It was a hot, dry summer in the land.
An ancient village sat on a rise above a glistening lake.
The villagers were having difficulty getting enough water for their crops. One day a wandering sage appeared and offered to be the village water bearer until the fall harvest.
The villagers were grateful for his help.
The sage found two water buckets. One of the water buckets was sturdy.
The other bucket looked sturdy, but it had a small hole in the bottom.
Everyday the sage carried the water buckets along the meandering trail from the lake to the village. Up and down, back and forth, over and over.
Each and every time he reached the crop fields the sturdy bucket was full.
But each and every time the other bucket, the bucket with the hole, was only half full. Half the water had leaked out through the hole in the bottom.
This bucket, was not a happy bucket, ashamed at its imperfection and miserable that it could only perform half of what it had been made to do.
The sturdy bucket was proud of its ability to stay full. Not too proud, mind you, it was just a bucket after all...
Anyway, the sturdy bucket was proud of its ability to stay full. The other bucket tried to do everything it could to ... hold its water, as it were.
But, being a bucket with a hole in it, there wasn't much it could do. At the end of the harvest the sage thanked the buckets and prepared to leave.
The leaky water bucket could hold back no longer. "uhm Sir, I'm sorry."
The wise sage turned and asked, "Why?"
"I'm useless!" the bucket cried. "Everyday you carry water from the lake to the village, up and down, back and forth, over and over, and every time half the water leaks out before we get to the fields"
"That's how it is." The sage nodded.
"But I can't stop leaking ...I am totally useless"
"It's not about what you can't do." The sage said as he picked up the bucket and carried it to the door. "Look."
He opened the door and gestured out to the azure lake below the village, sparkling in the afternoon sunlight.
The bucket looked. As far as the eye could see, from the shores of the lake to the distant fields...
one side of the meandering trail was lined with flowers and herbs. It was a beautiful, almost magical sight. Everywhere else was dry and barren.
"I knew you leaked, so I planted seeds along the trail." the sage said.
The bucket would have cried with joy, but since it was a bucket, it just dripped.
Then the sage smiled and said, "Everyone has their own unique flaws.
But it is the flaws we each have that makes our life interesting and rewarding. Take each person for what they are and look for the good within."
I love this story because there have been times in my life when I could have put myself into any one of these roles. There certainly was a time when I saw myself as the leaky old bucket.
My first two years as a teacher were abysmal. I started my teaching career in a very small school in upstate New York.
There were 550 students K through 12 in one building and the biggest thrill for the students came at the end of sixth grade when they got to move upstairs to be with the big kids.
Anyway, nothing I did seemed to work. The kids complained because the work was too hard, the parents complained because there wasn't enough homework and the principal complained because when it was my turn to do cafeteria duty the kids were too noisy.
It didn't take long before I came to seriously dislike my job and to question my choice of careers.
I was the leaky bucket and I didn't stop long enough to look behind me and see if I had done any good.
Just as things were getting really bad, I learned about an alternative school in Falls Church, Virginia, that had small classes and provided services to students that struggled in the public schools.
So, I began a new year with renewed optimism and confidence.
But the truth was in just a couple of weeks I realized I was again out of my league.
I was working with students who had serious emotional difficulties and I truly bombed in the area of classroom management.
My bucket was quickly being drained and I felt as if I was truly wondering in the desert.
But the question that kept coming back to me time and time again was, "How can you be so bad when you like working with the kids so much?" Why isn't this working if I feel so strongly motivated to be a teacher?
Well, it was then that I met the first of many sages that I would come to know during my 32 years in education.
This sage taught me the first rule of teaching. "Henry, it takes five years to become a teacher. The first year you make every kind of mistake you think possible.
The second year, you learn from some of your mistakes but you then you make a whole new set of mistakes that you thought were impossible but they weren't.
And only by the end of the third year will things begin to even out and by the fourth year you'll start to get the idea of what needs to be done and by year five you will be on the path to becoming the teacher you think you are."
I took this advice to heart and soon things did start to come together. I began to be an effective teacher and, for the first time, to enjoy my job.
I continued to develop my skills and as I went from the classroom into administration I always remembered the 5-year rule.
As a principal there were many occasions when I was able to re-energize a new teacher with those wise words. And you can imagine my pleasure when friends once said to me remember minister is the root word in administrator and the Latin origin is administrare--to serve.
Just proving the point that all work can be a form of ministry.
Most of us, when we are asked the common question, "What do you do?" respond by saying I am a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a manager, I'm in sales, I'm in IT--information technology--and so on as if our sense of well-being, our sense of worth and emotional security are somehow intertwined by our employment.
Our tendency to answer the question, "So, what do you do?" by naming our vocation points out our tendency to define our individual worth and value by what we do on the job.
Somehow we have been taken in by the myth that for our work to be truly meaningful, it must conform to certain criteria.
