my vocation in life essay

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in: Career , Career & Wealth

Brett & Kate McKay • June 13, 2010 • Last updated: May 30, 2021

Finding Your Calling Part IV: Discovering Your Vocation

Vintage man working in garden tilling soil.

In Parts I and II of our series on vocation we talked about what a vocation is, and in Part III we put forth an argument for why every man should pursue his vocation. Today, we’ll be discussing how to find your vocation.

Your True Vocation=Your Gifts+Your Passion

As we’ve discussed so far, your calling is not one specific magical job out there, but rather your unique talents, gifts, and capabilities-the things within you that you bring to a job. Thus, different jobs can tap into your vocation to different degrees. A job may use your gifts 50% of the time or 90% of the time. Finding your true vocation means finding work that utilizes your gifts in the 75-100% range. How do you go about doing that?

I think this “formula” is helpful:

True Vocation=Your Gifts+Your Passion

You can be in a job where you get to use your gifts, but not use them for a purpose you feel passionate about. Or you can be working in an area you’re passionate about, but in a job that doesn’t employ your unique gifts. The ideal is to have a job that uses your talents in the service of something you’re passionate about. Here are some examples of what this could look like for a man:

David’s gifts are for inspiring people and leadership, and his passion is for football. His true vocation might be becoming a football coach.
Joe’s gifts are in teaching and researching, and his passion is history. His true vocation might be becoming a history professor.
Dan’s gifts are in resolving disputes, and his passion is for making divorces more amicable for the partners and easier on kids. His true vocation might be becoming a divorce lawyer who concentrates on peaceful mediation.
Alex’s gifts are in investigating things, and his passion is for animals and the outdoors. His true vocation might be becoming a game warden.
Tyler’s gifts are in selling things and making deals, and his passion is for books. His true vocation might be becoming a literary agent.
Blake’s gifts are in crunching numbers, and his passion is for politics. His true vocation might be becoming the state treasurer.
Dave’s gifts are in language, and his passion is for Japan and Japanese culture. His true vocation might be becoming a translator in Japan.

You might be passionate about a cause, an area of the world, a sport, or a product. But you can also be passionate about a lifestyle or an ideal or a tradition. A man who has a gift for fixing things and working with his hands, might be passionate about the idea of craftsmanship and find his vocation as a carpenter. A man who has a gift for cutting hair, giving shaves, and offering easy conversation, and a passion for the tradition of barbering, should easily know what his vocation is! A man whose father and grandfather were police officers and who is passionate about carrying on the family tradition would do well to follow in their footsteps. A man whose gifts are in entrepreneurship and who is passionate about working at home might find his vocation in developing web projects. A man with gifts for leadership and courage and who is passionate about the ideals of country, service, and sacrifice might find his true vocation in the military.

Finding Your Birthright Gifts

Of course in order to use the above “formula,” you need to know the passions and capabilities to plug into it.

As we discussed in Part I , your “birthright gifts” are your unique talents, gifts, capabilities, and purposes-the seeds of things you were born to do. You may believe that the seeds were planted there by the chances of biology or purposefully by God. And they’re not so much things you seek as things you re discover.

In Let Your Life Speak , Parker J. Palmer argues:

“Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about-quite apart from what I would like it to be about-or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions…..Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live-but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.”

Trying to find your true life’s work without understanding what your birthright gifts are is like trying to grow a garden without any idea of what seeds have been planted in the soil. You wouldn’t know how to bring the seeds to fruition-how much water and sunlight the plants needed and how to care for them. Tending to the garden willy nilly would result in a barren harvest or plants that sprouted haphazardly and then quickly wilted away.

Finding your vocation thus means understanding exactly what seeds lie within you so that you are prepared to cultivate them to their fullest expression.

Tuning Into Your Signal

Your birthright gifts are like tiny radio transmitters that came buried within you when you were born and have been sending out signals ever since. As a kid you were probably very in tune with these signals-knowing what you liked and didn’t like came pretty easily.

But over time, the signal gets dimmer and dimmer, smothered by the increasing noise we’re bombarded with as we grow up. We pick up static everywhere we go-from the things we watch on tv, read in magazines, and hear from ministers, parents, and friends. Pretty soon our own signal, lost in a cacophony of voices, gets hard to hear.

Tuning back into this inner signal is the key to finding your vocation. Dr. Abraham Maslow argued:

“Recovering the self must , as a sine qua non , include the recovery of the ability to have and to cognize these inner signals, to know what and whom one likes and dislikes, what is enjoyable and what is not, when to eat and when not to, when to sleep, when to urinate, when to rest. The experientially empty person, lacking these directive from within, these voices of the real self, must turn to outer cues for guidance, for instance eating when the clock tells him to, rather than obeying his appetite…He guides himself by clocks, rules, calendars, schedules, agendas, and by hints and cues from other people.”

So much of our lives are dictated by external cues that we probably don’t even think about it. We wake up not when our bodies want to but when the alarm clock sounds. We eat lunch at noon and pizza while watching the game not because we’re necessarily hungry but because that is our company’s lunch hour and our game day ritual. We match our mood to the mood of whatever social group we find ourselves in. Our day’s activities come not from the heart but from a to-do list. There are men who if you gave them the day off to do whatever they wished, would be stumped as to how to fill the time.

Following some external signals is key to getting along in the world (showing up in a velvet jumpsuit to a job interview may be what your inner signal longs for, but it probably won’t land you the job). But they also end up distancing ourselves from who we actually are in areas of more importance than dress. Like your vocation.

Tuning into our inner signals need not mean traveling to India to study yoga at an ashram. It’s simply a matter of taking the time to carefully adjust our bunny ears until we hear the signal again loud and clear. This simply involves taking some time out for quiet moments of reflection. As Palmer insightfully put it:

“The soul is like a wild animal-tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of the tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.”

Stop multitasking and filling your life with constant noise. Don’t look at your laptop while you eat; don’t turn on the radio the minute you get in the car; don’t read a magazine when you’re on the john. If you allow them space, the signals will come to you during your most ordinary activities, like washing the dishes.

Work on being honest with yourself about your motivations for doing the things you do. Do you really enjoy x,y, and z, or are you doing those things to please other people? You can do things for pleasure or do things out of obligation, but you should have the self-awareness to know when you’re doing which.

Pray. Meditate. Take walks without your ipod. Make time for activities that quiet and settle the mind.

Taking the time to tune into your inner signals will help your personal growth all around. To specifically hone in on the signal of your birthright gifts and passions, set aside some quiet time to just sit and think. I highly recommend getting out into the wilderness where you are sure not to be distracted. And then ask yourself these questions:

As a boy, what did you love to do? Write? Read? Sports? Working on models? Playing with a chemistry set? Spending time outdoors? Pretending to be a solider or a spy?
During school group projects, what job did other students assign to you, or did you volunteer for?
What aspects of your current job do you love, which do you loathe?
What kinds of projects and jobs at work and at home do you get excited about? What kinds do you dread?
Have you ever talked to a friend about a topic, a dream, or an aspiration and everything just clicked inside of you, and you felt a surge of excitement throughout your body?
What things do you see other people doing that make you ache with jealousy because you wish you were doing them?
What issues get you really fired up?
What dream has nagged at you for as long as you can remember, the thing that always pops into your mind no matter how many times you dismiss it?
What fills your thoughts in the quiet moments when you’re riding the train or lying in bed? What do you think about incessantly, what captures your imagination? Politics? Spirituality? Relationships?
If time, money, education and any other obstacle was a non-issue, what kind of work would you choose to do?
What were you doing the last time you totally lost track of time?

I leave you to ponder on these questions. I think the answers will come clearly for most men. And I believe that most men know deep down what their calling is, what they really wish to do in life. The truly hard part is overcoming the obstacles and rationalizations we have for not following our callings. Explaining what these obstacles are will be the topic of the final part of this series. _______________ Finding Your Calling Part I: What Is a Vocation? Finding Your Calling Part II: The Myths and Realities of Vocation Finding Your Calling Part III: Why Pursue a Vocation? Finding Your Calling Part IV: Discovering Your Vocation Finding Your Calling Part V: Obstacles to Embracing Your Vocation

Pursuing Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of the human body.

Vocation: The Necessity of Dead Work

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Narrative on Vocation

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A PURPOSE UNVEILED: MY VOCATION STORY

After that, my enthusiasm for life dwindled. I had no desire to continue my education or leave our house.

It was at this point that our eldest sister asked me to join her in Manila, which I did out of obedience. I enrolled in Concordia College. There I met new friends and experienced the joys of youthful life. I completed my course and secured a well-paying job. However, at the end of each day, I still felt like something essential, something profound, was missing.

During my time in the convent, I encountered numerous challenges and moments of personal growth. I delved deeper into self-discovery and embarked on a profound spiritual journey to deepen my relationship with God. There were moments when I felt the urge to give up, but when I reflected on the sacrifices I had made for my vocation, it served as a powerful motivator to persevere.

Throughout this journey, I consistently kept my parents and my siblings at the forefront of my decision-making, as I realized that my pursuit of this vocation meant foregoing certain aspects of family life I could otherwise share.

I find it challenging to express the depth of gratitude I feel towards God for the abundant blessings bestowed upon me in this lifetime. Celebrating 28 years as a professed sister is a remarkable blessing. I could not ask for more!

N.B.: Sr. Gemma has been part of the Catechetical Foundation of the Archdiocese of Manila for more than eight years. She served the catechetical ministry of Manila in various roles, starting as a Public School-Based Catechist, a Research and Publication Officer, an Executive Secretary, and now as one of the Vicarial (area) Catechetical Coordinators.

Her vocation story is a tapestry of faith, dedication, and the extraordinary power of divine calling that unveils the inner workings of a heart and soul committed to the path of religious life. It was an inspirational story that will resonate on a profound level with individuals who feel a calling to dedicate their lives to serving God in the path of religious vocation and the work of catechesis.

vocation matters

Insights and Conversations from the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE)

Vocation as stories we tell ourselves about ourselves

illustration_at_title_a_in_just_so_stories_c1912

Metaphors for understanding narrative identity

This narrative understanding of identity has borrowed useful metaphors from the study of narrative in literature. We speak of scripts, plots, and roles, and the improvisation that draws on the “repertoire” one has seen, acquired, and rehearsed. These metaphors can help us understand how identity forms, how it adapts fluidly to changing context, and how it accommodates constraining structure while allowing for creative, free agency.

Most of our understanding of ourselves–our scripts, narratives, plots, roles, and other items in our repertoire–arises outside ourselves and is acquired by observation, mimicry, and rehearsal. We learn our identity as others interact with us, as we are given scripts and assigned roles. We are socialized into particular roles by parents, peers, communities, and institutions. We internalize these scripts, narratives, plots, and roles by incorporating them into our self-narrative and behavioral and conceptual repertoire.

Here is the scroll of every man’s name….

Our repertoire of scripts and roles is large and can be creatively combined–mixed and matched–with improvisatorial daring and skill, creating in the process new scripts and new roles. How others react to such improvisation shapes whether the script or role goes into our permanent repertoire or is abandoned.

Empathy and imagination

Empathy and imagination are crucial to the formation of identity. We learn our scripts and roles by empathizing with mentors and role models—by imagining our way into how he or she thinks, understands, feels. Some we wish to emulate; others serve as negative examples.

Thanks to empathy and imagination, we are able, in the relative safety of our minds, to try out scripts, see ourselves in roles, and imagine the course of different plots. We can imagine different futures, short range and long. We can contemplate likely outcomes of this script or that role or the other plot given the particular context, the other actors present, our abilities and skills. We then attempt to enact our choice, improvising as we go. The hard edges of the world and its institutions may resist and turn our course. Other actors push back with their own scripts, roles, and impelling plots. We are shaped by the intersection of multiple narratives, public and private, social and institutional and personal. Our narrative identity arises out of this interaction.

Identity as a community creation

Identity and understanding are community creations. 2 Consider when we encounter an unexpected situation, we often start with confusion. What really happened? What does it mean? Can that possibly be what happened? To begin answering these and related questions, we converse with others, trying out explanations, receiving feedback, modifying our account, creating in the process of give-and-take an account that makes sense. In the process, we simplify and select, and we discard that which does not “fit” and stress that which does. We reduce the ambiguity of experience to the coherence of story, confusion to understanding. To continue the literary metaphor, we author a meaningful story. Or, more accurately, we and those with whom we converse on the issue co-author a meaningful story.

This co-creative process shapes our own sense of self, the stories we tell to make sense of our own lives. We tell our tale and our listeners help us shape and reshape the tale until it “fits” and makes sense to us and to them. Employing empathy and imagination themselves, they ask questions, proffer their own take on the events, draw parallels with similar events in their experience or the experience of others, debate the pros and cons of different interpretive strategies. Through conversation we come to understand collectively.

Importantly, the communities to which we belong or with which we interact facilitate this conversational process by offering “standard” plot outlines and overarching schemata for making sense of life. Our conversational interlocutors are commonly also our community members. As fellow bearers of community plots and schemata, they become the co-creators, the co-authors of the account that we craft to make sense of our lives.

Going forward

In future posts I intend to tease out some implications for a narrative understanding of vocation. What does it mean to “discern” ones vocation in narrative terms? What happens as one acquires a longer, and longer “backstory” as one moves through life? Are the tools that are useful for discerning the story we hope our life will take up to the task of discerning where we are in mid-life or entering into our “encore adulthood”? 3

I invite others to engage with these and related questions, either in the comments or with posts of their own.

1. See, for example, the essay by Doug Henry in the Scholarly Resources Project book, At This Time and In This Place . 2. See, for example, David Cunningham’s recent blog entry on vocation as “playing catch.” 3. See, for example, essays by Shirley Showalter and Catherine Fobes in the forthcoming Scholarly Resources Project book, Vocation across the Academy .

