January Schmanuary
November 1st, 2005 | Tom and I might not go on our J-Term trip.
Tom has added English as a second major and he needs to get all the credits he can, including three during the month of January. I have attempted to kill him twice, but I’m over it now, and I understand where he’s coming from. Except.
We got an e-mail today from Red Bull saying that they would like to talk with us on the phone about a possible sponsorship, etc. Tom said that if they give us enough money, he’ll go on the trip. We called back and left a message… we’ll see what happens next.
If we end up not going on the trip, I can hopefully enroll in a J-Term class called “Recording Original Music” which has the following description in the Luther catalogue:
A project-based course designed for students (songwriters, bands, a cappella groups, etc.) wishing to record original music (any style). Students may work independently or collaborate with others. Recording options for the final project include a digital audio workstation (DAW) or a professional recording studio. Students using a professional studio will pay an additional fee; studios with different pricing options will be provided. While there is no prerequisite, it is recommmended that students speak with the instructor before registering. Graded credit/no credit.
To be continued…
Late Night Vocation Binge
I had been trying to fall asleep for nearly fourty minutes when my room phone rang. I decided that I wouldn’t answer it because if things had gone as planned, I would have already been asleep for a half hour and wouldn’t have heard the phone ring anyway. Shortly after, however, my cell phone rang. Because it was lying right next to my bed, I looked at the caller ID and it said “Tom.” I answered.
Tom explained to me that he, too, had been trying to sleep but found himself unable to enter a state of semi-consciousness because he had just read the first chapter of Finding the Open Road. I grabbed a packet of instant apple cider and made my way down to his room.
He told me that I should read the first chapter too, so I did. It was very inspirational, insofar as these people had done the same thing that Tom and I have been talking about nonstop. It turns out that these three guys who had done this a while ago have actually set up programs on college campuses nationwide so that students all over the nation can embark on road trips to find vocation. They even have grants available. Don’t worry, we applied.
Tom always says that true moments of creativity and inspiration are always spontaneous. You cannot plan for them. Last night was spontaneous. From 12:45 – 4:00am we worked on the trip. We emailed professors on campus. We emailed people about scholarship money. Most importanly, though, we came up with lists of people we really want to meet on this trip.
I sent out probably fifteen emails last night between the hours of 1 and 4am. A typical email presented our trip and asked if the person would be available for interview in January. I contacted the following people last night:
I found two events that would be great to add to the itinerary if possible. Politics and Spirituality: Seeking a Public Integrity is a conference taking place in Washington, D.C. January 14-16 that features Jim Wallis (Soujourners, God’s Politics), Anne Lamott, and Richard Rohr. Eugene Peterson, author of The Message and Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, will be speaking at Calvin College in Michigan on January 24.
Another idea that I had, inspired in part by my good friend Mike, is to take 30-60 copies of the Gospel of John to give to various people during the month. That’s between one and two per day. This does two things, (1) it is an opportunity to spread the Gospel and (2) it “forces” me to initiate conversation with people I might not normally approach. I also decided that I want to visit some “out-of-the-box” grassroots Christian ministries. The search is still on for some of these.
Update: Companies/media that have been contacted thus far (will be updated as more are contacted):
Ask not what you can do in your life. Ask what your life can do in you.
Inspiration from at Home
I had no idea that Tom was going to post on the road because a) he didn’t tell me he was going to and b) when I mentioned the idea of blogging the journey during January, he wasn’t too keen on it.
I find it a bit ironic that the woman from Lutheran World Relief he spoke with wants us to visit her in Baltimore. Why? Because last night as I was immersing myself in emerging church conversation I had an idea. In my post on the emerging church I mentioned Brian McLaren1, one of the leaders of the movement, and his home church: Cedar Ridge Community Church. CRCC happens to be in Spencerville, Maryland, which is right outside of Baltimore.
I looked up the leadership from the church and sent the youth pastor an e-mail. I thought it would be a great experience to visit the church (which is a pioneer in the emerging church movement) and to meet with/interview the youth pastor. I explained to him the journey Tom and I will be taking and asked him if we could meet up sometime in the month of January. And you never know, maybe Brian McLaren will be in town and we could have coffee with him, too.
I e-mailed him late Friday night (a quick search of my Gmail tells me it was 2:39 AM), so I’m not expecting an reply until Monday. More on the story as it unfolds.
- I really, really want to read McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy
. I don’t have the money for it right now, and I’m not surprised that it’s not available at Luther’s library. ↩
Inspiration from the Road
Tom here… from Chicago.
