-reading this beautiful and reaffirming letter, which, frankly, changed the trajectory of my career as a writer, I am struck by the despair welling up in me, the despair that causes me to focus on the fact that his Holiness' letter was written pre-9/11 and that he does not mention art that represents tragedy, disaster, heartache, or disbelief.

For a long time I have been able to sustain my own enthusiasm for work by the lights of Graham Greene and Flannery O'Connor, writers whose vocation lead them to meditate on the weakness of the flesh and the spirit.

But for the past four years, while I feel that I have approached my work enthusiastically, I do not feel that my work has raised me up in the way it used to. I am finding it more difficult now to feel gladdened by the work I do. Part of this, I think, must be economic and the other part spiritual.

The cost of living has risen but salaries have reached a plateau and are even starting to roll back. And while I am able to give thanks for how richly we live, especially in light of the abject poverty of others elsewhere, and while I thank God every night for family, health and shelter, it does not completely shut out the whining voices of entitlement and privilege.

There are days now where all day in the back of mind I regret my decision to become a writer. Not because I don't think I'm any good—God has blessed me with a secure enough ego to weather criticism, just ask my wife—but because I feel that I am letting my family down; that my inability to pay off our debt and to build up a nest egg for a hedge against bad times is a judgment of my manhood.

I used to feel that because I was young and lived in America, I could afford to be idealistic, but now as the gray creeps into my hair, and the college where I teach has suspended contributions to our 401K for the next five months in order to mend a million dollar hole in the budget, I am beginning to see why my parents feared for me lo those many years ago when I said I wanted to be an English major and eventually a writer.

Compounding this feeling of dread is the re-realization that the kinds of things I write about—violence and poverty—are just not popular or lucrative subjects. In my younger years I was able to smugly shrug off the distaste some had for my interest in what used to be called the grotesque, but is now called political. I don’t know why I’m even putting these words to the screen—it doesn’t take a literary agent to tell you that in these desperate times no one wants to read something that is going to bring them lower.

Usually when I get in these moods I am cheered by thinking of Flannery O’Connor’s response to a reader from California who wrote in a letter that she was not “uplifted” by her work. O’Connor replied: “I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.” And I used to be tickled by O’Connor’s prophetic observation that “[o]ne old lady who wants her heart lifted up wouldn’t be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club.”

But now I can’t help but notice that what book clubs want are tales about faithful pets and divorcees who take round-the-world tours of exotic lands in order to recover from heartache. This isn't to discount the real companionship and love animals can provide, or the pain of divorce or how travel can help us rediscover ourselves, but it is to say that we love stories that end with fresh starts, with the emergence of some certain and lasting good. We desire some affirmation that redemption is still possible.

Clearly, redemption has much more market value than despair, angst, or even mixed feelings, which is why I am so beleaguered. All I have these days are mixed feelings. On the one hand, I sense a pharisaical hubris taking over, and on the other I sense resignation and despair.

Where is my certainty? Where is my redemption?

But O’Connor, “that realist of distances,” cautioned: "at what cost?" At what cost do we demand redemption? The redemption I'm seeking right now—a reconciliation between the high-calling of vocation and the economic bottom line—is, I fear, wrong-headed and impossible.

One of my colleagues here at the college has adopted this quote as the signature on all of his emails: “A budget crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” Each time he emails me, the quote strikes to my very core, like an incantation, and I just sit there staring at it with gritted teeth.

Today, after reciting St. Francis’ prayer of vocation, which begins, “Most High, Glorious God, enlighten the darkness of our minds” and re-reading John Paul II’s letter, I have had an inkling of what it might mean: I must use this opportunity to see in the work I do the beauty and mystery of the incarnation. Where is the Word made flesh?