Joseph M. Gleeson and Paul Bransom, Paul, ilustrations from a collection of Kipling’s ”Just so stories” (c1912); public domain.

CorkShakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2 Scene 1, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P422Qhttww

Petrona Viera (1895-1960) , El cuentito (“The Story”); public domain.

Called to Life: Vocation Stories about Identity

December 22, 2020 By Collegeville Institute Leave a Comment

In July 2020, the Collegeville Institute hosted a virtual writing workshop led by Dori Baker and Patrice Gopo called Our Deep Wells: Writing on Vocation Across Race and Culture . The workshop invited faith leaders and scholars who center the voices of marginalized communities and/or grapple with power and privilege as an element of vocational discernment. Writing about vocation that is rooted in an individual’s distinct identity holds power to transform people, communities, and the world.

The online workshop began each day listening to participants’ responses to the prompt: “Tell a story about a specific person, practice, or tradition that called you to life.” The writing prompt was inspired by an interview with Patrick Reyes, author of Nobody Cries When We Die: God, Community, and Surviving to Adulthood , for Bearings Online, in which he defines vocation as following God’s call to survive. We are pleased to share this last collection of three short responses from the Our Deep Wells writing workshop cohort. To view others in this series, please click here .

Maria Alejandra Salazar

I listen closely to my maestra’s instructions. Peniel explains the steps for how we will open in ceremony. As she talks my breath slowly returns to normal, the high altitude of the Andes mountains no longer burning my lungs. Among the large rock formations we present our offerings of coca leaves and honey, asking for protection and thanking the Apus, sacred mountain spirits, for letting us share this space. Peniel has spent a week preparing my San Pedro cactus. San Pedro, or Huachuma, is grandfather energy and it is in this clearing that I will drink.

Photo by Giacomo Buzzao for unsplash

I receive the lit mapachito, a small roll of wild tobacco. I purse my lips so the sweet smoke flows directly into the bottle, watching it swirl on top of the thick, brown liquid.

“Hold your lower belly, ask Huachumita to heal where you most need it. Pray for release, in whatever form it takes.” Peniel’s voice is clear.

The syrupy concoction makes its way down. Inhale. Exhale, feeling the medicine reach the constellation of cells I inhabit.

It is three days before the total solar eclipse, four days before my thirtieth birthday. Two months after graduating from seminary, I traveled four thousand miles to start this new decade of life in my home country. Publicly, I was the recipient of a brand new master’s degree. Internally, I knew the work was just beginning. I felt called to release toxic relationships, heal old wounds, address ancestral trauma. I needed an altar to lay down my rage, exhaustion, and grief so that I might fully exhale. I needed to go to the root.

Maria Alejandra Salazar is a budding artist, writing at the intersection of faith, social justice, and ancestral connection. She is passionate about theologies that center lived experience as sites of liberation and transformative healing. A Chicago resident, she works for a national philanthropic organization.

Altagracia Perez Bullard

The classroom fills up, amphitheater style. I’m in the back, watching the room crowd with people. I know no one. The teacher, this pastor, speaks fire, and it ignites a fire in my belly, lights me up and burns me down. I know his words are true, although everything he says contradicts what I have been told about God, about right and wrong. And although they burn everything down, the whole building, this life I’d constructed—the charred wood, discarded bricks, the acrid smoke, opens a space.

“Homosexuality is not a sin.” The whole room shifts. Like a double dolly shot in a Spike Lee Joint, I am moving past the scenarios of my life. It feels dizzying. I must have heard wrong. I focus, I look at him and I look at the ceiling and back again. Back and forth waiting for the bolt of lightning that is surely, at any moment, going to come through the roof and strike this man down dead where he stands. It never arrives.

I never recovered. Never recovered the perception of safety the building had provided. That structure, however confining, was clear and defined. Until it burned down, I didn’t know how much I needed space. Space to be, to grow, to actually live in the freedom of God’s love.

That class during my senior year in college marked the beginning of a journey, my seminary journey, that led to a recognition that among God’s many beautiful creations was me, not in spite of, but because I am Queer. Different, odd, misfit, also rare, special, precious. Gone were my childhood notions of God’s will for my life. All that burned away, and a renewed faith came like a mighty wind. I was tossed about by the force, but my passion for justice, my love for God and the people was intensified. And now the real me was included among the beloved.

The Rev. Altagracia Perez-Bullard, PhD is the Director of Contextual Ministry and Assistant Professor of Practical Theology at Virginia Theological Seminary. An Episcopal priest and community leader for over 25 years, she is passionate about supporting leaders committed to the Gospel, working for justice.

Jennifer Moe

For most of my adult life I have worked in bookstores. Big stores, small stores, mall stores. I have shelved and shelved; counted endless magazines; pulled espresso; and finally, became the buyer for a small college bookstore.

My brother and I were the first in our family to graduate from college. It was a very big deal for our parents, and they took us to a glorious wood-paneled, relish-dished Wisconsin supper club to celebrate our (their?) accomplishment. Jason began his lucrative and steady career in mechanical engineering, and I… well, I got a job at a bookstore.

We grew up on a tobacco farm in a very small town in southern Wisconsin – Mail Pouch country. I spent my summers from the age of eight pulling small green plants out of the ground, root and all, for hours each day. This kind of steady repetitive work is both boring and fruitful – boring in action; fruitful in the imagination. I would daydream while pulling those plants, about life in the city, away from the endless flat and boring fields. In the afternoon, when the sun was too high for my Nordic complexion, I would read about kids getting lost in big city museums and flip through magazines and catalogs showing young women in heels and shoulder pads standing in front of endless skyscrapers. I would dream, then, of my future.

My bookstore life inched me closer to the life I dreamed of. I earned my Master’s degree part time while working at that college bookstore, out in the suburbs of Chicago, not quite in the city just yet, but close enough to spend my weekends driving around the fields of steel, dreaming of living there one day. During our Master’s capstone weekend, where we share our visions for the future, one of my professors told me that she hoped my dreams would come true.

I’m writing this essay now from my perch in my vintage city apartment. I’m surrounded by the books I’ve acquired through my former vocation. They have come with me as I journey toward a new one. Sometimes, when I crack the spine of a new world in ink on paper, I remember daydreaming in those tobacco beds, pulling those plants out of one location so that they could be transplanted someplace bigger.

Dr. Jennifer Moe is Assistant Director of the Young Adult Initiative at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary where she works with area churches to help them realize young adults as vital members of their congregations. She has lived in the Chicago, Illinois area for almost twenty years and her brother now lives on the small Wisconsin farm where they grew up..

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The surprising gift of knowing my vocation

How i became the kind of person who wants to do the work to which she’s called..

During times of turbulence in politics, culture, and religious life, it’s tempting to hold tightly to current convictions. Allowing a change of one’s mind or heart can be difficult work. With this in mind, we have resumed a Century series published at intervals since 1939, in which we ask leading thinkers to reflect on their own struggles, disappointments, and hopes as they address the topic, “How my mind has changed.” This essay is the seventh in the new series.

It was a midsummer afternoon in 1982 when I was first introduced to the person I was called to become. I was ending a year of graduate study in Oxford with a farewell visit to Sister Mary Kathleen at Fairacres (formally known as the Convent of the Incarnation), who had spent the better part of that year teaching me how to pray, an activity I found less familiar and more taxing of my energy than theological study. “So what are you going to do?” she asked, looking toward my return to the States.

I was not expecting the question, since for months she had repeatedly instructed me to focus on the immediate, an instruction I found easy to obey. The protracted pain of a marriage that floundered and failed when I was in my twenties had excised the delusion that the most important elements of my future were under my control. But now Sister pressed me to think ahead: “It wasn’t time before, but now it’s time. What are you going to do with this education of yours?”

To my complete surprise, the answer was out of my mouth before I had time to consider: “I need to teach, preach, and exercise a pastoral ministry.”

“That sounds right, and how will you do it?”

“I’ll get a doctorate in Old Testament.”

“Fine,” she said, “do that.”

Our exchange was soon over, since Sister was not one for small talk, and I went on my way.

That conversation seems completely unremarkable, viewed from the perspective of my life since that day. I went ahead and did what I told her I would do, and the rest is my personal academic history.

It is worth relating only because prior to that conversation, I had no intention at all of becoming a professor, the chief role in which I now teach, preach, and exercise a ministry. Being an unreformed introvert, I dreaded public speaking and was averse to any kind of frontline leadership. Before going to seminary I had done writing and administrative work for a small nonprofit organization working in the field of religious media programming, and I assumed I would return to that kind of work, now with greater theological depth.

Yet once my words to Sister had been uttered and accepted, I was committed to a very different future than I had ever imagined. In a matter of minutes I had received the gift of knowing my vocation, with a certainty that had long eluded me. The relief was incalculable; it was the peace that passes all understanding (Phil. 4:7).

Nonetheless it is good that Sister Mary Kathleen had taught me to focus on responding to God in the immediate, because it would take years for me to grow fully into my vocation. I had to become the kind of person who wants to do the work to which I am called; my temperament had to change along with my mind.

Vocation, I’ve learned, is a tapestry. It gathers up the disparate threads of a life, and when the weaving is true, a pattern emerges, one that is capable of incorporating new threads that may appear. The pattern itself provides the standard for discerning if certain threads are fitting or should be set aside for now—or indefinitely, perhaps forever.

The basic pattern of my vocation is outlined in those words that I blurted out at Fairacres: teaching, preaching, and pastoral ministry (my own ministry being to equip my students to serve in professional pastoral roles). Of all the thread bundles that have helped create that pattern, three strands stand out as the most essential: language, the relationship between church and academy, and practical theology.

Love and respect for words, in English and in Hebrew, is much of what keeps me going as a scholar, writer, and teacher. It is my spiritual gift, if I have one, and in a sense it may be my most valuable inheritance from my parents. By current norms, they were relaxed about my intellectual and spiritual development (concepts that surely never entered their minds). Nonetheless my mother was vigilant about word usage and spelling—her own, mine, and what she saw in the newspaper. Through some years of my adolescence my father worked with uncharacteristic patience on a semiautobiographical novel, which he eventually self-published. I earned summer money typing parts of it, absorbing some of his sentence structures, which I retain to this day.

However, the most important way in which my parents bred in me a love of language was unintentional, at least for that purpose: they took me to church. I never much liked Sunday school, but as a small child I loved being in the dark and numinous sanctuary of our Anglo-Catholic parish (All Saints’ Episcopal in San Francisco), with the words of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer forming the cantus firmus for whatever else was sung or said or done in that place. My first church memory—I might have been four—is of kneeling in the pew and losing all track of time and what everyone else was doing, so eventually I alone was kneeling. I doubt it was a religious experience, but it may have been a philological one. Those beautiful words were seeping into my awareness and memory; I recall no time when they were not familiar to me.

I wonder now if it was the words of the prayer book that eventually led me to become a biblical scholar. After all, 90 percent of the BCP is biblical phraseology, mashed up and remixed so that we may, as one BCP collect famously puts it, “inwardly digest” it as we pray. That language provided for me a way into scripture, and now I recognize that it gradually shaped my understanding of what the Bible is: a source not of doctrinal propositions but rather of language for reckoning with reality. It is the most fully adequate source known to me of a complex story that rings true, of essential concepts and poetic images that equip me to live in awareness of God, self, and neighbor and make sense of what I experience.

It was not until college that I had any sustained engagement with the Bible, but in the interval two things happened that helped me develop some linguistic and literary sensibility. The first was four years of high school Latin, which put me on notice that in some matters my opinion is of no value. It either is or is not an ablative absolute. My spin will not alter that, and further, if I cannot read the text accurately, it is of no interest. The second salutary influence was two years in a Great Books program at the University of California in Berkeley, in which I learned the difference in cultural and intellectual value between a text and a textbook, between a carefully crafted literary work and the endless stream of scholarly criticism or theory. I also learned something about the kind of questions that are worth engaging century after century and through an intellectual lifetime. I remain grateful to two formative teachers, Latin teacher Robert Kuehnl and philosophy professor Joseph Tussman, whose rigor with language and texts challenged the rampant solipsism and cultural arrogance of the Bay Area in the 1960s.

The final linguistic thread that figures importantly in the pattern of my vocation is Hebrew, which I began to study while spending an academic year (1969–70) at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Hebrew was immediately more entrancing to me than any language I had previously studied. The joy of it has never faded for me and is possibly the most significant gift I have to pass on to my own students.

Learning to speak Hebrew while I was studying the Bible for the first time, and studying it among Jews, doubtless prepared the ground for my eventual recognition that scripture as Jews and Christians traditionally have known it is more a linguistic experience (even if most Christians have read the Bible in translation) than a doctrinal one. Without the words and stories of scripture, we would have no way of talking about God in relation to ourselves, and of course that experience is more intense when the Hebrew language is a major player in the interpretive experience.

With its broad semantic ranges and musicality, its often ambiguous or homophonic word patterns and elliptical grammatical and poetic structures, biblical Hebrew invites open-ended modes of interpretation. Even my students who have not studied Hebrew are drawn into the always unfinished game of translation when I do it in front of them during an ordinary class lecture. They often notice points of difference from their familiar translations, starting with the first clause of the Bible: “In the beginning, God created” or “When God began to create.” Suddenly what seemed perfectly obvious— creatio ex nihilo —is something worth talking about. What other ways might that decidedly, even defiantly, odd syntactic structure be construed? The game is on.

