A reason for being

There are lots of ways to make a living. Jobs and careers are good. But vocations are better.

Frederick Buchener was born in NYC in the summer of 1928, just fifteen months before the Great Depression officially began. His formerly well-off family struggled. They moved nearly every year. Different houses. Different schools.

When he was 10, Frederick watched his mom unsuccessfully try to revive his dad’s lifeless body in his driveway. He’d committed suicide using carbon monoxide. He thought he’d been a failure.

Despite that early trauma, Frederick made it to Princeton. And as a college student, he started writing his first novel.

A Long Day’s Dying hit bookshelves in 1950, just two years after he graduated. And it was a hit.

The famous composer Leonard Bernstein called it a literary triumph. "I have rarely been so moved...”

Everyone loved his book.

Despite early commercial success, Buechner surprised the literary community by enrolling at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Some questioned his decision. He was such a talented writer. Why the pivot?

Frederick’s pastor wasn’t sure seminary was right for him either. He said “it would be a shame to lose a good novelist for a mediocre preacher.”

But Frederick didn’t see preaching and fiction as tradeoffs. He saw them as complementary. He felt called, and he planned on doing both.

Frederick is 91 today. He lives with his wife on a hilltop in Vermont in what he calls “fathomless obscurity.” But his work isn’t obscure. Over a career that spans six decades, Frederick has written 32 books. Fiction, biography, essays, and sermons. He’s taught and lectured. His literary and theological influence is expansive. His writing helped shape my own embrace of doubt as a necessary ingredient for faith.

The best selling author John Irving was one of Frederick’s students at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and Irving quoted his former religion teacher in the epigraph of his beloved novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany.

How could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me."

– Frederick Buechner

Another one of Frederick’s most widely shared observations is on vocation. Our calling. He points out the Latin root of vocation is vocare (to call). And he says vocation is the place where our deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet.

"There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of society, say, or the superego, or self-interest.

The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need to do and (b) that the world needs to have done.

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet.”

The place where our deep gladness meets the world’s hunger. For Frederick, that place combined writing, teaching, and asking questions of faith. Novels and seminary.

The Japanese call that place Ikigai. It translates as a reason for being. A place where four circles intersect. What we love. What we’re good at. What we can be paid for. And what the world needs.

Ikigai.

The place where our deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet.

Our reason for being.