Today I immersed myself in the ideas of the fair trade movement and while drinking my fair trade concoctions, I dreamed up a way to use the conservative frame to fair trade’s advantage by making fair trade coffee an “American” thing to do. That can be explained later.
Also, today I spoke with Kattie Sommerfeld from Lutheran World Relief. Jake, she wants us to come see her in Baltimore. I’m getting us a freakin’ network.
Live it, Love it, Drink Coffee.
In Search of Vocation: Course Description
Tom here. In a fit of a caffeine high and total inspiration from Sigur Rós, the journey’s course description came to be. This is what we will present to the advisors. They will love it. They will get out of their seats and cheer, screaming with joy at the two incredible specimens seated before them. So here it is, our life-changing experience:
In Search of Vocation: An American Journey of Self-Discovery
Our vocational experience for J-Term will be both an informative endeavor of interacting with others about discerning vocation and a journey of self-discovery to find our spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical strengths. From Decorah to the open road of America we will set out to make this realization a true physical journey. Interactions and self-discovery experiences will be intermeshed throughout the term to keep the two aspects of vocation together in a synthesized manner. Our experience will be accompanied by a number of readings to provide concrete philosophical and spiritual guidance that lay the path for our search and that hopefully illuminate what we should be looking for in coming closer to this incredible realization. The course will culminate in formal journal of the experience as well as a template for future students to engage in vocational discovery. Following the term, we will present our experience and hopefully inspire others to begin thinking critically about their call in life.
Below are the 3 criteria laid out in an organized manner:
Self-Discovery Experiences:
Spiritual: We will visit institutions or conferences to decide how faith functions in our lives and to what extent we can apply that to our future call. (Ex: Passion Conference, Quaker Retreat Center, Sweat Lodge, Zen Monastery, and Worship Leadership) Mental: We will inventory our mental abilities and intellectual interests and decide what of these can apply to our future calls. (Experiences can include visiting museums, cultural centers, attending community or area college lectures.) Emotional: We will create experiences that may be both emotionally enriching and emotionally taxing. This can help us decide what kind of emotional beings we are. (Experiences could include working at a soup kitchen, volunteering at a care facility, volunteering at the Walter Reed Military Hospital, even speaking with a psychologist to figure out our E.Q. or Emotional Quotient.) Physical: Calls will not always be easy and may be physically taxing. We will experience intense physical strain to discover our limits as well as how to overcome some limits we thought were permanent blocks. (Example, 3-day hike in the snowy Appalachians, Fasting, Getting a body piercing or tattoo) Artistic: Create a work of art, be it music or a physical object. (Performing music or creating sculpture, snow sculpture, painting, drawing, collage, etc.) Interactions for Vocational Discernment:
This will most likely be part of interacting with the individuals we come in contact with while living out the self-discovery experiences. When those experiences won’t suffice, we will seek out counsel from professionals in the respective fields of service or ministry in which we are looking.
Reading List (tentative):
Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer Soul of a Citizen by Paul Loeb The Call of Service by Robert Coles Vocation: Discerning Our Callings in Life by Douglas J. Schuurman *A note on the necessity of travel: Where the actual trip and act of moving across the country creates a subliminal metaphor of discovery and journey, a metaphor isn’t the only way this physical trip will be beneficial. It is impossible to discuss vocation without including location. This country offers a wide variety of cultures and landscapes. The location aspect of the call embodies the physical need to be somewhere and do something. This experience cannot be realized by sitting stationary in a classroom.
You know, Jake… I think this might just happen.
Vision
Tom and I have been talking about this trip nonstop. So much so that many people who know us have heard about it, and we’ve been getting mixed reactions. Some believe in us and our vision and believe that we can make it happen. Others, however, think that it is just a dream that will never be realized.
Here’s the thing – vision in and of itself is not contageous. It is vision fueled by passion that is truly contageous; it cannot be ignored. Because Tom and I believe in this vision, I think that whatever faculty we talk with will become infected with our passion. Tom also mentioned the other day the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is a “prediction that, in being made, actually causes itself to come true.” In other words, if we believe in this vision enough, if we pour our hearts, souls, and unbridled imagination into it, it will inevitably come true.
Since the original post, we have thrown around several ideas. The first deals with the theme and organization of the journey. The idea of community and (1) where one finds indivudual vocation within community and (2) how community affects vocation has become, more or less, the central theme. Because of the community aspect, we have thought about beginning our journey by attending Passion ‘06 in Nashville, Tenessee from January 2-5. Passion is a national conference for Christian college students that has speakers, worship, and community group time. We think it would be an awesome way to begin the trip, and also a great way to begin to analyze vocation in community. We would then, maybe (and this is all a big “maybe”), head up through Pennsylvania, where we would stop at one or more Amish communities. Following this, we would then drive to Maine and the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village. Beyond that, we don’t really have much planned.