The second bundle of threads that runs through my vocational pattern is the integration between church and academy, made possible through four decades of studying and teaching in seminaries and university divinity schools. I began my doctoral studies at Yale with the expectation of teaching in the kind of church-based seminary that educated me. As it turned out, I did spend five of my teaching years at Virginia Theological Seminary, which serves my own (Episcopal) denomination. Yet I have been surprised to find that I am best suited to teaching in a university divinity school: first Yale and now Duke, for nearly 20 years. I seem to prefer being one of the churchier people in a predominantly academic setting to being one of the more academic people in a predominantly ecclesial setting. All my adult life (and longer) I have loved the inexhaustibly rich environment of a middling to large university, an affection that horrified my parents when I first developed it at the age of 16 and directed it toward UC Berkeley, which in 1967 was strange enough to satisfy any curious teenager.

At Yale I was both challenged and encouraged to effect a deep integration between theology and biblical studies, as well as between church and academy. My first two papers in the doctoral program were for seminars taught by Brevard Childs, one on Jeremiah and the other on the post-Reformation history of European biblical interpretation. I wrote an exegesis paper for the first and for the second, a paper on John Donne’s use of scripture in preaching, with an exegesis of two of his sermons (c. 1620). I now realize how remarkable it was that Childs greeted both topics with equal enthusiasm.

At that time in academic biblical studies, virtually no one took preaching seriously as a mode of interpretation. Yet, as teacher and mentor, Childs never urged me to choose between academic and practical theology. He therefore freed me to become the scholar I wanted to be, for whom the most pressing questions are how we may live as people of faith and think in light of Israel’s scriptures. My 2003 Lyman Beecher Lectures, published in 2005 as Wondrous Depth: Preaching the Old Testament , are dedicated to Childs.

No less important for my vocational formation and freedom was Childs’s impatience with the conceit, common at research universities, that good teaching and good scholarship are incompatible, simply because they both demand so much attention. From the start (that moment at Fairacres) I have understood that my primary vocation is teaching those preparing for ministry. But research and writing compel me, and I am privileged to serve at a university where I have the responsibility of guiding younger scholars who are weaving their own vocational tapestries.

Because I write for the same people I teach, I experience no tension between teaching and writing, as long as I let each “bear fruit in its season” (Ps. 1:3). I do not try to do substantial writing during term time; through those weeks, for the most part I go to bed and wake up thinking about the work of the classroom. As a result, I am inevitably hungry to write whenever there is a break. The intense introversion of research and writing refreshes me for teaching, at the end of a week or a month or a summer, and invariably I discover in the classroom substantive complementarity with the writing task at hand.

If it sounds as though teaching and writing occupy most of my time and energy and furnish most of my entertainment, then I have accurately represented my work-life balance, although that dichotomous term is specious. A truer statement is that my vocation is a great part of my life, and it is complementary with other parts, especially my marriage. My husband, Dwayne Huebner, is also a professor and an educator by temperament. Now retired and in his tenth decade, he remains deeply committed to advancing learning, his own and that of our grandchildren. He is, moreover, a caretaker of language, which makes him the first and best editor of whatever I write. Thus he understands my obsessions, even if he does not share each of them to the same degree. We care about making our home a peaceable place of simple hospitality, and as introverts, we find ease in the large swathes of quiet that wrap our daily lives.

One result of the complementarity I experience between teaching and writing is that unlike many senior scholars, I do not look toward retirement as the time to write my “big book.” On the contrary, I wanted to be sure to write what will undoubtedly be my biggest book, in terms of pages and scope, while I am still teaching. Opening Israel’s Scriptures (2019) is dedicated to my students, because I could write it only with their voices, concerns, challenges, and insights fresh in mind. The book is pedagogically inflected throughout, but it is not a textbook. Rather, I hope it reads as a sort of inscribed conversation about the various books of the Bible, a reflection (not a record) of what happened in multiple classrooms over many years, and thus a stimulus to further exegetical conversations among my readers and their conversation partners.

My academic title is “Professor of Bible and Practical Theology,” devised by Dean Greg Jones when I came to Duke to describe the kind of biblical scholar I am. The title is apt, even if (or maybe, precisely because) it is two ways of saying the same thing. The Bible, properly taught in the context of theological study, is practical theology, or at least the basis for it. It offers deep insight into virtually every aspect of our existence as material, social, and spiritual beings.

In this way, practical theology comprises the third bundle of threads that make up the distinctive pattern of my vocational tapestry. In the classroom, in writing, and in the pulpit, I have consistently looked at how biblical interpretation intersects with conversations about matters within church and society that regularly touch the lives of people of faith yet have not conventionally been treated within biblical studies.

Writing my second book, Imagination Shaped: Old Testament Preaching in the Anglican Tradition (1995), formed me more profoundly than I had expected when I began the project. Frustrated with much of the preaching I heard in my own denomination, and remembering the example of John Donne, I was convinced that there had to be something in the tradition of Anglican preaching to redeem us from triviality.

I did not intend to take a lengthy research sojourn away from biblical studies “proper,” but so it was. Spending a year with each of five great biblical preachers from the 17th and 19th centuries was like doing a second doctorate. These teachers, all long dead and yet vividly present through their words, opened up to me possibilities for poetic modes of interpretation I had not imagined.

Above all, this research persuaded me that sermons are ultimately the most consequential form of biblical interpretation, for good and sometimes for ill (for instance, in the long and tragically consistent tradition of anti-Judaism in Christian preaching). Many people who never read the Bible have opinions about it based upon the sermons they have heard. That sobering fact has prompted me to focus much of my scholarly energy on exegetical preaching, in three different books. Further, I hope that everything I write, regardless of whether it is expressly on preaching, is useful for those who, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, “speak where many listen . . . that they may do their part in making the heart of this people wise, its mind sound, and its will righteous.”

As a theologian with an eye to the practical, I have learned much from the dead and more from the living. My exegetical practice has been deepened and made more accurate by reading Israel’s scriptures with those whose daily lives are not abstracted from certain geophysical and social realities that the writers and hearers of the Bible knew well.

Unexpected friendships with Wes Jackson, Norman Wirzba, and Wendell Berry made it possible for me to write Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture (2009), which required thinking in ways that had not figured in my formal biblical and theological education. These three—a plant geneticist, a philosophical theologian, and a man of letters, respectively, all of them also farmers—enabled me to believe that an agrarian reading of the Bible is not just plausible but persuasive, congruent as it is with both ancient literary practices and contemporary scientific understandings. The most surprising thing about that book is that many of my colleagues in biblical studies are now persuaded by its argument.

Shortly after I discovered the (then) small cadre of North American agrarian writers, I was introduced to another culture in which agrarianism has consistently been the dominant way of life. For more than 20 years I have had the privilege of reading the Bible with Sudanese and other East African women and men, often in their own local communities. They have given me insight into the inescapable limits that a semiarid land imposes on a daily basis, into the exigencies of an economy that reckons in the first instance with land and domesticated animals and not the colossal abstraction of money, and into the constraints and supports that operate within a society in which the extended family structure, not the individual, is the touchstone of identity and the context in which all important decisions are made.

It is eye-opening to read Exodus in settings where just a few skilled midwives make the difference between life and death for mothers and infants, or the book of Jeremiah among those who have experienced war coming to their homeland and villages. I tried to make the voices of these colleagues audible in Opening Israel’s Scriptures . To Western readers, perhaps the most enlightening witness these readers from traditional cultures offer is their unwillingness to make a clear divide between the spiritual and the material. Further, because they are not burdened by the narrow rationalism that characterizes much Western thought, they are more adept at perceiving logical patterns that are strong elements of biblical thought and expression: not merely mechanical processes of cause and effect but also patterns of thought that may work through analogy, metaphor, symbolization, wordplay, repetition, and echoing.

More than 30 years into this vocation, I would judge that nothing has fed my excitement more than collaborative teaching. I now have a pronounced preference for it; I doubt there is a year in the last decade when I have not taught one or more courses with a partner. It is often said that shared teaching is twice the work, but I have found it to lighten the load while doubling both the joy and the insight.

Invariably my teaching partners view things quite differently than I do, whether because they come from a different discipline (Stanley Hauerwas and Sarah Musser in theology, Richard Lischer and Jerusha Neal in homiletics) or a different religious tradition (Mona Hassan and Abdullah Antepli in Islamic studies, Laura Lieber in Jewish studies). The very act of teaching together challenges the notion of individual expertise as the basis for biblical interpretation, or for thinking well on any subject. Because we trust each other both personally and intellectually, we are willing to venture outside our scholarly comfort zones.

The students themselves are more willing to take risks when they witness our exposed differences and disagreements, sometimes marked by uncertainty and frank discomfort, and yet the conversation does not break down. In these situations, we all learn that when dealing with the most important aspects of being human, being right (whatever that means) is not the main goal. Staying in a conversation that is probing yet respectful, even loving, is the goal.

Using our minds and even our practical skills to facilitate such conversations might be the best contribution that theologians can make to the university and to culture in our time. That is hopeful work, and I am grateful to be called to it.

A version of this article appears in the print edition under the title “Weaving my vocation.”

Ellen F. Davis

Ellen F. Davis teaches Bible and practical theology at Duke Divinity School.

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Discerning One’s Vocation: Some Personal Reflections

Posted by Meghan Clark | Jul 6, 2011 | From the Field | 0 |

What is a vocation? Or more specifically, what is MY vocation? How do I figure it out? And, once I do, can it change? How is one’s vocation related to one’s job? Vocation was a hot topic today on two of the theology blogs I follow: Daily Theology and WIT (Women in Theology) .

Over at Daily Theology, my good friend Katie O’Neill reflects on the question of vocation and her recent discernment between the vocation of the theologian and a vocation to nursing:

In the past I have always thought that vocation was toward a specific field or specific line of work. For instance, one was called to be a social worker or a doctor, or a parent or a musician or create delectable foods, or more then one call at the same time. To some degree, the economic collapse of 2008 along with other life circumstances and choices has made gaining employment as a working theologian very difficult and the experience of watching myself procrastinate with writing my dissertation has shown me that this might not be my true passion. As a result I have worn many hats while adjuncting the past few years and have finally concluded that the plan of becoming a professor is either financially unsustainable (as adjuncting and selling makeup only stretch so far) or I will have to sacrifice having any control over where I live and take a job anywhere I can get one. After a year of deliberation I have finally made a decision…I started nursing school last month. ….I feel so privileged to have been able to study in the ways that I have. But in the end I think my concept of vocation is expanding and growing. First and foremost, my vocation is to be a baptized Christian. From there, vocation is the use of whatever skills I have to make the world a more merciful and just place.

As young adults, we spend so much time trying to figure out our vocation and unintentionally it merges with the quest to find the right job and career. In her post, Katie O’Neill captures beautifully the heart of Christian vocation – it begins with our baptism, not with our career choices. As Christians, the foundation of all our vocations is the call of the Gospel.

As theologians, my colleagues and I spend considerable time discussing our “vocation” as it pertains to the academy, the university, and the Church. The complexities of inhabiting these various communities is something younger scholars, myself included often find overwhelming. However, when we remember that at the heart of our vocation isn’t “theologian” but “Christian” – a beautiful but challenging unity emerges in the recognition that embracing one’s vocation is to respond to a call from God. Once one recognizes this the stark distinctions between a vocation to be a nurse and a vocation as a theologian starts to blur. And, the pressure to get it “right” as if it then becomes a closed subject fades in light of the Christian’s ongoing call to discernment and conversion.

Through personal experience, I have learned that discerning my vocation to be a theologian was just the beginning; discerning HOW to do that and WHAT that means requires a perpetual openness to the call of the Gospel. For me, I began to appreciate both the complexity and simplicity of my own vocation through being asked, as a moral theologian, to give advice concerning end of life care. Just as I was beginning my dissertation, my grandfather had a hemorrhagic stroke and died after 7 days in intensive care. Those 7 days felt like an eternity full of painful decisions, gruesome medical realities and a lot of waiting. A few weeks after his death, I received my first “request for advice as a Catholic moral theologian.” A family friend called seeking my professional advice concerning care of a dying family member in light of Church teaching. In that moment, it was the blending of my academic theological knowledge and my first hand experience with end of life decision-making that allowed me to provide pastoral care. This practical, pastoral role of the moral theologian in personal relationships had not previously been part of my understanding of my vocation. Questions of medical ethics and concrete cases tended, in my head, to involve medical ethics boards and such. I had not really thought of the pastoral role of the moral theologian as distinct from that of a priest, parish minister, or counselor. (In part, probably due to the tensions between academic theology and ministry examined on the WIT post.) Through that one month – personally painful and professionally challenging, I began to embrace “being a moral theologian” in a new and more integrated way.

How do I live a life of discipleship as a crucial part of any vocation? And, how do we form a just and faithful community? When we begin with our Christian vocation as the foundation, perhaps we will be less likely to wed our vocation to a career or to set up a hierarchy of competing vocations. In doing so, we can become more likely to embrace our own vocation with humility and appreciate those of our neighbors; and thus, to incorporate this within the broader lifelong process of discernment and ongoing conversion. To do so poses a great challenge to all Christians, but it also takes off a great deal of the pressure to “get right” that “perfect career choice that is one’s unique vocation.”

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Meghan Clark

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Rediscovering Natalia Ginzburg

In an early novella by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg—it has just been reissued by New Directions, as “ The Dry Heart ” (translated by Frances Frenaye)—the narrator walks into her husband’s study and finds him sketching. He shows her his drawing: “a long, long train with a big cloud of black smoke swirling over it and himself leaning out of a window to wave a handkerchief.” In other words, goodbye. He laughs. She doesn’t. “I took the revolver out of his desk drawer and shot him between the eyes.”

About time! For their entire marriage, four years, she has cowered before him: “I was always worried about my face and body, and when we made love I was afraid he might be bored. Every time I had something to say to him I thought it over to make sure it wasn’t boring.” Eventually, he takes to sleeping in his study, though he occasionally calls her in, to have sex, and then, presumably, sends her out again. “Why don’t more wives kill their husbands?” the book’s jacket copy asks.

