What Color Is Your Parachute?

percent (it varies from country to country: here in the U.S. the figure is 9 percent, while in Canada that figure is 19–30 percent).[44] Still, that leaves us with an overwhelming percentage of the U.S. population (91 percent) believing in God. And my ten million readers are a pretty typical cross-section of this country.

So, leaving out a section that 91 percent of my readers might be interested in, and helped by, in order to please 9 percent of my readers, seems to me insane.

But you are welcome to skip this section, if you wish. It’s not mandatory reading; that’s why it is an Appendix to this book.

As I started writing this section, I toyed at first with the idea of following what might be described as an “all-paths approach” to religion: trying to stay as general and nonspecific as I could. But, after much thought, I decided not to try that. This, because I have read many other writers who tried, and I felt the approach failed miserably. An “all-paths” approach to religion ends up being a “no-paths” approach, just as a woman or man who tries to please everyone ends up pleasing no one. It is the old story of the “universal” vs. the “particular.”

Those of us who do career counseling could predict, ahead of time, that trying to stay universal is not likely to be helpful, in writing about faith. We know well from our own field that truly helpful career counseling depends upon defining the particularity or uniqueness of each person we try to help. No employer wants to know what you have in common with everyone else. He or she wants to know what makes you unique and individual. As I have argued throughout this book, the inventory of your uniqueness or particularity is crucial if you are ever to find meaningful work.

This particularity invades everything a person does; it is not suddenly “jettisonable” when he or she turns to matters of faith. Therefore, when I or anyone else writes about faith I believe we must write out of our own particularity—which starts, in my case, with the fact that I write, and think, and breathe as a Christian—as you might expect from the fact that I was an ordained Episcopalian minister for many years. Understandably, then, this chapter speaks from a Christian perspective. I want you to be aware of that, at the outset.

Balanced against this is the fact that I have always been acutely sensitive to the fact that this is a pluralistic society in which we live, and that I in particular owe a great deal to my readers who have religious convictions quite different from my own. It has turned out that the people who work or have worked here in my office with me, over the years, have been predominantly of other faiths. Furthermore, Parachute’s more than ten million readers have not only included Christians of every variety and persuasion, Christian Scientists, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and adherents of Islam, but also believers in “new age” religions, secularists, humanists, agnostics, atheists, and many others. I have therefore tried to be very courteous toward the feelings of all my readers, while at the same time counting on them to translate my Christian thought- forms into their own. This ability to thus translate is the indispensable sine qua non of anyone who wants to communicate helpfully with others in this pluralistic society of ours.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition from which I come, one of the indignant Biblical questions was, “Has God forgotten to be gracious?” The answer was a clear “No.” I think it is important for all of us also to seek the same goal. I have therefore labored to make this chapter gracious as well as thought-provoking.

R.N.B.

Appendix A. Finding Your Mission in Life

TURNING POINT

For many of us, the job-hunt offers a chance to make some fundamental changes in our whole life. It marks a turning point in how we live our life.

It gives us a chance to ponder and reflect, to extend our mental horizons, to go deeper into the subsoil of our soul.

It gives us a chance to wrestle with the question, “Why am I here on Earth?” We don’t want to feel that we are just another grain of sand lying on the beach called humanity, unnumbered and lost in the billions of other human beings.

We want to do more than plod through life, going to work, coming home from work. We want to find that special joy, “that no one can take from us,” which comes from having a sense of Mission in our life.

We want to feel we were put here on Earth for some special purpose, to do some unique work that only we can accomplish.

We want to know what our Mission is.

The Meaning of the Word “Mission”

When used with respect to our life and work Mission has always been a religious concept, from beginning to end. It is defined by Webster’s as “a continuing task or responsibility that one is destined or fitted to do or specially called upon to undertake,” and historically has had two major synonyms: Calling and Vocation. These, of course, are the same word in two different languages, English and Latin. Both imply God. To be given a Vocation or Calling implies Someone who calls. To have a Destiny implies Someone who determined the destination for us. Thus, the concept of Mission lands us inevitably in the lap of God, before we have hardly begun.

I emphasize this, because there is an increasing trend in our culture to try to speak about religious subjects without reference to God. This is true of “spirituality,” “soul,” and “Mission,” in particular. More and more books talk about Mission as though it were simply “a purpose you choose for your own life, by identifying your enthusiasms.”

This attempt to obliterate all reference to God from the originally religious concept of Mission, is particularly ironic because the proposed substitute word—enthusiasms—is derived from two Greek words, “en theos,” and means “God in us.”

In the midst of this increasingly secular culture, we find an oasis that—along with athletics—is very hospitable toward belief in God. That oasis is job-hunting. Most of the leaders who have evolved creative job-hunting ideas were—from the beginning—people who believed firmly in God, and said so: Sidney Fine, Bernard Haldane, and John Crystal (all of whom have departed this life), plus Arthur and Marie Kirn, Arthur Miller, Tom and Ellie Jackson, Ralph Matson, and of course myself.

I mentioned at the beginning of this Appendix that 91 percent of us in the U.S. believe in God. According to the Gallup Organization, 90 percent of us pray, 88 percent of us believe God loves us, and 33 percent of us report that we have had a life-changing religious experience.

However, it is not clear that we have made much connection between our belief in God and our work. Often our spiritual beliefs and our attitude toward our work live in separate mental ghettos, within our mind.

A dialogue between these two is opened up inside our head, and heart, when we are out of work. Unemployment, particularly in this brutal economy, gives us a chance to contemplate why we are here on Earth, and what our Calling, Vocation, or Mission is, uniquely, for each of us.

Unemployment becomes life transition, when we can’t find a job doing the same work we’ve always done. Since we have to rethink one thing, many of us elect to rethink everything.

Something awakens within us. Call it yearning. Call it hope. We come to realize the dream we dreamed has never died. And we go back to get it. We decide to resume our search … for the life we know within our heart that we were meant to live.

Now we have a chance to marry our work and our religious beliefs, to talk about Calling, and Vocation, and Mission in life—to think out why we are here, and what plans God has for us.