It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have been touched by the center of your sorrow, if you have been opened by its betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own;
if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being human....
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours or mine, and still stand on the edge of a lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "Yes!"
It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children.
It doesn't interest me who you are, how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
What do you do? I mean, what do you do - with your life? The first question is one asked by a seatmate on an airplane, or someone at a party, a high school or a college reunion. I doubt there is one among us who has not been asked this question. It is a kind of ice-breaker, a way to launch a conversation among strangers or friends who have been too long apart. This is also a way of evaluating people - sizing them up - putting them in perspective - discovering their occupation: "what do you do - for a living?"
It might also be a way of stifling certain kinds of conversation. If I were to tell a bunch of guys drinking beer and watching a football game at a sports bar what I do, it might well curb some of the more colorful language they might use. I must confess that in gatherings of strangers I prefer to go occupationally incognito.
But are we more than what we do? That is the thrust of the second question: "what do you do - with your life?" That is the kind of query we probably don't make in the airplane, around the water cooler at work or at the social gathering. It is much too serious an inquiry - not the kind of thing you can answer while sitting at your keyboard, or chatting with a salsa-covered corn chip in your hand or watching a hockey game.
Our most famous contemporary Unitarian Universalist author Robert Fulghum, who left the certain glories of our ministry for the uncertain rewards of being a writer, has a good deal of fun with the question: what is it that you do?[1] In the course of such a conversation he is usually given a business card with the answer - name, company, telephone, address, cell phone, e-mail, FAX number and the rest. "If you don't have a business card these days," he writes, "you are not to be taken too seriously."
After receiving the card from one corporate vice-president, Fulghum asked quite seriously, "'Well, so, what is it you really DO?' And he pointed at his title as if I had overlooked it. I asked again. 'I mean, if I followed you around all day long, what would I see you doing?' He talked for a long time. I still do not really know what he does. And I am not sure he knows, either."
At that point Fulghum did not have a business card; he couldn't quite get himself down on a 3 1/2 by 2 inch piece of paper. So he started playing games when an airplane seatmate asked the inevitable question. One time on a flight to San Francisco he said he was a janitor, thinking that might end the conversation and allow him to read his book. However, his fellow passenger was fascinated and engaged him in extensive conversation. It turned out that she was a member of the church where he was to speak on Sunday, as he discovered when he spotted her in the third row. She had known who he was all along.
On another occasion when he was bumped into first class on a flight to Thailand, he was seated next to a very distinguished-looking gentleman who politely phrased the same question. This time Fulghum replied that he was a neurosurgeon. "How wonderful," said the man with delight. 'So am I!' And he was. A real one."
After that, Fulghum suggested that he and his seatmate play a game "just for the fun of it and each make up our occupation and pretend." One day on a flight to Chicago a fellow passenger agreed. "So he declared he was a spy, and I decided I'd be a nun. We had a hell of a time - one of the great conversations of my life. He said he couldn't wait until his wife asked him, 'Well, dear, how was your flight?' 'There was this nun dressed in a tweed suit.'" However, a middle-aged couple from Green Bay sitting behind them had the last laugh. "As the man passed me in the concourse," Fulghum wrote, "he said, 'Have a nice day, Sister.'"
But Robert Fulghum only scratches the surface of the issue: are we more than what we do? I have always been enamored of psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, and the activist in me resonated to his cryptic line, "We are what we do." That made sense to me. As one who is a strong "J" on the Meyers-Briggs inventory - task oriented - results driven - I think of behavior as the main measure of the person. What we can do - the skills we bring to the life enterprise - that is what is most important. And, of course, what we can contribute by our actions to the human endeavor is vitally important.
However, when I saw Anand Tucker's film Hilary and Jackie, a new dimension of the "what do you do?" issue surfaced. Hilary and Jackie, contrary to what you might think, is not about Hillary Clinton and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. It is a biographical film about Hilary and Jacqueline Du Pre, two musically precocious sisters, and their self-discovery. Hilary is a fine flutist; Jackie is an exceptional cellist. Their parents push both of them, but Hilary finally exchanges a musical career for a more mundane family life - she marries and has children.
Jackie, meanwhile, at first jealous of her older sister's talent, pressures herself into almost obsessive practice, and becomes a world-class cellist, embarks upon a concert career, marries the famous conductor Daniel Barenboim - and becomes incredibly unhappy. There are some moving scenes between the sisters, some sexual escapades and other dramatic flourishes that make this a truly fascinating film.
But the most poignant moment comes when Jackie develops multiple sclerosis, and her rapidly ascending career comes crashing down around her broken heart. I can't recall the exact monologue, but these words come to mind as she contemplates the ruins of her life without the sustaining power of her career. "What am I without my cello?"
Those words insinuated themselves in me and I began to wonder, what are we, any of us, without our career, without the identification of our work, without citing what we do? What am I without my ministry? When I retire, when any of us retire, what is left for those of us who have had such a strong vocational focus for so long? If we are suddenly unemployed, how then do we deal with our identity? If we are struck down by illness and are no longer able to function as we normally would, who, then, are we?
There is an old verse, author unknown, that suggests an answer:
"If your nose is close to the grindstone rough
and you keep it down there long enough,
you soon will think there's no such thing
as brooks that babble and birds that sing.