Maybe they will, because there’s a Natalia Ginzburg revival going on, abetted, perhaps, by the huge success of Elena Ferrante ’s Neapolitan quartet. Before that series was published in English (2012-15), who, among the people you know, was talking about modern Italian fiction? True, people talk about Primo Levi (a new, complete edition of his works came out in 2015, under the editorship of Ann Goldstein, Ferrante’s translator), but for reasons as much historical as they are literary. Levi was a prisoner in Auschwitz, and wrote our greatest book on that subject. But the rest of Italy’s stellar postwar generation—Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese, Elsa Morante, Giorgio Bassani, Ginzburg—have been widely neglected in recent decades.

Now, at least for Ginzburg, the wheels are turning again. This year has seen not just the republication of “The Dry Heart” (originally “È Stato Così,” or “That’s How It Was,” 1947) but also a new translation, by Minna Zallman Proctor, of Ginzburg’s more mature “ Happiness, as Such ” (“Caro Michele,” 1973). Another novel, “The Manzoni Family” (1983), will be reprinted in August. Most important, her masterpiece, “ Family Lexicon ” (“Lessico Famigliare,” 1963), was brought out by New York Review Books in a fresh translation, by Jenny McPhee, two years ago. There’s still work to be done, though. Several of Ginzburg’s books remain out of print. The only English-language biography I’ve found, a translation of a German book by Maja Pflug, is not in print, either. And it amounts only to some two hundred pages—this for a woman who lived and wrote into her mid-seventies.

It’s good to have “The Dry Heart” back, good to see what Ginzburg, whom few people encouraged to write, did at the beginning—quite different from what she did later. Ginzburg became famous for her ability to conjure up a mixed emotional atmosphere, poignant yet unsentimental. (Chekhov was a favorite of hers.) “The Dry Heart” is not very mixed. Although it is not without comedy, it is a cold, angry book. The main reason, unquestionably, is that it was written in the shadow of Fascism, a matter that, for Ginzburg, cut very close to the bone.

Born in 1916, Ginzburg came from a large, fractious, high-I.Q. family based in Turin, an industrial hub, the headquarters of Italy’s automotive industry (the flagship Fiat plant is there) and of Olivetti business machines. It is also an important center of learning. Ginzburg’s father, Giuseppe Levi, was a professor of neuroanatomy at the University of Turin. (Three of his lab assistants went on to win Nobel Prizes.) Paola, Natalia’s beautiful older sister, married a future president of Olivetti. Of her three brothers, Gino became Olivetti’s technical director, Mario a journalist, and Alberto a doctor. Natalia, the youngest by seven years, didn’t have much formal education; her father wouldn’t let her go to elementary school, believing that children picked up germs there, and she dropped out of college.

In the nineteen-thirties and forties, Turin was a hotbed of anti-Fascist activity, and almost everyone in the Levi family was part of it. Relatedly, they were Jews. (Or Giuseppe was Jewish; the mother, Lidia, was a Gentile.) They suffered for it. The Germans were not the only people in Europe who thought that opposition to Fascism was a Jewish plot. Natalia’s brothers were in and out of jail for seditious acts. Giuseppe lost his job at the university and had to move to Belgium in order to go on teaching. Natalia’s first novel appeared, in 1942, under a nom de plume, because Mussolini’s racial laws forbade Jews to publish books.

Most of the family’s friends were, like them, high achievers—publishers, writers, professors, scientists—and anti-Fascist and Jewish. But probably the most notorious Resistance fighter in this circle was Leone Ginzburg, an Odessa-born Jew who was a professor of Russian literature at the University of Turin. He was a leader of the Turin branch of the anti-Fascist organization Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty), to which the Levi men belonged. He, too, was dismissed from his university position. Eventually, he stopped visiting the Levis’ house, because he felt that his presence there endangered them, but he obviously managed to see Natalia, because in 1938 she married him. They had three children, the eldest of whom is the eminent historian Carlo Ginzburg.

Leone, Natalia recalls, was arrested whenever an important politician came to town, and certainly whenever the King, Victor Emmanuel III, visited Turin. “Accursed king!” her mother would say. “If only he’d stay at home!” Finally, in 1940, Leone was sent into confino , or “internal exile,” meaning confinement to a town so poor and isolated that, in the government’s view, the accused could do no further damage from there. But Leone, in confino , went on doing what harm he could to the authorities. In 1943, when Mussolini was deposed, Leone decamped to Rome, to supervise an underground press. But after five months he disappeared. According to prison records, the cause of death was cardiac arrest combined with acute cholecystitis, a gallbladder infection that is often the product of trauma. That is, Leone probably died under torture.

From these griefs, suffered when she was just beginning to write, Natalia learned that unhappiness, though it feels quite powerful, doesn’t always help one write well. As she said in her essay “My Vocation” (1949):

When we are happy our imagination is stronger; when we are unhappy our memory works with greater vitality. Suffering makes the imagination weak and lazy. . . . A particular sympathy grows up between us and the characters we invent—that our debilitated imagination is still just able to invent—a sympathy that is tender and almost maternal, warm and damp with tears, intimately physical and stifling. We are deeply, painfully rooted in every being and thing in the world, the world which has become filled with echoes and trembling and shadows, to which we are bound by a devout and passionate pity. Then we risk foundering on a dark lake of stagnant, dead water, and dragging our mind’s creations down with us, so that they are left to perish among dead rats and rotting flowers in a dark, warm whirlpool.

Change the “we” to “women,” and that’s basically what Virginia Woolf said in “A Room of One’s Own,” twenty years earlier. Women, if they want to be artists, should stop sloshing around in their emotions. No doubt that statement disappointed many female writers at the time Woolf made it, and it is probably not popular even today. (I wonder what the male-female ratio is in those courses on writing “personal essays.”) But Ginzburg learned the lesson fast. In 1944, she wrote “Winter in the Abruzzi,” an essay about the time she and her family spent in Pizzoli, the poor, chalky-soiled town that was the site of Leone’s confino . Miraculously, she makes it a kind of happy tale. She talked to the children about life back in Turin:

They had been very small when we left, and had no memories of it at all. I told them that there the houses had many storeys, that there were so many houses and so many streets, and so many big fine shops. “But here there is Giro’s,” the children said. Giro’s shop was exactly opposite our house. Giro used to stand in the doorway like an old owl, gazing at the street with his round, indifferent eyes. He sold a bit of everything; groceries and candles, postcards, shoes and oranges. When the stock arrived and Giro unloaded the crates, boys ran to eat the rotten oranges he threw away. . . . At Christmas the men returned from Terni, Sulmona, and Rome, stayed for a few days, and set off again after they had slaughtered the pigs. For a few days people ate nothing but sfrizzoli , incredible sausages that made you drink the whole time; and then the squeal of new piglets would fill the street.

The oranges the town’s boys grab at are rotten, but they are probably pretty good all the same, or better than no oranges. The men of the town come home from the cities where they went to find work after the harvest was over. For days everyone eats sausages, and the streets are filled with the cries of newborn piglets, the makings of Christmas sausages to come. Crocetta, the Ginzburg family’s fourteen-year-old maid, runs around town, trying to borrow a pan big enough for making dumplings. Crocetta also tells the children stories; for example, one that many people know as “The Juniper Tree,” in which a woman cuts off her stepson’s head and cooks it and feeds it to his father. The eight pages of “Winter in the Abruzzi” may be the most beautiful piece of work Ginzburg ever produced, full of oinks and smells, fellowship and cruelty.

It ends in sorrow. In the fall of 1943, after Germany began to occupy Italy and the Italian commanders fled to the south, Leone wrote to Natalia telling her to go to Rome, with the children, as quickly as possible. But how was Ginzburg to get out of there, with three small children? In a hilarious episode, a friend in the village convinces the Nazis that Ginzburg is a poor, sad refugee who has no papers because they were lost in an air raid. She has to get to the capital. Can they help? And so this woman, the wife of a famously militant anti-Fascist, is driven to Rome, with her children, by a bunch of Nazis in a military vehicle. Presumably, she thanked them very much. She had three weeks with her husband before he was arrested again, for the last time. He was thirty-four. Natalia wrote:

My husband died in Rome, in the prison of Regina Coeli, a few months after we left the Abruzzi. Faced with the horror of his solitary death, and faced with the anguish which preceded his death, I ask myself if this happened to us—to us, who bought oranges at Giro’s and went for walks in the snow. At that time I believed in a simple and happy future, rich with hopes that were fulfilled, with experiences and plans that were shared. But that was the best time of my life, and only now that it has gone from me forever—only now do I realize it.

A test rat is alone at home in a makeshift lab.

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This, finally, is the heartbreak that in her writing Ginzburg staved off with the oranges and the piglets.

Many of her readers, knowing what she had been through, wished she had shared her sorrows with them more often. But in her time Italian literature was still largely a men’s club, and therefore Ginzburg had wanted, as she later flatly stated, to write like a man. Besides, emotionalism was not in her nature. As her granddaughter Lisa Ginzburg wrote, her ways were “always sober and austere.”

You can get a sense of this from her appearance in her good friend Pier Paolo Pasolini ’s film “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” (1964). For this movie Pasolini used mainly nonprofessional actors, people with plain faces, in dusty clothes. Ginzburg he cast as the woman who, in Matthew 26:6-13, intrudes on Jesus’ dinner with Simon the leper and anoints Jesus’ head. Anyone who can stream this film should do so. It is interesting to see Ginzburg’s face: one critic said that she looked more Inca than Italian. Movingly, one can sense her embarrassment at being in a movie, and in a slightly naughty role. The woman with the jar of ointment has often been said to be a prostitute; the disciples object to her presence at their gathering. But Ginzburg’s Mary is blunt, not seductive. She looks as though she were giving Jesus a shampoo.

In a radio interview in 1990, a year before she died, Ginzburg, likable and laconic—the interviewers probably talk more than she does—mentioned how much she admired her friend and fellow-novelist Elsa Morante for being able, in her fiction, to use the third person confidently. She herself didn’t have that ability, she said: she couldn’t “climb up on mountains and see everything from above.” But neither was she able to deploy the first person easily. Ginzburg was a moralist, which is a hard thing for a modern novelist to be, and, partly for that reason, she didn’t like to declaim, or to let her characters do so. She needed to break up the voice. Two of her novels are epistolary, so that the characters take turns speaking in the first person. Another way that she avoided an overbearing “I” was simply with the terseness of her prose. (In some passages, she averaged perhaps twelve words per sentence.) When interviewers asked her about this, she would often reply that she was so much younger than her many siblings that, as a child, if she had something to say, she had to say it quickly, before somebody interrupted her.

Whatever her griefs, Ginzburg made a life for herself after Leone’s death. In her earlier years, she had done some work for Einaudi Editore, the celebrated publishing company established in Turin, in 1933, by Leone and Giulio Einaudi (the son of a future President of Italy), together with Cesare Pavese. Now she went back to work there. In 1950, she got married again, to Gabriele Baldini, a professor of English at the University of Rome, and she moved to the capital to be with him. (She writes about Baldini in a tender essay, “He and I,” collected in “ The Little Virtues ,” a book of beautiful short pieces that also includes “Winter in the Abruzzi.”) In 1983, Ginzburg was even induced to run for a seat in the Italian parliament, as the candidate of the Independent Left. She won and was later reëlected. All told, however, she had bad luck. Baldini died young (in 1969, at the age of forty-nine), and the two children they had together were both born severely disabled. The first, a boy, died within a year. The second, a girl, Susanna, lived, and Ginzburg kept her at home. I have read no description of how this was for her.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that critics overstress the theme of sorrow in Ginzburg’s works. She always knew how to convert the griefs into some sort of beauty. In “Happiness, as Such,” she pulled off a wonderful act of virtuosity, an epistolary novel in which a young man, Michele, is the subject of a series of letters written to, by, and also about him, by his mother, his sisters, a friend, a former girlfriend, and assorted others. Most of these people are comically selfish; they want what they want from Michele. And where the hell is he, anyway? As it turns out, he has had to leave Italy, where he was involved in left-wing causes. He writes to his sister Angelica to please go get the machine gun out of the stove where he stored it, in his kitchen, and throw it into the river. In another letter, he tells his friend Osvaldo to go to the same apartment and get the white cashmere scarf with the blue stripes out of the bottom drawer of a bureau. It will remind Osvaldo, he says, of the walks they used to take along the Tiber. Osvaldo replies that he looked for the scarf but couldn’t find it, so he went to the store and bought another scarf. It probably wasn’t cashmere, and didn’t have stripes, but it was white. Michele is killed in a demonstration. By then, ironically, he seems to have given up politics. Everything in the book is a little sad and a little funny.

This tone, a kind of melancholy touched with poetry, is carried forward in Ginzburg’s greatest book, “Family Lexicon,” which she said was to be read as a novel even though everything in it really happened. The title means, sort of, “the way we used to refer to things,” and most families probably have such a lexicon. If Natalia arrived at the dinner table in an adolescent funk, her mother would say, “Here comes Hurricane Maria.” An uncle who was a doctor specializing in the treatment of the insane was referred to as “the Lunatic.”

Ginzburg is best when writing about her parents. Her father, Giuseppe, a loud, choleric Triestine, always took a cold shower in the morning:

Under the water’s lash, he’d let out a long roar, then he’d get dressed and, after stirring in many spoonfuls of sugar, he’d gobble down great cupfuls of that cold mezzorado [yogurt]. By the time he left the apartment, the streets were still dark and mostly deserted. He’d set out into the cold fog of those Turin dawns wearing a large beret that formed a kind of visor over his brow and a great big raincoat full of pockets and with many leather buttons. He’d go out with his hands clasped behind his back, his pipe in his mouth, his stride lopsided because one shoulder was higher than the other. Almost no one was on the street yet but he still managed to bump into whoever happened to be out then.

