Work is love made visible
I’ve read quite a few passages on discovering your authentic work, or what some would refer to as a “calling”. Most recently, I completed a book by Jonathan Haidt named The Happiness Hypothesis in which he quotes Kahlil Gibran in a chapter about Love & Work and how it is linked to a calling or what Jung referred to as vocation.
But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born.
And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life. … And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God. … And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit. … It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit.
Work is love made visible.
–Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
I’ve actually added a few more lines than what Haidt did to give a little more flavor of Gibran’s thrust.
Haidt also compares work to lost craftsmanship, which I think is the primary point he is working with. However, what stood out for me was the additional move Gibran makes in linking work with the beloved. It occurred to me that perhaps many people are not able to find or fulfill themselves in a true vocation, not because they are unable to find work that connects with their talents and passion, but because they have no experience with connecting with a beloved. In other words, without knowledge of the underlying experience of the divine love to measure the worth and purpose of our work, how do we know we are pursuing our life’s calling?
I worry that we focus our energies on finding the perfect fit (i.e., finding our beloved) in our work when the reality in my experience is that the love or the work or the calling often finds us without our conscious intention. This I believe is the truth that Gibran is trying to convey when he calls our work the fulfillment of “earth’s furthest dream.” In other words, it is not OUR calling that we seek when we look for our true vocation–that view is a reflection of our egomeniacal need to have the universe revolve around our own desires. Instead, what Gibran I think is saying is that it is the earth’s dream calling to us to play our part in its fulfillment and in so doing bind ourselves to our Self and thus to our beloved. What this means is that we do not need to make the effort to search for the perfect connection to work, we only need respond when we are finally called by the work that will ultimately find us. There is, I believe, a huge difference in the world view based on seeking and one that is based on responding. By leaving out the line, “But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born” the meaning of what follows shifts from transpersonal to personal and the term beloved takes on a corporeal meaning (i.e., lover) instead of something that is divine (i.e., god, nature, Gaia, etc.). We must pursue the lover and his/her love whereas we are always already one with the divine. Read in the context of a calling, we could say that vocation (just the same as love) is inherently imminent in work of any kind, not just in work of our own choosing.
Often when people talk of god, or god’s plan, they may also cling to the idea that they can force fit their own free will (ego) to a web of intelligence that by definition they are unable to conceive or comprehend. This is not to say that the two concepts are mutually exclusive, it’s just that they tend to contradict in terms of our beliefs in either divine craftsmanship of reality or subjective destiny both of which can potentially have profound impact on our overall world view as well. How can we presume to understand our fit in the divine web from the pinpoint of a single vocation? Or, how can we presume that our vocation actually serves a greater whole–especially one that is beyond our comprehension? The best we can possibly do is use our thermometer of happiness to measure our relative success and hope that, in the end, our work does some good somewhere at some time. Otherwise, our vocation runs the risk of being an exercise in the ego feeding its own needs rather than a calling.
L. appellare “to address, appeal to, summon, name,” iterative of appellere “to prepare.” For more information about what's behind this site,
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