Although it may seem like an overtly religious trip – there are undoubtedly religious themes and questions – we are not limiting our search of self and vocation to religion alone. We’d like to vist with non-religious communities as well and investigate vocation with them. The tentative title, then, has been changed. Instead of Traveling the American Frontier: In Search of Self and Vocation, it would be [insert creative title]: An Exploration of Self and Vocation in America’s Communal Heritage.
In questioning how to make the journey more presentable as an academic endeavour and not a month-long vacation, we have come up with several ideas. We would, as I have already mentioned, journal our experiences and insights from the trip daily and compile them into a thesis-length paper after the completion of the journey. We would also put together a presentation that we would present for faculty members and students, and anyone to whom the Sense of Vocation Program would have us speak. This would be good for us because it organizes what we learned from the trip, and it is also good promotion for Luther and its programs. As with nearly any other academic class, we have a required reading list. We’ve been researching the topic and the two texts we have decided to read thus far are:
The first is written by a man who spent 10 years in a Quaker community in Pennsylvania (we could go there…), and the second is a more theological piece. Having required reading, which we plan to have already read before the journey, again, makes our vision more presentable as an academic endeavour.
We also hope to play disc golf in every state through which we pass.
It’s A Start
This is Tom, Jake’s compatriot who will stick by his side during this mind blowing odyssey.
As Jake said, we’ve set a lofty goal of embarking on a month long road trip into the great wide open. Funding for the trip is unlikely. However, faculty sponsorship could be a possibility. A journey whose road is a search for meaning and vocation presents many great expansive educational oppurtunities. In a society where grades, numbers, and profits have become the reason for work, opportunities for jobs with purpose are falling to the wayside. Once the substance is gone from a task one enjoys, the sense of calling goes with it. Though a month’s time isn’t nearly enough, we could use this oppurtunity to engage in conversation with the few remaining American faiths based on simplicity and the honest sense of dedication that dictates their everyday actions.
A hope of mine is that through this process of understanding, we can uncover what qualities are necessary in one’s life to bring out and create the inherent quality we call vocation. As we work and think about this journey, I’m sure more aspects will be added, but this could be a start.
In Search of Self and Vocation
A few quick things:
Anyway, on to the actual post…
My friend Tom and I have been talking a lot during the last two days. At one point, half jokingly, I said that we should spend J-term[2] traveling. Slightly inspired by Donald Miller’s new book, Through Painted Deserts (which is a reworked version of his first book, Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance[3]), in which Donald and a friend pick up and leave their home state of Texas with no plans except to go to the Grand Canyon and eventually end up in Oregon, I thought it might be cool if Tom and I just dropped everything for a month and travel around the country.
The more we talked about it, the more serious we got.
We would spend as much time in January as we could – 4 full weeks – on a journey through the eastern U.S. We talked about trying to get tuition credit at Luther for this proposed “course” and making it actually mean something. Titles for the course were tossed around, such as Traveling the American Frontier: In Search of Self and Vocation and An Odyssey through America: Sojourners in Search of Self and Vocation – something that sounds very academic[4]. You see, we actually want to learn from this experience. The hardest part, though, will be getting it approved for credit and finding an academic advisor. Part of the journey will involve Tom and I writing all of our experiences with the intention of compiling them into a book or thesis-length paper at the end.
We don’t want a strict itinerary. We do, however, need to have some idea of what we want to do and where we want to go. One of the early decisions was which direction to go, so we picked East. Other ideas that were tossed around were: living for 3-5 days in an Amish community – eating, sleeping, and working with them, going to an Indian reservation, living in an inner city, hiking in the Appalacians, and visiting the last remaining Shakers, among other things.
As Donald Miller says in Through Painted Deserts,
It’s interesting how you sometimes have to leave home before you can ask difficult questions, how the questions never come up in the room you grew up in, in the town in which you were born. It’s funny how you can’t ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal.
More on the journey as it unfolds…
[1] My photoblog is a place to dump all of my pictures and is hosted on Luther’s servers, while my Flickr account has select pictures and is more permanent in nature.
[2] J-term is a mini-semester during the month of January, inbetween fall and spring semesters.
[3] PAVM is no longer in print, and now sells for no less than $30 on places such as Half.com.
[4] See Luther’s Sense of Vocation program.
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