The mother, Lidia, a Milanese, is the opposite: immovably serene, playing solitaire and chatting with the seamstress when she is not journeying happily here and there to bring clean clothes to the men in the family who are in jail. Lidia loved to tell stories:

She would turn to one of us at the dinner table and begin telling a story, and whether she was telling one about my father’s family or about her own, she lit up with joy. It was as if she were telling the story for the first time, telling it to fresh ears. “I had an uncle,” she would begin, “whom they called Barbison.” And if one of us said, “I know that story! I’ve already heard it a thousand times!” she would turn to another one of us and in a lowered voice continue on with her story. “I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve heard this story,” my father would shout, overhearing a word or two as he passed by. My mother, her voice lowered, would continue on with the story.

In 1934, Natalia’s brother Mario was the star of a scandal in which he and an associate were caught at the Swiss border trying to bring anti-Fascist literature into Italy. The other man was arrested, but Mario jumped into the Tresa River and swam for the Swiss shore. “In the water with his overcoat on!” Lidia exclaimed when she was told. She regretted that her menfolk were always being locked up, but she was proud that they were incarcerated with distinguished people. When her son Alberto was sent to prison with his friend Vittorio, she said of Vittorio, “He’s just done very well on his law school exams.” This theme, of the blindness of European Jewish families to the actual, mortal threat of the Fascists, has been sounded before, but rarely with such flair. “I wrote poems for Mussolini,” a woman the Ginzburgs knew in Pizzoli says. “What a mistake!”

The dinner table was the scene of loud arguments. The small Natalia sat there, listening, and what people said she stored away. Her later life, too, was grist for this poet of remembrance. (She had translated Proust’s “Swann’s Way” for Einaudi.) I especially treasure her 1957 essay “Portrait of a Friend” (also collected in “The Little Virtues”), about Cesare Pavese, who took an overdose of barbiturates in Turin, in 1950, at the age of forty-one.

He died in the summer. In summer our city is deserted and seems very large, clear and echoing, like an empty city-square; the sky has a milky pallor, limpid but not luminous; the river flows as level as a street and gives off neither humidity nor freshness. Sudden clouds of dust rise from the streets; huge carts loaded with sand pass by on their way from the river; the asphalt of the main avenue is littered with pebbles that bake in the tar. Outside the cafés, beneath their fringed umbrellas, the little tables are deserted and red-hot. None of us were there. He chose to die on an ordinary, stiflingly hot day in August, and he chose a room in a hotel near a station; he wanted to die like a stranger in the city to which he belonged.

Although Pavese was eight years older than Natalia—he went to school with her brothers—he became not only her colleague at Einaudi but also a close friend and, through his novels, a significant influence on her. His death was a terrible blow, and, as usual, one admires the restraint of her report. One must also admire the portrait of Turin. She makes the city absorb all the desolation that she is too delicate-minded to tell us was Pavese’s. But the city is also beautiful, in an eerie way: “very large, clear and echoing, like an empty city-square.” (It seems like a de Chirico.) And Pavese is not just a man who killed himself. He is also a person who was young once. He loved cherries, Ginzburg says, and used to come over to the Levis’ house in the evening with a pocket full of them, which he would then distribute. Usually, when Pavese is spoken of, he is the man of the bleak books and the death by Seconal. But, thanks to Ginzburg, I now see him, sometimes, dangling cherries in front of a young woman. Later, he was one of the few people who urged her to write. When she was living in the Abruzzi, he sent her a postcard: “Dear Natalia, stop having children and write a book.” She had more children, but she also sat down and wrote more than a dozen books. ♦

Hiding in Plain Sight: Natalia Ginzburg’s Masterpiece

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Type: Blog/Magazine Article
Topic: Historical Women-Church

Published Date: March 19, 2014

Hilary Ritchie

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Thérèse of Lisieux: “My Vocation Is Love!”

“My vocation is love!” These words of Thérèse of Lisieux caught my attention immediately. As a twenty-something trying to “figure out my life,” I found Thérèse’s bold statement jarring at first. But, as I reflected on her confident words, I found them reassuring and true. Who was this woman who was so passionate about love? What was her relationship with Jesus like? How can her story change my story? Might love become my vocation as well?

Most of what we know about Thérèse comes from her autobiography, Story of a Soul . In the book, Thérèse (calling herself the Little Flower) weaves together her spiritual journey with her life growing up in France during the late nineteenth century. One word describes her story: remarkable. However, don’t be fooled. On the outside, Thérèse’s journey is quite unremarkable. What stands out is the way that she took her simple, unassuming life and let the love of God transform every action and thought. Her most ardent desire was to give herself in service of Jesus, so in 1888 at age fifteen, she entered a Carmelite convent. Let me clarify something here. When you picture Thérèse as a nun, do not picture someone like Mother Teresa, out on the streets of the city feeding the hungry and giving clothes to the poor. She was a Carmelite nun, which meant that when she entered the convent at age fifteen, she would never again see the outside world. Clearly she did not join the religious life to be seen doing great things for God. She was called because of love, and in the walls of that convent, God’s love was radiating with such brilliance that we are still pondering the life of this Little Flower.

As Story of a Soul progresses, what is most remarkable is that Thérèse’s faith remains just as simple as it did when she was a child, though increasing in devotion and maturity. Hers was a humble understanding of the love of God—no task was too small to be used by God, no person too insignificant. She especially made it a point to love the sisters who annoyed her the most. One can imagine that, living in such close quarters to the other sisters, one’s patience would be tested often. Rather than become obsessed with the faults of the other sisters, she embraced them and rejoiced in them, saying “I ought to seek the companionship of those Sisters towards whom I feel a natural aversion, and try to be their good Samaritan. A word or a smile is often enough to put fresh life in a despondent soul” ( Story of a Soul , ch. 10). She wanted to remain obscure, doing her acts of love in secret, because she could “only offer very little things to God” ( Story of a Soul , ch. 11).

Thérèse is exceptional because she lived out her vocation of love with pure and honest sincerity within her context: the convent in Lisieux. That Thérèse was called to a hidden life seems obvious to those of us who have benefitted from her straightforward wisdom, but she struggled with her vocation on occasion, saying, “I want to be a warrior, a priest, an apostle, a doctor of the Church, a martyr… If only I were a priest!” ( Story of a Soul , ch. 11). We all struggle with God’s call for our lives at some point. We compare ourselves to others and create misguided dreams and expectations of what we think God should want for us when most of the time all he wants is ourselves, obedient in the context he’s given to us. However, I can’t help but notice that if Thérèse had been called to be a warrior, a priest, an apostle, she would have been prohibited because of her gender and the time in which she lived.

The irony is that after her death Thérèse became all of the things she longed to be. She ministers to us and fights for the faith through her simple words of devotion and confidence in the love of God. She even became a doctor of the Church! As I reflect on Thérèse’s vocation and ponder my own, I am thankful for the options I have to live out a vocation of love. If God so leads me, I have the ability to minister to his people. Let us continue to live the little way, creating the space for all of God’s people, both men and women, to follow wherever God’s love might lead.

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Choosing a Vocation: An Essay on Agency

Prayer candles burn below a statue of the Virgin Mary in a small-town church in San Quirico di Vernio, Tuscany, Italy. Owen Franken/CORBIS

There were a couple of things Cristina knew for sure. She did not know which path her life would take, but she knew that either she would get married and establish a family or she would lead a (lay) consecrated life devoted to God:

There is that clarity that I started to have when I had the encounter with Christ. Around me society is full of people who don't have a definite form of life, right? So many people who are not married, for a thousand reasons, who are not married but also not consecrated. [Before,] this wasn't clear to me. I thought yes, everybody could do what they wanted to. But on the contrary: no, it isn't like that. And that made me happy. That is a truth that I have discovered when encountering Christ, and that made me happy, because I said: “So much the better, there are two paths, and so much the better that no other paths exist, that there are no other possibilities.”

Cristina acquired this knowledge through her involvement with the Italian Catholic movement Comunione e Liberazione (CL), or through following the charisma of Father Luigi Guissani, as members of the movement often put it. Father Guissani began his work of “restoring a Christian presence” in 1954, in a high school in Milan, working within the structure of the established Catholic youth movement Azione Catolica, and in particular its female section, Gioventu Studentesca (GS). The movement was reconfigured during the 1960s and began using the name Comunione e Liberazione, first in publications and then at an inaugural conference in 1971. The movement's reconfiguration was in response to critical events of the time, the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and the student revolts of 1968. The reconfiguration also signaled the maturation of the movement, as young followers grew up and sought to pursue the religious, social and cultural experiences of GS in ways that were better suited to their adult lives. This led to the emergence of a (lay) consecrated pattern of life within the movement, known first as the “adult groups” and later as Memores Domini. Memores Domini take a number of vows, including the vow of chastity and obedience, and live together in same-sex houses. This manner of living is characterized by both a contemplative, monastic dimension, including daily hours of silence, and an emphasis on being “in the world,” which is expressed through a strong commitment to work, and hence to a professional life, as the context par excellence for keeping alive “the memory of Christ.”

I first met Cristina in 2000 in Milan, where I was doing ethnographic work on female piety and religious agency. Cristina was a visitor to the CL female student house where I was living at the time, and which resembled very much the house she lived in during her own student years within CL university community structures. Cristina had recently graduated in architecture, and she was approaching the moment when the contours of her life path would become clear. Her attraction to the life of Memores Domini was evident in our conversations, and this was not unusual: I regularly encountered such attraction among students connected to CL, particularly among women, who constituted the majority of Memores Domini.

Memores Domini follow a vocation. Within CL, following either a familial or a consecrated life is considered to be a vocation, yet the vocation of Memores Domini is more readily recognized as a religious vocation, as understood within the Catholic tradition, and includes not only a divine calling but also its subsequent verification with a spiritual counselor. Vocation was on Cristina's mind when we met, and it became an important part of all our conversations, including an in-depth interview. When I later analyzed these interactions, I discerned a subtle but undeniable tension between my reliance on the language of choice when asking about the course of her life, and Cristina's steering away from that language. Her uneasiness with the vocabulary of choice became most explicit when we touched on the question of work-life balance and the ways in which this is a particular challenge for women:

Yesterday I was speaking to a colleague of mine who said that the family is a vocation, just like work is, and that one has to choose: “either family or work.” This horrified me. As if I can choose family as a vocation! Already here the sentence doesn't work: I choose the family as my vocation.

Vocation, Cristina insisted, belongs to a different realm than choice: one does not simply “choose” vocations. One might receive a vocation or discover it, be able to hear it calling or understand it, either slowly or in a split-second, willingly or unwillingly. One might accept it or fight it, but one does not choose it.

A young sociologist at the time, I was not yet specifically trained to account for Cristina's understanding of vocation in a social scientific manner. Or rather, her understanding of vocation stood in sharp contrast to common social scientific approaches that frame vocation as a “personal choice.” The latter, of course, adequately reflects how many people today understand vocation. The Young and Vocation , a recent study on contemporary ideas of vocation among a representative sample of young people (between the ages of 16 and 29) in Italy, shows that the term “vocation” generally evokes the idea of self-realization rather than imposition (79% to 8%, respectively), and a sense of satisfaction rather than renunciation (71% to 13%). 1 Moreover, when Italian youth do connect vocation to its religious dimension, the religious call is interpreted as “a personal option that makes it possible to aim at a satisfactory self-realization.” 2 These results must be understood, Luigi Berzano argues, in the light of postmodern society, where each individual is impelled to create her own biography. 3

Studies like these effectively document significant and indisputable societal tendencies in how individuals conceive of their life course. My concern, however, lies in the way in which the design of such studies is based on assumptions that are part and parcel of the tendencies they seek to document. This becomes clearer when a rational choice perspective—well established within the sociological study of religion—is used. In their study of the decline of religious vocations within Catholicism in six countries during the period 1965 to 1995, Rodney Stark and Roger Finke argue that the costs of Catholic consecrated religious choices have diminished only marginally, while their benefits have diminished significantly. 4 Thus, vocations are in decline as a consequence of modifications in the advantages and opportunities of religious life—modifications that Stark and Finke associate with the Second Vatican Council. Within this framework, they suggest, the “vocation crisis” in the Roman Catholic Church might be addressed in two ways: either by reducing the costly aspects of these religious choices, or by reinstating the benefits. Stark and Finke show the cost-benefit logic at work in religious life, but they assume at the outset of their inquiry the universal nature of this logic.

Cristina's claim that “the sentence doesn't work” stretches beyond the words of her colleague and implies that, from her point of view, the paradigm of “vocation as choice” does not hold. Considering Cristina's claim brings us to the long-standing question of how sociological categories, of both empirical inquiry and analysis, relate to the categories and meanings respondents use to make sense of their world. By taking Cristina's refutation of “vocation as a choice” seriously, I do not mean to suggest that social scientific analyses should be confined to the categorical distinctions that respondents make. Such a conflation of two distinct levels of social reality and analysis would indeed deprive sociology of its own logic, language, and level of theorizing and analysis, and hence its raison d'être. At the same time, it is widely accepted that empirical inquiries, in order to be methodologically sound, should engage categories that are meaningful to respondents and in which respondents might be able to situate themselves. This is where the problem lies: while Cristina did not consider vocation in terms of “self-realization,” as most respondents in The Young and Vocation survey did, the contrasting term used in the survey—”imposition”—also failed to adequately capture what she means. (It should be noted that about 13% of the respondents did not select either of these two terms.) What Cristina and others like her might understand by vocation gets “lost in social scientific translation,” since it does not fit smoothly into the survey questions and categories. This poses problems, not because Cristina represents a majority point of view on the matter; she does not. But it is important to ensure that minority views inform the ways in which empirical inquiries and analyses are set up, for a whole slew of reasons, and there's one reason that stands out in this case. The Young and Vocation study documents the process of secularization, and the concomitant sacralization of personal life choices, given that the respondents seem to extend an idea of the sacred to the search for authentic existence. 5 But its design struggles to adequately incorporate those experiences that are not based on a secular understanding of vocation. The secularization that the survey ends up revealing is, in other words, already at least partially predisposed by the survey's design.

