Summoned
Today, commencement speakers tell graduates to follow their passion, to trust their feelings, to reflect and find their purpose in life. The assumption behind these clichés is that when you are figuring out how to lead your life, the most important answers are found deep inside yourself. When you are young and just setting out into adulthood, you should, by this way of thinking, sit down and take some time to discover yourself, to define what is really important to you, what your priorities are, what arouses your deepest passions. You should ask certain questions: What is the purpose of my life? What do I want from life? What are the things that I truly value, that are not done just to please or impress the people around me?
By this way of thinking, life can be organized like a business plan. First you take an inventory of your gifts and passions. Then you set goals and come up with some metrics to organize your progress toward those goals. Then you map out a strategy to achieve your purpose, which will help you distinguish those things that move you toward your goals from those things that seem urgent but are really just distractions. If you define a realistic purpose early on and execute your strategy flexibly, you will wind up leading a purposeful life. You will have achieved self-determination, of the sort captured in the oft-quoted lines from William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus”: “I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul.”
This is the way people tend to organize their lives in our age of individual autonomy. It’s a method that begins with the self and ends with the self, that begins with self-investigation and ends in self-fulfillment. This is a life determined by a series of individual choices. But Frances Perkins found her purpose in life using a different method, one that was more common in past eras. In this method, you don’t ask, What do I want from life? You ask a different set of questions: What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do?
In this scheme of things we don’t create our lives; we are summoned by life. The important answers are not found inside, they are found outside. This perspective begins not within the autonomous self, but with the concrete circumstances in which you happen to be embedded. This perspective begins with an awareness that the world existed long before you and will last long after you, and that in the brief span of your life you have been thrown by fate, by history, by chance, by evolution, or by God into a specific place with specific problems and needs. Your job is to figure certain things out: What does this environment need in order to be made whole? What is it that needs repair? What tasks are lying around waiting to be performed? As the novelist Frederick Buechner put it, “At what points do my talents and deep gladness meet the world’s deep need?”
Viktor Frankl described this sort of call in his famous 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist in Vienna who was rounded up in 1942 by the Nazis and sent to a ghetto and then to a series of concentration camps. His wife, mother, and brother died in the camps. Frankl spent most of his time in camp laying tracks for railway lines. This was not the life he had planned for himself. This was not his passion, or his dream. This is not what he would be doing if he were marching to the beat of his own drummer. But this was the life events had assigned to him. And it became clear to him that what sort of person he would wind up being depended upon what sort of inner decision he would make in response to his circumstances.
“It did not really matter what we expected from life,” he wrote, “but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly.”11 Frankl concluded that fate had put a moral task and an intellectual task before him. It had given him an assignment.
His moral task was to suffer well, to be worthy of his sufferings. He could not control how much he suffered, or whether or when he would end up in the gas chamber or as a corpse by the side of the road, but he could control his inner response to his sufferings. The Nazis tried to dehumanize and insult their victims, and some prisoners went along with this degradation or retreated into their memories of a happier past. But some prisoners struggled against the insults and fortified their own integrity. “One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph,” Frankl realized. One could struggle against the insults by asserting small acts of dignity, not necessarily to change your outer life or even your ultimate fate, but to strengthen the beams and pillars of your inner structure. He could exercise what he called an “inner hold,” a rigorous control of his own inner state, a disciplined defense of his own integrity.
“Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs,” Frankl wrote.12 Once he became aware of the task events had assigned to him, he understood the meaning and ultimate purpose of his life and the opportunity the war had given him to realize that purpose. And once he understood the meaning of these events, survival itself became easier. As Nietzsche observed, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
Frankl’s other assignment was to take the circumstances into which he had been put and turn them into wisdom he could take to the world. Frankl had been given a great intellectual opportunity, the opportunity to study human beings under the most horrific conditions. He had the chance to share his observations with his fellow prisoners, and, if he survived, he figured he could spend the rest of his life sharing this knowledge with the world beyond.
When he had the mental energy, he spoke with groups of prisoners, telling them to take their lives seriously and struggle to preserve their inner hold. He told them to focus their minds upward on the image of a loved one, to preserve, share, and strengthen love for their absent wife or child or parent or friend, even in the midst of circumstances that conspire to destroy love, even though the loved one, having been sent to a different camp, might already be dead. Amid the grit and grime and the corpses one could still rise upward: “I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and he answered me in the freedom of space.” One could, Frankl wrote, still participate in a rapturous passion for one’s beloved and thus understand the full meaning of the words “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”
He told potential suicides that life had not stopped expecting things from them, and that something in the future was still expected of them. In the darkness after lights out, he told his fellow prisoners that someone was watching them—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or God—who did not want to be disappointed.13 Life, he concluded, “ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets before the individual.”14
Few people are put in circumstances that horrific and extreme, but all of us are given gifts, aptitudes, capacities, talents, and traits that we did not strictly earn. And all of us are put in circumstances that call out for action, whether they involve poverty, suffering, the needs of a family, or the opportunity to communicate some message. These circumstances give us the great chance to justify our gifts.