Post Script | October 17, 2022

Gretchen Rubin, Dante, and Vocational Faithfulness

I told you last week about the half-day of prayer and planning I finally put on the calendar and kept. Because it was only a half-day, I didn’t travel to spend it elsewhere as originally intended. (Someday soon, I’ll get to The Mercantile library!) Instead, I just curled up in a corner of my couch with my Bible and journal. Beforehand, I told my husband, who also works from home, that I would be praying and was not to be disturbed. (I said it nicely, I promise.)

It didn’t take long for me to sit with some questions and begin noticing stabs of anxiety, particularly when it came to my work. By its very nature, the writing life requires a lot of self-direction. Although there are occasional assignments that knock on my door, what’s more often true is that I must seek the work. These Monday letters, for example. This is a source of pretty constant anxiety for me.

It’s rare that I enjoy unequivocally clear direction for discerning the next right thing in my work. Perhaps my indecision suggests I’m not very good at listening to God. Perhaps it suggests I am an Enneagram 1, unnecessarily tied up in knots about finding the best and the right option. Perhaps it just means I’m a human being who feels the weight of responsibility for life’s burden of choosing.  

My spiritual director asked me some pointed questions about this weight I often feel at the very center of my chest related to choosing. What would happen if I chose “wrongly”? What would happen if I chose “rightly”? She wanted me to play out the scenarios, and of course I could begin to see my own ridiculousness. If I chose wrongly, would God disown me? And if I chose rightly, would my choices guarantee the right outcomes? No, no, no. He is bigger, kinder than my choices.

The tension is, of course, that choosing matters. It doesn’t keep the planets circling in their orbits, but it matters. And the surprising thing that I began discerning, after my half-day of prayer and planning, was that I needed to be choosing better in my work.

First, I could see I needed renewed courage for choosing a writer’s life. With flexibility in my days, it’s easy to populate the calendar with other things I want to do, even benefit from doing. But it’s easy to abuse this flexibility, to plan a few too many appointments or coffees or lunches. It takes a fair amount of courage to say no to good invitations in order to be faithful here, at my desk.

But it’s not just courage I have needed God to renew in me. It’s also diligence. I’ve enjoyed John Baillie’s A Diary of Private Prayer over the last several months, and the morning prayer for the first day of the month is a prayer I would benefit praying every morning:

Keep my thoughts pure;

Keep me gentle and truthful in all I say;

Keep my faithful and diligent in my work . . .

Diligence for me, in my writing life, looks like doing consistent and deep work. It means studying carefully, taking good notes, committing things to memory, reading good books, sustaining a journaling habit, keeping a writer’s commonplace book, sending these Monday letters, finishing the work required for my MFA, publishing essays, doing the necessary marketing required for my next book. (Could it even mean more intentional social media presence? Not yet clear.)

As I thought about this call to vocational diligence on my day of prayer, I could be honest with myself that my reading has, of late, been rather lazy. I haven’t been finishing books. I’ve been avoiding books that require the labor of attention. Mostly, I’ve been cramming my schedule with other things to crowd out reading all together.

So, I had a choice to make: commit myself to deeper reading or continue these lazy, faithless patterns.

Something happened rather serendipitous, just as I was considering this call to vocational diligence. I’d been reading Gretchen Rubin’s The Four Tendencies. I generally like Rubin’s work, although I probably wouldn’t put it in the category of deep reading. It’s a bit self-helpy though aalso incredibly well-researched. (Gretchen Rubin clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, so she’s not a dummy.)

In this particular instance, I sorely needed an insight from Rubin’s book, which addresses ways in which we meet both external and internal expectations. (You can take the quiz here to see if you are an upholder, an obliger, a questioner, or a rebel.) I’d assumed, before taking the quiz and reading the book, that I was an upholder. Fairly self-disciplined, I get up early, exercise, keep up regular spiritual practices. Surely that signaled I could meet both internal and external expectations.

But no! I am an obliger, someone who meets external expectations but struggles to uphold internal expectations, especially if those expectations conflict with others’ expectations of me. AHA! Things started to make sense. I was a person who needed a bit more support to uphold inner obligations and expectations, especially for vocational commitments like deep reading.

Rubin has suggestions for ways obligers can shore up their courage and diligence, and the primary strategy is to engineer structures of external accountability. Sometimes this can simply mean articulating your inner expectations (desires, longings, intentions, hope) and writing them down. You can certainly go the next step and sharing that written list with a trusted friend.

On my day of prayer/planning, I wrote down that I needed to choose an hour of deep reading every day. Then, I started reading Dante’s Divine Comedy with Baylor’s Honors College. In their “100 Days of Dante,” Baylor will send anyone who signs up a link to a YouTube video with an accompanying lecture to the daily canto. (100 days, 100 cantos).

And here’s the thing: what began as a I have to has become an I want to. That’s one of the paradoxes of habit: that we often begin with a sense of duty and drudgery but see transformation in our heart’s inner desiring. The good habit produces good fruit which sustains good intention.

The external accountability—of this shared Dante pilgrimage—has been a vital component for me. I get the reminder email from Baylor, and I remember what I’ve committed to. And now of course I’m telling you about this commitment, and you can ask how my Dante reading is going!

It wouldn’t be too shameless, would it, to point out how in Dante’s hell, the cowardly “undecided,” those unwilling to choose in this life stay on the outskirts of hell. In Canto III of Inferno, the undecided are not in hell (or purgatory or heaven), but sentenced to a liminal place for their unwillingness to choose. They must chase a moving, roving banner endlessly because they never assumed the courage to plant their flag and follow something or someone.

“This wretched state of being

Is the fate of those sad souls who lived a life

But lived it with no blame and with no praise.

They are mixed with that repulsive choir of angels

Neither faithful nor unfaithful to their God,

Who undecided stood but for themselves,” (l. 33-39).

My choice to read Dante and set up for myself structures of accountability (including this very letter!) have brought such deep satisfaction in the last couple of weeks. I’m reminded that vocational diligence is hard—and happy—work.

As most of life is.

Yours,

Jen

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I’m offering you the chance to sign up for a free five-week Zoom workshop on writing a rule of life in January. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a rule of life, it’s a means of grace by which we seek to intentionally pattern our lives in faithful response to God’s voice. It’s the very practice of choosing and the structure of accountability I’m suggesting a lot of us need!

This workshop is a gift to those who pre-order my book, In Good Time, by December 13. (At Baker Book House, you can get it 40% off and receive free shipping!) I’m getting pretty excited about the content I’m putting it together. You’ll get a free workbook as well as links to the recordings for each session, in case you need to miss the live Zoom calls. (They start Sunday, January 8, 7pm EST.)

After you pre-order the book, you can sign up for the workshop at my website in about three seconds. That gets you on the list for the emails I’ll start sending after the pre-order window closes. Thanks for considering and even sharing with a friend!