In sum, Cristina's understanding of vocation cannot be reduced to a biographical choice, and neither is it simply the result of a cost-benefit analysis. This is not to deny that such analytical frameworks can highlight important dimensions of the social reality of vocation. But they do seem to miss, by design, the crux of what vocation entails for people like Cristina. What does it mean to approach vocation as an individual choice, we might ask, when the actor herself insists that her vocation cannot be adequately accounted for in such terms?

Vocation and Sociology

The significance of vocation within sociology greatly exceeds the empirical studies on the matter. 6 Vocation has intrigued sociology, Giuseppe Giordan argues, 7 and this is related to its pivotal role in Max Weber's thinking. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism —Weber's critical engagement with Marx in which he explores the importance of culture and the production of meaning in the formation of society—vocation is a protagonist in two ways. First, it plays a crucial role in accounting for how individual action relates to social transformation. Weber's argument is well known: the Reformation, and in particular Lutheranism, brought about a modern understanding of vocation. Vocation, or calling, continued to be perceived as a divine ordinance, a task set by God, but it also came to include a positive valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs. Thus, everyday activities gained religious significance, as ascetic conduct was highly valued, particularly in the Puritan traditions, and labor became an ascetic technique par excellence. As a result, Puritan communities accumulated material wealth—the fruit of their labors—that in turn created a new social formation favorable to the development of capitalism. In other words, asceticism, “carried out of monastic cells into everyday life,” as Weber's well-known wording puts it, played its part in building the modern economic order. Along the way, however, the meaning of vocation continues to shift.

This brings us to the second role vocation plays in Weber's theory, i.e., as a crucial context in which to elucidate his understanding of secularization. Weber traces the development of an “inner-worldly asceticism,” which is central to both a religious and a secular understanding of vocation. While, for the Puritan, asceticism is born out of a relation with God, the asceticism of the modern secular subject is removed from such a relationship and focuses instead on worldly aims. Vocation became secularized, to refer to a profession, an occupation for which an individual is particularly well suited, trained, or qualified.

What does this semantic shift in meaning of vocation, from divine calling to professional occupation, tell us about secularization? The relocation of vocation, or “calling,” to within the subject—as an inner inclination that might be uncovered and actualized—resonates strongly with Talal Asad's discussion of the secular recrafting of “inspiration.” 8 As the Bible went from “the letter of divine inspiration” to a system of human significance, Asad argues, the methods of the German Higher Biblical Criticism “rendered the materiality of scriptural sounds” and writings into something akin to a spiritual poem. Previously, the divine word was necessarily also material, and the inspired words were objects of reverence, which entailed that pious bodies were taught “to listen, to recite, to move, to be still, to be silent, engaged with the acoustics” of those words. 9 The methods of Higher Biblical Criticism, in contrast, relocated the effect of words inside the subject, thus representing a move toward inner spiritual states independent of the senses. As a result, inspiration was no longer thought of as direct divine communication. This, Asad insists, involved a twofold shift: “all causation from outside the world of material bodies [is brought] entirely into that world,” and at the same time this “inside” was progressively reshaped. 10 Vocation is recrafted in a similar manner, as it becomes an inner inclination or inspiration that might be discovered, and joins the universe of authenticity and the rhetoric of sincerity, in which the idea of being true to oneself is conceived as a moral duty. 11

The Turn to Agency

My interest in vocation stems from my interest in the conceptualization of agency, particularly in relation to gender and religion. Agency, in sociological parlance, is commonly understood in terms of choice, or rather, choice is central to the conceptual architecture of agency. Cristina's refusal to consider vocation in terms of choice does not, however, imply that she is prepared to relinquish her sense of agency. Cristina's notion of vocation is in fact ingrained in an understanding of her own capacity to act, which includes the deliberate attempt to make herself receptive to a divine calling, as well as the effort to prepare herself to respond adequately to what such a call might require of her. This could suggest that Cristina's religious conception of vocation might also point to a different understanding of agency than the common one that hinges on the notion of choice.

Within established sociological reasoning, it might be argued that Cristina lacks agency to some extent. Cristina does not claim to be able to choose between what she considers the two fundamental patterns a life can follow; on the contrary, she refutes that choice. It could be argued that she is relatively alienated from her own agency and thus relates to the unfolding of her life course in a rather passive and docile way. One way of framing her outlook might be in terms of “false consciousness,” which implies that the material conditions and choices in her life remain obscured to her. Instead, she ascribes crucial moments in, and conditions of, her life to a source outside of her own will, consciousness, and power. Such accounts stressing the lack of agency have in fact been influential in the case of pious subjects, and of female pious subjects in particular. In sum, the capacity to act, as Cristina conceives, narrates, and represents it, is likely to be found lacking in agency, according to established sociological understandings of agency—and, this lack of agency is particularly gendered.

Alternatively, it could be argued that Cristina is exercising her free choice. The fact that she might be deliberating and narrating that choice through “vocation” could be seen as a strategy of authorization or justification, particularly in a situation where her social environment or her family might oppose such choice. This way of ascribing agency is related to a foundational impulse of feminist theory and women's studies, which insists on valuing women's voices and perspectives and affirming their agency. Feminist theory has indeed made women's lives central to its analysis and is predicated on validating women's perceptions of their own situation. This leads to a feminist insistence on women's agency, which coincides with a new prominence of “agency” in social theory at large, 12 to the extent that we can speak of a “turn to agency” in the last couple of decades. In many ways, this turn to agency remains vital for countering those accounts that deny (pious) women's capacity to act. Yet this insistence on agency also brings its own set of questions and problems. Amy Hollywood has captured the critical conceptual problem in the following question: “how to take seriously the agency of the other . . . when the other seems intent on ascribing her agency to God?” 13 What does it mean to fall back on an established sociological understanding of agency to make sense of a subject, when the subject herself relies on a very different variety of language to speak of her capacity to act? To keep insisting on her agency, while glossing over the difference she points to, replicates, in an uncanny way, the structure of the “false consciousness” argument: her alienation lies in thinking she is not exercising her choice, while in fact she is. 14 And, both ways of accounting for pious women's agency suffer from the fact that they rely on an already established meaning and sense of agency, fixed in advance, rather than on letting agency emerge through the analysis of the particular concepts that enable specific modes of being and acting. 15

One particularly productive way to approach this conundrum is found in Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety . In exploring some of the conceptual challenges that women's involvement in Islamic piety movements poses to feminist theory in particular, and to secular-liberal thought in general, Mahmood looks carefully at conceptions of the self and moral agency that undergird the practices of this nonliberal movement. 16 The theoretical stakes in this approach lie in unpacking a set of normative liberal assumptions about human nature, notably through making her empirical material speak back to them. These include a conceptual critique of both common social scientific and feminist understandings of agency. Mahmood's ethnography—as she considers the worlds and livelihoods of women involved in the piety movement in Egypt—prompts her to question the assumption that human agency consists primarily of acts that challenge social norms and therefore express some kind of resistance to social norms. Not only those acts that resist norms require agential activity, Mahmood argues; the capacity to act is itself to be found in the ways in which one inhabits norms. In order to theorize this agency in a way that renders visible the capacity of a subject who deliberately seeks to uphold certain norms to act, Mahmood turns to the realm of ethics and ethical self-fashioning, and to embodiment, which she approaches through the work of Michel Foucault and an Aristotelian understanding of habitus.

This provides a more adequate approach to Cristina's understanding of vocation and, relatedly, her sense of agency. The desire that shapes Cristina as a subject is not one of self-realization, but, rather, is a desire to lead a life that pleases God. This desire includes acquiring an understanding of God's will, which leads Cristina not only to study important texts as they are presented within CL (which also serves as an interpretative community for those texts), but also to shape her embodied self in a certain way. In order to receive a vocation, one must make oneself receptive, which Cristina does through prayer and regular moments of keeping silence, and through participation in the spiritual exercises of the movement. After receiving a vocation, moreover, as my current research shows, more complex agential activities take place. A calling can be accepted and embraced but also struggled with intensively. It needs to be “verified” with a spiritual counselor; that is, it is interpreted and bestowed with meaning in a context of social interaction and subsequently acted upon in various ways. Religious vocation, in other words, points to a particular shaping of the body and the senses that differs, we could argue, from what Charles Hirschkind has called the “secular body” 17 and the secular sensory cultures through which it is constituted. In order to receive a vocation, one needs to be able to feel and hear or see in particular ways that are not necessarily recognized as secular. This underscores the point that established understandings of agency mobilize particular, secular understandings of the embodied subject.

To conclude: I have used the story of Cristina, who, more than ten years ago, was a young graduate at an important point in her life, to pose an epistemological question about the gap between established sociological concepts, such as agency, and a spectrum of pious livelihoods. During my time as a research associate in the Women's Studies in Religion Program and as a resident of the Center for the Study of World Religions, I have been investigating this question further. In concrete terms, this means I have returned to doing fieldwork within CL, focusing this time on the lives of Memores Domini who took their vows. In theoretical terms, my work explores further the conflicted relationship of sociology to religion and piety, as well as to gender, and makes use of Mahmood's rethinking of agency in terms of ethics and embodiment to unpack some of these tensions and to offer an alternative account of female pious livelihoods. It is not so much that such livelihoods need their own sociological accounts, I believe, but rather that sociology is in need of analytical tools and concepts, in addition to the sociological imagination, that are able to account adequately for more subjects and social realities than it currently does, especially when it comes to gender and religion.

—by Sarah Bracke

This article appears in the Spring 2014 edition of CSWR Today .

Franco Garelli, 'Italian Youth and Ideas of Vocation,' in Vocation and Social Context , ed. Giuseppe Giordan (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 38.
Luigi Berzana, 'Vocation as Personal Choice,' in Vocation and Social Context , ed. Giuseppe Giordan (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, 'Catholic Religious Vocations: Decline and Revival,' Review of Religious Research 42, no. 2 (2000): 125–45.
Garelli, 'Italian Youth and Ideas of Vocation.'
See, e.g., Albert Dilanni, 'Vocations and the Laicization of Religion Life,' America 14 (1987): 207–11; M. Marcelinne Falk, 'Vocations: Identity and Commitment,' Review for Religious 39 (1980): 357–65; Chiamata a scegliere: I giovani italiani di fronte alla vocazione , ed. Franco Garelli (Milano: San Paola, 2006); Roger Finke, 'An Orderly Return to Tradition: Explaining Membership Recruitment to Catholic Religious Orders,' Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36, no. 2 (1997): 218–30; Helen Rose Ebaugh, Jon Lorence, and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, 'The Growth and Decline of the Population of Catholic Nuns Cross-Nationally, 1960–1990: A Case of Secularization as Social Structural Change,' Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35, no. 2 (1996): 171–83.
Vocation and Social Context , ed. Giuseppe Giordan (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 37–56.
See, e.g., Lois McNay, Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
Amy Hollywood, 'Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historiography,' The Journal of Religion 84, no. 4 (2004): 524.
Sarah Bracke, 'Conjugating the Modern/Religious, Conceptualizing Female Religious Agency: Contours of a 'Post-Secular' Conjuncture,' Theory, Culture and Society 25, no. 6 (2008): 51–67.
Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Charles Hirschkind, 'Is There a Secular Body?' Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 633–47.

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Bracke, Sarah. 'Conjugating the Modern/Religious, Conceptualizing Female Religious Agency: Contours of a 'Post-Secular' Conjuncture.' Theory, Culture and Society 25, no. 6 (2008): 51–67.

Berzano, Luigi. 'Vocation as Personal Choice.' In Vocation and Social Context , edited by Giuseppe Giordan. Leiden: Brill, 2007.

Garelli, Franco. 'Italian Youth and Ideas of Vocation.' In Vocation and Social Context , edited by Giuseppe Giordan. Leiden: Brill, 2007.

Giordan, Giuseppe, ed. Vocation and Social Context . Leiden: Brill, 2007.

Hirschkind, Charles. 'Is There a Secular Body?' Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 633–47.

Hollywood, Amy. 'Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historiography.' The Journal of Religion 84, no. 4 (2004): 514–25.

Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

McNay, Lois. Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory . Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.

Stark, Rodney, and Roger Finke. 'Catholic Religious Vocations: Decline and Revival.' Review of Religious Research 42, no. 2 (2000): 125–45.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . London: Routledge, 2001.

Catholicism
Women and Religion

Toru Dutt: Poetry

By toru dutt, toru dutt: poetry summary and analysis of "my vocation".

The poem "My Vocation" is from Dutt's A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (1876), and is a translation of a Pierre-Jean de Béranger poem. It describes an individual who has been mistreated greatly by both fate and other people, but who also finds comfort and inspiration in the work of a singer, a figure who is often used in literature as a representative of the poet. Though the best years of the speaker's youth are long gone, and though the speaker is without love, the speaker finds something like beauty and love in the task of creating song and poetry. Each stanza except the last ends with the refrain "Sing—said God in reply, / Chant, poor little thing." This refrain emphasizes the divine nature of the poet's work and its otherworldly importance when contrasted with things like "wealth" and "power." By the poem's end, the speaker asserts a lack of desire for any kind of physical compensation, and the refrain mentioning God is changed to read "Still—still comes that reply, / Chant, poor little thing." This final refrain emphasizes instead the ongoing nature and constancy of the poet's labor.

