On Motivation.

People come into the Carmelite Library to read: journals, study notes, books whose page numbers are carefully recorded from one visit to the next. What motivates them? What is motivation, which must have something to do with movement? Is it an external force — to get out of the wind and rain — or an internal compulsion, like the body’s need to sit down for awhile?

            How much motivation is physical, how much mental? Our thoughts swim in a chemical bath: so do our feelings. When we say we’re not motivated, do these chemicals wash about due to the presence of light, darkness, or wild weather? My dogs aren’t motivated to lift one paw on a cold wet morning.

            Lack of motivation can be fuelled by expectation. Not only today, but in our life frame, we want to fill out the picture and achieve something splendid. But somehow the motivation isn’t there: the getting moving. If you can’t equal or surpass your heroes — or even the child next door — you lose hope. Our culture that demands so much may often give back little. What motivates someone to keep practicing the piccolo for hours every day? Maybe he likes the sound.

            Motivation comes easier when the aim is clear and the reward constant. I’m motivated to go to work to pay my bills, for example. I seem to be less motivated to exercise to improve my health. Is the goal too diffuse, or the reward uncertain? Maybe both, in my case.

            What if we were motivated to do exactly what we want? Seriously. You think you should be motivated to clean the floor, but the idea dismays you so much you want to sit down and cry. So cry. You should be motivated to cook dinner, but you want to relax and watch a film instead. So eat another breakfast today. You’d like to be motivated to practice the piccolo, but you need more sleep than you ever get. So sleep. The piccolo isn’t going anywhere.

            Some things are nearly always motivating. You can do them sitting in an armchair. Look around: you’ll be motivated to praise God. Think about the state of the world: you’ll want to ask for blessings on everyone you know, and everyone you don’t know, too. Prepare yourself to stand witness to the truth, in whatever form that may take on the day that you get moving.

            When the reader left the library, she spoke to me. She said: “It’s a peaceful place to be.”

On transitions: Bishop John McIntyre.

This past long weekend I spent some time travelling through a seasonal rainstorm to see the house of a young person who had just bought their first home. As I crossed the threshold I recalled the first homes of others I had known, for this had much in common with them. An affordable first home is often full of ladders, paint tins, no-more-gaps, carpets in need of replacement and kitchens on the list for determined renovation. It’s a home in process.

            I thought of Janus, Roman god of gates and doorways, who ruled all thresholds including the gate to the gods: prayers to other gods had to go through him, with his double faces, one looking at the past, the other towards the future. And so it is with transitions, directed by our pasts, leading to our futures.

            Big transitions like weddings and graduations may be ceremonies attended by many people, while others may be whisper soft with an audience of one. Some can be planned for; others simply appear, perhaps as a stumbling-block in our way. Not so long ago I passed over the threshold from unthinking health to carefully managed illness, where I was the main witness. Some transitions cross the threshold to the future, like the first day on your first job; others draw heavily on the past, like clearing up the effects of the dead.

            Conversion is of course a transition, from one belief to another, or from no belief to finally getting around to thinking about our relationship to the Divine. Is loss of faith a transition? I’m inclined to think it is not. Maybe if you’ve had a faith to lose, you simply can’t get along with your current Divine-human situation, and have lost energy or intellect for the present. It does take both energy and intellect to hold onto faith, and some people at some times have other things to do.

            While we’re here, I don’t think that when one door closes, another opens. Rather, we pass under the archway from one room or state of being into another, not exclusive of the past but informed by it in memory and reality. In the same way, the future can intrude into the present sometimes in prescient, even unnerving ways.No shut doors: nothing solid in between.

            The great transitions are those Buddha noted as bringing suffering: birth and death. Birth, despite its thrilling manifestations of love and attachment, always leads eventually to death. I think of great spiritual masters who have been taken by death, and of martyrs, whose ends tend to be messily cruel. Of the many family and friends who have gone over the threshold into death, which is thought of as the last transition, the final transformation.

            The ancients thought of the cemetery as a dormitory, where the dead await the transition to life eternal, when the universe attains its end, and all things return to God. This week we lost, suddenly, a valued leader, pastor, and mentor in Bishop John McIntyre. He has gone into the changeless realm, and is free of the constant transitions of our mortal life. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

           

On Vocation

The first question in the catechism of the Book of Common Prayer is this: What is your Name? This name that our parents call us is our first vocation, a vocation to human life. Indeed much of our subsequent vocation may be determined right here: by genetics, by upbringing, and by example. Very commonly, one’s working life was decided by the family trade or business: James and John fishing with their father are recapitulated through the ages in all kinds of situations.

            There have also been many who broke out to follow the inspirations of the day: from Crusaders seeking adventure on the way to the Holy Land to miners from all over the world piling into California (the Chinese called it the Gold Mountain) and Australia (the New Gold Mountain). The city of Melbourne that I photograph was built on the wealth of the Gold Rush by some who felt they had a vocation to get rich.

            In the Bible, a certain group of individuals meet with a vocation they would rather do without: these are the prophets. They don’t welcome the call to go tell the king what the Lord thinks of him; they realise the king is in denial and likely to punish the messenger. Prophets may take quite a few calls before they do what they’re told: Jonah would rather be eaten by a sea monster.

            So vocation isn’t always a comfortable or joyful experience.

            A vocation is different from a gift. Composer Benjamin Britten ‘loved numbers’ and his gift was such that his school wanted to send him to Cambridge as a mathematician, while his father hoped he’d become a nice accountant. But Britten knew his vocation was to write music, and he used his gift for numbers to fill his works, like J. S. Bach before him, with mathematical delights and puzzles, including the famous’ turning of the screw’ through the musical keys in the opera of the same name.

            Still many persons, including myself, have times of dismay when we feel we have no real vocation of our own. This affects us, whatever our gifts. But today’s values around performance and work don’t apply in all times and places. Mozart’s sister Anna Maria was more respected for marrying into the aristocracy than for being one of the great keyboard virtuosos of the age, and Sofonisba Anguissola, 16^th century court painter to the Queen of Spain, had a noble father who trained his daughters as painters to elevate the status of the art because these noblewomen excelled in it.

            There’s also a difference between vocation and something you just want to do.

Many things bring interest and happiness, and these are often driven by love. Love predicates attachment: it may be familial, filial, romantic, idealistic, altruistic, aesthetic, and more. To have something you love to do is both a gift and an achievement. It’s often separate from the destiny of humankind, which is both to make a living and to nurture the living, and it’s also often separate from vocation.

            We belong to God, and this is the basis of our vocation. The first letter of John states that the sensual understanding of the word of life (understood through all the senses) is the fulfilment of joy: that God is light, and not darkness. This is not understood through work or performance, but through fellowship with others.

            Evagrius of Pontus advised monks discouraged with daily work to seek the desert: the desert cell with its attendant poverty and solitude was the way to clarify this discontent. Even in the desert, though, we will discover than vocation is different from salvation. ‘What must I do to be saved?’ asked the rich man. Sell up, give it all away, and follow me, said Jesus. ‘Work out your salvation with diligence,’ said Buddha. The important thing to realise is that vocation is not the real question. If God has something to say to you, you will know it. Let’s hope it doesn’t involve being swallowed by a sea monster.