These three will all your world compose:
You, the stone - and your silly old nose!"
I recall reading about Rabbi Earl Grollman, who has written a number of books about death for our denomination's Beacon Press. When his father died, he and his brother, also a rabbi, went to the funeral home. The director there said something about how unusual it was for two rabbis to be there, and surely they would know how to handle things. Grollman pointed out that these were not two rabbis, but two grieving sons. I notice that neither the joy of new birth nor the sorrow of death depends on what we do for a living. The great democracy of death reminds us of our common humanity, no matter our station in life.
Ours is such a "bottom-line" age that we tend to measure people by what they produce, what they do - for a living. Am I only a minister - some kind of automaton who does things like preaching and teaching for pay - or am I a human being like others who is hurt and heals, who laughs and cries, who succeeds and fails? I think of the old satirical gravestone epitaph: "Born a man, died a butcher."
Friday night I saw Shipping Dock Theatre's powerful play The Laramie Project, the story of the murder of Matthew Shepard at the hands of two homophobic young men. The cast of eight played many parts as the people who were a part of that dramatic story. What I noticed was that their feelings of anger or guilt, hate or love, sorrow or pity did not depend on their roles in society, but on their human reaction to tragedy. College president or bartender, outraged father or limo driver, rancher or teacher - their reactions came, not out of their social status - but their common humanity - or as we say it in our Unitarian Universalist principles, "We covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person."
That sense of human community has been expressed many times in many ways. I am particularly struck by the words of the political columnist and writer Walter Lippmann. He reminds us of the irreducible essence of human beings that makes us one: "There you are, sir, and there is your neighbor. You are better born than he, you are richer, you are stronger, you are handsomer, nay you are better, kinder, wiser, more likeable; you have given more to your fellow men and taken less than he. . . and yet - absurd as it sounds - these differences do not matter, for the best part of him is untouchable and incomparable and unique and universal. Either you feel this or you do not; when you do not feel it, the superiorities that the world acknowledges seem like mountainous waves at sea; when you do feel it, they are slight and impermanent ripples upon a vast ocean."[2]
Then this week on National Public Radio I heard an interview with one of the lead researchers in the human genome project. Amazingly, scientists have been able to spell out our genetic code with all its incredible implications for preventing or controlling disease. But what impressed me most was this researcher's assertion that while we are made up of some 30,000 genes, 99.9% of them in humans are identical. Our differences come from one-tenth of one per-cent of our genetic make-up - which provides for plenty of differences; however, essentially, genetically we are much the same no matter our social standing or our vocation or our place in the world. We are all more human than otherwise.
However, ours is an age of the resume, stressing our different achievements. I thought of this last week as I joined a panel of the Rochester Area Foundation exploring the issue of civic engagement in our community. It was a most impressive group, I discovered, as we went around and introduced ourselves. We were to be given only a minute-and-a-half, but you can imagine that I - and everyone else - took somewhat more time than that. After all, we all had to give our full resumes of personal civic engagement.
We learned a good deal about one another during that meeting - knowledge that will no doubt be helpful as we explore that crucial topic. But we did not - could not - really learn the essential about each one of us - how we feel about life, how we deal with misfortune, how we understand our personal life meaning, how we envision the purpose of our lives. We discovered much about what each of us did - that being the reason we were there. But we discovered little about who we were as persons. We are more than what we do. But here, in this congregation, in religious community, that is one of our primary purposes - to get to know who we really are - and who are those people who sit next to us in the congregation, and at the committee meeting and at the task force gathering. Here, what we do in the workaday world is less important than who we are as religious people - what are our hopes and dreams, what are our burdens and sorrows, what are our loftiest thoughts and deepest feelings.
Poet Phyllis Theroux expresses it well:
"I wonder now, whether accomplishments
Have any real significance as the world defines them.
I suppose they do, or at least we're inwardly urged
To create things to prove that we
Were around for a few years.
But, beneath the books, music scores
And brilliant conceptions we foist upon the world,
Perhaps our real accomplishments lie elsewhere.
In a conversation we can't remember having,
A small relationship that gets someone else believing
In something more powerful
Than self-doubt."[3]
No, the resumes we compile on our computers and send into cyber-space for the work-a-day world are not the most important things about us. The resumes that really matter are how we feel about life and deal with our neighbors day by day; how we endure the hard knocks and how we celebrate the good times; how we relate ourselves to the powers that gave us birth and how we face the fate that comes to each of us in the end.
Robert Fulghum concludes his reflection on the question "what is it that you do?" by saying "Making a living and having a life are not the same thing. Making a living and making a life that's worthwhile are not the same thing. "What do you do?" In truth, I have a business card now. Finally figured out what to put on it. One word. "Fulghum." That's my occupation. . . . What I do is to be the most Fulghum I can be."
Each of us is more than what we do. Each of us is an irreducible repository of humanity that transcends anything we can put on a business card. And so with poet e. e. cummings I say, "Come out of the measurable house of doing into the immeasurable house of being." Don't just do something, stand there - be there - be here. Remember that, next time your seatmate asks you, "What is it that you do?"
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