The poem is written in five stanzas of eight lines each (called octaves, or octets). Each stanza introduces four lines of new alternating rhymes, followed by four more lines of alternating rhymes—two lines of which are new, and two lines of which are part of a repeating refrain (i.e., the rhyme scheme is ABABCDCD EFEFCDCD GHGHCDCD IJIJCDCD KLKLCDCD, with the last two "CD" lines of each stanza constituting the refrain). This formal structure and rhyme scheme allows the poem to explore a different dimension of the speaker's life at length in each stanza, while still returning in the end to the central idea that—despite everything—the speaker feels a divine call to sing and create poetry.

In the first stanza, the speaker explores the moment of birth and links the cry that may accompany birth or subsequent sadness to a voice creating song or poetry. This moment supplies a literal link between the pain experienced by the speaker and the speaker's work at creating song—that is, the sound of the voice crying out in response to the world.

In the second stanza, this link is made figurative as Wealth—personified as someone with means in a carriage—drives by and figuratively covers the speaker with dirt (perhaps by driving through a dirty puddle or something similar). Here, the speaker also reflects on their dismissal by the general public—even by "minions" who serve more powerful people—and their search for comfort that eventually ends with the divine calling to write poetry.

A similar arc is traced in the third and fourth stanzas, where the speaker is forced to do hard labor with little monetary success and mourns the loss of their youth and past loves, respectively. Each struggle that the speaker faces ends with the voice of God calling the speaker to sing about their experiences and create poetry.

In the last stanza, then, the speaker turns their attention towards the self, commenting on how, despite the pain and hardship experienced, they feel that the occupation of singing is just as lofty as anything else, just as necessary and important in the divine order of things. The speaker even finds a place as a bard or poet at parties, among "glasses that ring."

Besides these central ideas that hardship can give rise to beauty and that the poet's task is as vital as any other line of work, the poem explores additional symbolic relationships and uses figurative language to diverse effects. For example, the poet's consistent comparison of the self to birds—an element that is present in Béranger's original but that Dutt chooses to emphasize through the flight in the second stanza and the "clipped wing" in the third stanza—links the poet's calling and work to the natural world. Further, the poem's use of personification raises interesting questions—for example, why are no people formally named except the figurative personas of Wealth, Love, Life, and Beauty, who are afforded the treatment of proper nouns? As in Dutt's other poems, the answer lies in the poet's unique ability to mediate between the realm of nature and the realm of the man-made, the poet's ability to create beauty where none existed beforehand, and the poet's focus and interrogation of the deeper meanings and concepts (such as loss, "love" and "beauty") behind everyday human interactions.

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Toru Dutt: Poetry Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Toru Dutt: Poetry is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

describe the allusions to various mythical characters in the poem lotus and what in your opinion do these allusions stand for?

Many Toru Dutt poems also center on the relationship between humanity and nature by foregrounding and commenting on many different varieties of animal. These central animals in Dutt's poems—be they wolves, condors, baboons, or deer—more often than...

What does the sower do , as the speaker watches him?

As the sun sets and the hours for planting seeds come to a close, the speaker is fascinated by the sower's motion and his figure as he sets about his farming task. As the scene gets darker and darker, the silhouetted figure of the sower also...

How does Toru Dutt introduce the tree in the poem "Our Casuarina Tree"?

Dutt introduces the tree by comparing it to a python: "Like a huge python winding around,The rugged trunk, indented deep with scars 3Up to its very summit near the stars..."

Study Guide for Toru Dutt: Poetry

Toru Dutt: Poetry study guide contains a biography of Toru Dutt, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Introduction

I became a lawyer because I loved books. It became my vocation because of the people.

One might be justified in questioning the veracity of my vocation (from the Latin word vocare , “to call”) to be a lawyer upon learning of the circumstances attending the call. I remember them vividly.

It was the middle of the night. I was lying awake, whether tossing or turning I can’t recall. But feeling terrified? Anxious? Uncertain? Yes, yes, yes.

I knew I was getting married. Not imminently, as I had only just begun to date my future wife—who happens to be my current wife, who also happens to be my only wife, just to be clear—but there was no doubt in my mind that we would eventually be married. And that fact changed my approach to everything.

At the time, I was a junior in college studying English, philosophy and Catholic studies. I prided myself on choosing a financially nonviable course of study. I believed my path was the pure path of the mind. I would be an intellectual, a scholar, a writer. One who sat upon mountain tops and pondered. I understood that the market for the skill set I sought was slim to nonexistent. But in my mind, that was a fact in its favor.

I derided and stuck up my nose at my friends who were pre-law, pre-medicine or pre-business. It was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one of my fellow students who had a legitimate career path to receive my approval. In my youth, I failed to recognize my own deadly pride and gnostic tendencies. I earnestly believed that the pure realm of ideas—whatever that is—is an infinitely higher realm than the world of flesh and blood and bones and mud. I was terrified of the mundane, the banal, the everyday ordinariness of most of reality. I hoped to escape that through the persistent pursuit of immaterial ideas, whether through novels or philosophy or abstract theology. Money, the selling of goods and services, people’s physical or legal ailments, putting food on one’s table, gas in one’s car and heat in one’s house—all that was beneath me.

But when I considered this path in the context of a marriage, my worldview was upended. It was one thing if I was content for the entirety of my worldly possessions to consist of books by Aquinas, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. But could I really invite my beloved into such a life? What would my choices mean for our future—and our future family?

Thus my cold sweats in the middle of that January night. What should I do, O Lord? Then—in a fit of inspiration, or panic-induced revelation—it came to me. I would become a lawyer!

As simple as that, the decision was made. I fell asleep and woke up the next day a new man.

I awoke the next morning with the realization that I didn’t know any lawyers and did not really know what they did. I grew up in small-town North Dakota. We didn’t have a courthouse or a cop or a lawyer, and we liked it that way. The only thing I knew about lawyers I had gleaned from watching “Matlock” and “The Practice.” But during high school, I had also been an avid public speaker, an active member of Future Farmers of America, and participated in 4-H, drama, music and speech.

I reasoned that if I combined my knowledge of law from TV shows with my love of public speaking, I could develop a plan: I’d be a trial lawyer, spending my days in front of juries. In my mind, a trial was just another speaking competition. And if there was—and is—something I like even more than scholarship and the world of ideas, it’s competition. And winning.

If I had taken two steps down the ladder of intellectual snobbery, I had probably taken three or four steps up the ladder of pride and self-conceit. The world of ideas had simply been replaced by the idea I had of myself. And the idea I had of myself was one of success. Of great competency. Confidence in my ability to convince another or a group of others that my position was right. I hated to lose. I had always been an accomplished student, an award winner in whatever extracurricular activity I did (save basketball). And I reasoned that I’d simply continue that in law. I’d get the highest grades and a coveted clerkship and an important job doing important things. And I’d keep winning.

But what I failed to see back then, and during most of my law school days, is that lawyers have clients who are human beings with real-life problems. Lawsuits aren’t competitions. Lawyers don’t get trophies for winning a case. You don’t stand before a jury trying to convince them that God exists, or that utilitarian philosophy is bunk or that language does reveal something about essence. Instead, lawyers are advocates who must stand in the shoes of their clients, clients with concrete, incarnate legal problems. More than just advocates, lawyers are counselors.

It has taken me nearly 10 years of practicing law to even begin to understand that term: c ounselor of law . But of late, the Lord appears to want to hammer this idea into my skull.

From Pages to People

Today I am an appellate attorney. I love this niche area of practice. In some ways my work as a lawyer is closer to my original vision for my life than I could have thought possible. Give me 1,000 transcript pages and unlimited access to an online legal research database and lock me in a windowless office for a week or two, and I’m happy. I love research and writing. I enjoy pondering legal issues and thoroughly considering them from every angle. I am proud of my ability to craft succinct, clear, persuasive legal arguments. Writing a brief is about as much fun as one can have as a lawyer.

But my work also constantly reminds me that there is no such thing as an abstract legal issue, that the practice of law is about real people. And the Lord keeps sending real people with real problems to knock on my office door, pulling my mind out of the appellate heights. To help me see that, God has given me the privilege of seeking to understand these problems from others’ perspectives. I am learning that being a lawyer is not primarily about coming up with the best legal arguments. It is about being a counselor. A listener. An empathizer. And an advocate.

These folks do not usually become my clients. They come to me because I am the only person they know who is a lawyer. And they know me because of my family’s mission to build Christian community with the poor and marginalized, including through foster care, weekly communal dinners and creating a house of hospitality.

At times I am simply able to point them in the direction of pro bono or low bono resources. Other times I can help them understand their legal challenges and their options going forward. But most importantly, I can listen and empathize with those who come my way. Women in abusive relationships trying to navigate divorce and child protection proceedings. Employees terminated from jobs. Teen fathers being investigated by law enforcement. Individuals charged with crimes.

Many times, there is not much practical assistance I can offer. I wish I could do more. I wish I could change their often dire circumstances. Those in need of legal counsel are usually going through one of the hardest times in their lives. Stress, anxiety, fear, the overwhelming sense of helplessness and lack of control—these feelings are all common. Being a counselor of law requires some of the same skillset as a clinical counselor. In my experience, empathy and patient listening are key. On multiple occasions I have listened to a mother crying on the other end of the phone, trying to empathize with her feelings of helplessness as she prepares to send her children for another required weekend visit with her abusive ex-husband. And sometimes all I can do is agree that it’s not fair. As much as I’d like to, I can’t change her legal circumstances. But I can say her sharing her life with me has broadened my understanding of my own vocation.

We in the legal profession are privileged. We have had access to training and opportunities that most will never have. I believe the law is, must and can be a force for great good. We live in a fallen world. Good law and fair legal processes can help. But the law can also become a hurdle and a burden, especially for those who are poor and disadvantaged.

A lawyer’s right to practice law brings with it a duty to assist those in need. That doesn’t mean that we can or should represent every person who comes to our doors. We need to practice discernment. But how we respond to those we cannot help in legal matters can still make a difference. We must at least lend our ear to those in need. Can that be the cup of cold water we offer back to Jesus? Or will we be like those disciples who time and again tried to send away the poor, the sick, the lame and those who chased after Jesus, crying out for help? Jesus always had the time for them.

Today, I love being an appellate attorney. I still love ideas, the joy of diving deep into a challenging legal issue and the thrill of obtaining a favorable judicial ruling. And I believe that my passion for my work pleases the Lord. This is how he made me. But I am also convinced more each day that my call to be a lawyer is not just for my own good, or even the good of my wife, but is also for those in need. As a lawyer, I still feel God’s presence in the pages of my books and the papers on my desk, but I also see it more clearly in the people before me.

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As a Teenager in Europe, I Went to Nudist Beaches All the Time. 30 Years Later, Would the Experience Be the Same?

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In July 2017, I wrote an article about toplessness for Vogue Italia. The director, actor, and political activist Lina Esco had emerged from the world of show business to question public nudity laws in the United States with 2014’s Free the Nipple . Her film took on a life of its own and, thanks to the endorsement from the likes of Miley Cyrus, Cara Delevingne, and Willow Smith, eventually developed into a whole political movement, particularly on social media where the hashtag #FreeTheNipple spread at lightning speed. The same year as that piece, actor Alyssa Milano tweeted “me too” and encouraged others who had been sexually assaulted to do the same, building on the movement activist Tarana Burke had created more than a decade earlier. The rest is history.

In that Vogue article, I chatted with designer Alessandro Michele about a shared memory of our favorite topless beaches of our youth. Anywhere in Italy where water appeared—be it the hard-partying Riviera Romagnola, the traditionally chic Amalfi coast and Sorrento peninsula, the vertiginous cliffs and inlets of Italy’s continuation of the French Côte d’Azur or the towering volcanic rocks of Sicily’s mythological Riviera dei Ciclopi—one was bound to find bodies of all shapes and forms, naturally topless.

In the ’90s, growing up in Italy, naked breasts were everywhere and nobody thought anything about it. “When we look at our childhood photos we recognize those imperfect breasts and those bodies, each with their own story. I think of the ‘un-beauty’ of that time and feel it is actually the ultimate beauty,” Michele told me.

Indeed, I felt the same way. My relationship with toplessness was part of a very democratic cultural status quo. If every woman on the beaches of the Mediterranean—from the sexy girls tanning on the shoreline to the grandmothers eating spaghetti al pomodoro out of Tupperware containers under sun umbrellas—bore equally naked body parts, then somehow we were all on the same team. No hierarchies were established. In general, there was very little naked breast censorship. Free nipples appeared on magazine covers at newsstands, whether tabloids or art and fashion magazines. Breasts were so naturally part of the national conversation and aesthetic that Ilona Staller (also known as Cicciolina) and Moana Pozzi, two porn stars, cofounded a political party called the Love Party. I have a clear memory of my neighbor hanging their party’s banner out his window, featuring a topless Cicciolina winking.

A lot has changed since those days, but also since that initial 2017 piece. There’s been a feminist revolution, a transformation of women’s fashion and gender politics, the absurd overturning of Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction in New York, the intensely disturbing overturning of Roe v Wade and the current political battle over reproductive rights radiating from America and far beyond. One way or another, the female body is very much the site of political battles as much as it is of style and fashion tastes. And maybe for this reason naked breasts seem to populate runways and street style a lot more than they do beaches—it’s likely that being naked at a dinner party leaves more of a permanent mark than being naked on a glamorous shore. Naked “dressing” seems to be much more popular than naked “being.” It’s no coincidence that this year Saint Laurent, Chloé, Ferragamo, Tom Ford, Gucci, Ludovic de Saint Sernin, and Valentino all paid homage to sheer dressing in their collections, with lacy dresses, see-through tops, sheer silk hosiery fabric, and close-fitting silk dresses. The majority of Anthony Vaccarello’s fall 2024 collection was mostly transparent. And even off the runway, guests at the Saint Laurent show matched the mood. Olivia Wilde appeared in a stunning see-through dark bodysuit, Georgia May Jagger wore a sheer black halter top, Ebony Riley wore a breathtaking V-neck, and Elsa Hosk went for translucent polka dots.