Someone has spread the very hurtful idea that only certain kids of work are meaningful or spiritual; all others are intrinsically selfish, exploitive or insignificant.
But sometimes what we need to do is simply what must be done each day, common, simple, not-so-glamorous work that needs someone to do it.
Many of the tasks we must undertake are not overtly spiritual, meaningful or exciting. Yet any of these things can be done with care, attention and purpose.
Still, how often I have heard people lament that their work seem to have no "higher purpose," how each day they struggle to complete each task, which seems disconnected from whom they really are.
"Human persons work the world over. Wherever there are people, one can find people working," writes David Jensen in his book Responsive Labor: A Theology of Work.
"Work is a reality so basic to life--like eating, sexuality, communication, and reproduction--that it appears as nonnegotiable as the human condition. However we may seek to avoid it, work will find us and we will find work."
"In many cases," the author continues, "work is a matter of survival: to acquire daily bread, one tends the soil or works in some other trade to enjoy the fruits of a soil-tiller's labor. We work, in most cases to live."
And here Jensen concludes, "But work cannot be considered only a means to survival since it can also be a form of self expression: human work gives birth to igloos and cathedrals; Navajo rugs and Ghanaian kente cloth; novels and vaccinations; music and worship. In work, people create culture and identity."
"So, what do you do?"
What is your job? Your profession? Your vocation? Your calling? If you allowed your life to speak what would it say?
Quaker theologian, Parker J. Palmer, addresses these questions and talks about his understanding of those words as they affected him at different stages of his life.
When young, he said, "I found those words--"Let your life speak"--encouraging, and I thought I understood what they meant..." and at that time in my life, they meant: "Let the highest truths and values guide you. Live up to those demanding standards in everything you do."
Palmer goes on to say, "Because I had heroes at the time who seemed to be doing exactly that, this exhortation had incarnate meaning for me - it meant living a life like that of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Rosa Parks or Mahatma Gandhi or Dorothy Day, - a life of high purpose."
"So I lined up the loftiest ideals I could find," he continues, "and set out to achieve them. The results were rarely admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque.
But always they were unreal, a distortion of my true self - as must be the case when one lives from the outside in, not the inside out. I had simply found a 'noble' way to live a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart.
"Today," he goes on, "some thirty years later, 'Let your life speak' means something else to me, a meaning -- faithful to both the ambiguity of those words and to the complexity of my own experience:"... and he concludes with these powerful words:
"Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent."
The word vocation comes from a Latin root meaning "voice" or "calling".
Our vocation, then, comes from listening to that still, small voice within; not the voices of those who tell us what we should, ought or must do, but that still small voice from within our own heart and soul.
Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian theologian, has said that vocation is "the place where a person's deep gladness meets the needs of the world."
But it seems to me that too often we are forced to make a choice between what we call our vocation--the job that pays the bills--and our avocation that work that we truly love.
Fortunate indeed is the individual who can truly use these words interchangeably--whose employment is doing what is also their passion.
How often have we known friends and family members who have said, "I want to be a writer, or a painter, or I would build houses than be in the corporate world; but I have to pay the bills."
So it may not always be our job that allows us to have our deep gladness meet the needs of the world, it may be that it is our job that allows us to experience this sense of fulfillment and bliss.
Palmer writes, "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."
We, too, must listen for the truths and values at the heart of our own identity, not the standards by which we must live - but the standards by which each one of us cannot help but live if we are living our own lives.
Perhaps Henry David Thoreau anticipated Palmer's words when he wrote:
"I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do."
Or consider these words from Joseph Campbell, "We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
So when we are asked that question, "What do you do?" let's try to answer it in a different way.
Let's say that we are committed to cultivating compassion; that we are committed to finding ways to protect the lives of people.
That we are committed to the ethical treatment of the globes resources and we are opposed to violence committed against individuals, communities, and nations.
Let us say that we are committed to cultivating loving kindness and to practice generosity by sharing our time, energy, and resources with those in need.
Let us say we are committed to using inclusive language, of refusing to participate in racist, or sexist, or ageist practices.
Let us say we are committed to listening as deeply to others as we listen to ourselves.
Let us say we are committed to the peaceful mediation of conflicts and from using language that cause division and discord.
Let us be committed to doing the best we can at whatever job we have and when we stumble we should not feel guilty. (Adapted from Thich Nhat Hanh's book For A Future to be Possible)
As Winston Churchill so eloquently put it, "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
We need to remind ourselves of the part of the story when the sage opened the door and gestured out to the azure lake below the village, sparkling in the afternoon sunlight.
As far as the eye could see, from the shores of the lake to the distant fields...one side of the meandering trail was lined with flowers and herbs. It was a beautiful, almost magical sight.
"I knew you leaked, so I planted seeds along the trail." The sage said.
Some days we must carry our buckets--and some days we must plant some seeds--both are noble callings.
May it be so.