In some strange way, it feels as if the trends of the ’90s have swapped seats with those of today. When, in 1993, a 19-year-old Kate Moss wore her (now iconic) transparent, bronze-hued Liza Bruce lamé slip dress to Elite Model Agency’s Look of the Year Awards in London, I remember seeing her picture everywhere and feeling in awe of her daring and grace. I loved her simple sexy style, with her otherworldly smile, the hair tied back in a bun. That very slip has remained in the collective unconscious for decades, populating thousands of internet pages, but in remembering that night Moss admitted that the nude look was totally unintentional: “I had no idea why everyone was so excited—in the darkness of Corinne [Day’s] Soho flat, the dress was not see-through!” That’s to say that nude dressing was usually mostly casual and not intellectualized in the context of a larger movement.

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But today nudity feels loaded in different ways. In April, actor and author Julia Fox appeared in Los Angeles in a flesh-colored bra that featured hairy hyper-realist prints of breasts and nipples, and matching panties with a print of a sewn-up vagina and the words “closed” on it, as a form of feminist performance art. Breasts , an exhibition curated by Carolina Pasti, recently opened as part of the 60th Venice Biennale at Palazzo Franchetti and showcases works that span from painting and sculpture to photography and film, reflecting on themes of motherhood, empowerment, sexuality, body image, and illness. The show features work by Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois, and an incredible painting by Bernardino Del Signoraccio of Madonna dell’Umiltà, circa 1460-1540. “It was fundamental for me to include a Madonna Lactans from a historical perspective. In this intimate representation, the Virgin reveals one breast while nurturing the child, the organic gesture emphasizing the profound bond between mother and child,” Pasti said when we spoke.

Through her portrayal of breasts, she delves into the delicate balance of strength and vulnerability within the female form. I spoke to Pasti about my recent musings on naked breasts, which she shared in a deep way. I asked her whether she too noticed a disparity between nudity on beaches as opposed to the one on streets and runways, and she agreed. Her main concern today is around censorship. To Pasti, social media is still far too rigid around breast exposure and she plans to discuss this issue through a podcast that she will be launching in September, together with other topics such as motherhood, breastfeeding, sexuality, and breast cancer awareness.

With summer at the door, it was my turn to see just how much of the new reread on transparency would apply to beach life. In the last few years, I noticed those beaches Michele and I reminisced about have grown more conservative and, despite being the daughter of unrepentant nudists and having a long track record of militant topless bathing, I myself have felt a bit more shy lately. Perhaps a woman in her 40s with two children is simply less prone to taking her top off, but my memories of youth are populated by visions of bare-chested mothers surveilling the coasts and shouting after their kids in the water. So when did we stop? And why? When did Michele’s era of “un-beauty” end?

In order to get back in touch with my own naked breasts I decided to revisit the nudist beaches of my youth to see what had changed. On a warm day in May, I researched some local topless beaches around Rome and asked a friend to come with me. Two moms, plus our four children, two girls and two boys of the same ages. “Let’s make an experiment of this and see what happens,” I proposed.

The kids all yawned, but my friend was up for it. These days to go topless, especially on urban beaches, you must visit properties that have an unspoken nudist tradition. One of these in Rome is the natural reserve beach at Capocotta, south of Ostia, but I felt a bit unsure revisiting those sands. In my memory, the Roman nudist beaches often equated to encounters with promiscuous strangers behind the dunes. I didn’t want to expose the kids, so, being that I am now a wise adult, I went ahead and picked a compromise. I found a nude-friendly beach on the banks of the Farfa River, in the rolling Sabina hills.

We piled into my friend’s car and drove out. The kids were all whining about the experiment. “We don’t want to see naked mums!” they complained. “Can’t you just lie and say you went to a nudist beach?”

We parked the car and walked across the medieval fairy-tale woods until we reached the path that ran along the river. All around us were huge trees and gigantic leaves. It had rained a lot recently and the vegetation had grown incredibly. We walked past the remains of a Roman road. The colors all around were bright green, the sky almost fluorescent blue. The kids got sidetracked by the presence of frogs. According to the indications, the beach was about a mile up the river. Halfway down the path, we bumped into a couple of young guys in fanny packs. I scanned them for signs of quintessential nudist attitude, but realized I actually had no idea what that was. I asked if we were headed in the right direction to go to “the beach”. They nodded and gave us a sly smile, which I immediately interpreted as a judgment about us as mothers, and more generally about our age, but I was ready to vindicate bare breasts against ageism.

We reached a small pebbled beach, secluded and bordered by a huge trunk that separated it from the path. A group of girls was there, sharing headphones and listening to music. To my dismay they were all wearing the tops and bottoms of their bikinis. One of them was in a full-piece bathing suit and shorts. “See, they are all wearing bathing suits. Please don’t be the weird mums who don’t.”

At this point, it was a matter of principle. My friend and I decided to take our bathing suits off completely, if only for a moment, and jumped into the river. The boys stayed on the beach with full clothes and shoes on, horrified. The girls went in behind us with their bathing suits. “Are you happy now? my son asked. “Did you prove your point?”

I didn’t really know what my point actually was. I think a part of me wanted to feel entitled to those long-gone decades of naturalism. Whether this was an instinct, or as Pasti said, “an act that was simply tied to the individual freedom of each woman”, it was hard to tell. At this point in history, the two things didn’t seem to cancel each other out—in fact, the opposite. Taking off a bathing suit, at least for my generation who never had to fight for it, had unexpectedly turned into a radical move and maybe I wanted to be part of the new discourse. Also, the chances of me going out in a fully sheer top were slim these days, but on the beach it was different. I would always fight for an authentic topless experience.

After our picnic on the river, we left determined to make our way—and without children—to the beaches of Capocotta. In truth, no part of me actually felt very subversive doing something I had been doing my whole life, but it still felt good. Once a free breast, always a free breast.

This article was originally published on British Vogue .

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I quit my high-paying legal career and moved into my car. It was the best decision I ever made.

On a trip to Washington, I decided to quit my career as a lawyer and travel full time.
I moved into my car and traveled all over the country.
It was a steep learning curve, but I followed what excited me.

Someone once told me every life boils down to five major decisions —five moments when the direction we step dictates the path we'll travel until the next juncture. If it's true, I made one of those decisions in 2015 in the western reaches of Washington State . I was 33 years old and had just summitted Mount Rainier, the first glaciated peak I'd ever climbed and the most adventurous thing I'd ever done.

As the sun crested the horizon, I sat at a diner in a small town. Wrapping my hands around my coffee, I thought about the rainforest I planned to explore that day as my eyes looked out the window toward the highway's long white lines. Those lines could take me anywhere. Anywhere was a long way from the law firm at the edge of Wall Street , where I spent 70-plus hours a week. A long way from the two computer screens and never-ending to-do lists that dissolved days into weeks into months. A long way from the discontent permeating my life.

Almost seven years into my career , I'd just paid off my law school debt, was on track for partnership, and was deeply unhappy. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy the work. But the work — representing financial institutions being investigated by the government — didn't give my life meaning. It was a job — a good job, but a job. And I'd made that job my entire life. I'd prioritized it over all else, including my health and, most recently, the birth of my sister's first child. A moment I'd never get back.

In that small town, gazing at the highway, I calculated how many nights of campsite fees would equal one month's rent — 240. It'd been over a decade since I owned a car, and I'd never camped alone. But by the time the scrambled eggs arrived, I'd decided to quit my job , move into a car, and live on the road, exploring America's wild places.

Preparation for my new life took some time

Over the next eight months, I quietly prepared. In a box, I collected places I wanted to visit. In a spreadsheet, I budgeted what I'd need for a year on the road, followed by another year of what I hoped would be starting anew.

It turned out to be the best decision for me

Day by day, I did figure it out. Soon, I met others who were living out of their cars. Soon, I stopped arcing my head with defense tools. Soon, I slept better on dirt than anywhere else.

Over the following months, I opened myself in new ways. I made friends at trailheads and on trails, went backpacking or rock-climbing with those friends, and ran for miles in the wild without a watch or any goal other than exploration.

I made many mistakes. After a storm detoured me on a run, I spent the night in a stranger's car. Through those mistakes, I learned to trust in the uncertainty.

When I drove west, I had no itinerary, but I held tight to one plan: In a spreadsheet, I'd mapped out how to climb every 14,000-foot peak in Colorado; there are almost 60. The goal quieted the lingering voice, telling me I was "wasting" time. If I climbed those mountains, just look how productive I would be. By late July, I'd abandoned the spreadsheet.

After a life of checking boxes, I started to find a different sort of success by chasing curiosity and going to what excites me. Eight years later, I no longer live in my car, I didn't return to law, and I'm still chasing what excites me — and still building a life filled with purpose.

The gift of living on the road wasn't the answers it gave me but how it taught me to be comfortable with the questions.

Watch: How 'Grand Theft Auto' actually works, according to a former car thief

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‘Shoot Me Up With a Big One’: The Pain of Matthew Perry’s Last Days

Court papers show that Mr. Perry, the “Friends” star who had long struggled with addiction, was increasingly taking ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, in the days before he died.

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Matthew Perry, with a mustache and goatee, stands outdoors in front of some trees in a black leather jacket and a gray shirt.

By Julia Jacobs and Matt Stevens

On the day Matthew Perry died , his live-in personal assistant gave him his first ketamine shot of the morning at around 8:30 a.m. About four hours later, while Mr. Perry watched a movie at his home in Los Angeles, the assistant gave him another injection.

It was only about 40 minutes later that Mr. Perry wanted another shot, the assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, recalled in a plea agreement that he signed.

“Shoot me up with a big one,” Mr. Perry told Mr. Iwamasa, according to the agreement, and asked him to prepare his hot tub.

So Mr. Iwamasa filled a syringe with ketamine, gave his boss a third shot and left the house to run some errands, according to court papers. When he returned, he found Mr. Perry face down in the water, dead.

Mr. Iwamasa was one of five people who the authorities in California said this week had been charged with a conspiracy to distribute ketamine , a powerful anesthetic, to Mr. Perry. The defendants also included two doctors, a woman accused of being a dealer and an acquaintance who pleaded guilty to acting as a middleman.

Mr. Perry, a beloved figure who rose to fame playing Chandler Bing on the sitcom “Friends,” had long struggled with addiction. Court papers filed in the case shed light on the desperate weeks leading up to Mr. Perry’s death on Oct. 28 at the age of 54.

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Who is Kamala Harris's mother, Shyamala Harris?

One of the most frequently mentioned people at the Democratic National Convention this week has been someone not in the room: Shyamala Gopalan, Vice President Kamala Harris's late mother.

Harris has frequently cited her mother as a major influence on her life and politics. In a now-viral 2023 interview, Harris quoted Gopalan saying, "You think you just fell out of coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you."

The quip grew so popular that a coconut emoji quickly became a symbol of Harris's campaign online after she launched her presidential bid last month.

Other DNC speakers have also adopted Gopalan's teachings. In her address to delegates this week, former First Lady Michelle Obama drew parallels between Gopalan and her own recently deceased mother, and cited one of Gopalan's mottos when she told the crowd, "Don't sit around and complain about things. Do something."

Harris is likely to touch on her mother's legacy again in her speech Thursday accepting the presidential nomination. Here's what to know about Gopalan and her role in the vice president's politics.

Who was Shyamala Gopalan?

Born in India, Gopalan immigrated to the United States at 19 years old to pursue a post-graduate degree in nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley. She eventually became a breast cancer researcher, and her work contributed to several significant advances in the field.

In California, Gopalan also met economist Donald J. Harris , and the couple married and had two children, Kamala and Maya.

The couple bonded over their involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, and Harris has said attending marches for racial justice as a child was formative in her upbringing.

Harris's parents eventually divorced, and Gopalan got primary custody of their children. Donald continued to see Kamala and Maya during the weekends and summer, but Gopalan raised the sisters "mostly on her own," according to the vice president's 2019 memoir.

“Had they been a little older, a little more emotionally mature, maybe the marriage could have survived . But they were so young,” Kamala wrote in "The Truths We Hold."

More: Who is Kamala Harris's father, Donald J. Harris?

What is Shyamala Gopalan's connection to Wisconsin?

Though she lived in California for much of her life, Gopalan also spent several years in Wisconsin .

The family lived in Madison from the time Kamala was three to five years old. Shyamala worked as a breast cancer researcher in the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at University of Wisconsin-Madison, while Donald was an associate professor of economics at the university.

In her memoir, Harris cited the family's move to Madison as the reason for her parents' separation.

Shyamala Gopalan death and legacy

Gopalan died of colon cancer in 2009 at the age of 70. At the time, Harris was serving as the district attorney of San Francisco.

After her mother's death, Harris traveled to Chennai, India, to scatter Gopalan's ashes. Harris used to travel there with her mother every other year to visit her grandparents, according to USA Today .

Though Gopalan won't be in the audience tonight, she will almost certainly on Harris's mind as becomes the first Black and South Asian woman to accept the Democratic presidential nomination.

“Mommy, you are the star of this book because you are the reason for everything,” Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir “The Truths We Hold.” “There is no title or honor on earth I’ll treasure more than to say I am Shyamala Gopalan Harris’ daugher."

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