On a basement bookshelf of my home sits a framed photograph I’d forgotten about until recently. In that picture, I’m beaming in cap and gown, flanked on either side by my smiling parents as we stand in the backyard garden of a former landlord’s property. That day was muggy and hot (not surprising for May in South Carolina), and I remember my nervous anticipation on that celebratory afternoon–the kind of feeling where you’re not sure if your stomach is buoyed with breathless excitement or clenched in apprehension…or, more likely, both. Either way, you’re holding your breath a bit more than usual.

While milestone moments can seem cliched to focus on, they do often define real junctures, and mine that afternoon certainly did.

I had made all sorts of plans, convinced that I needed to map things out in particular ways. Some of those plans would take dramatic turns I could not yet imagine and most assuredly would not have signed up for. Other parts would morph and unfold far more powerfully and beautifully than I could have sketched out on that May afternoon. 

Among the many adventures that I was about to embark on: beginning a graduate program in literature and learning “officially” to teach through pedagogy coursework and through the mother of all learning–critical, sometimes painful experience. All of 22 years old and only a handful of months removed from my own college graduation, I would don blazers and heels to feel more authoritative in those Texas university classrooms as a graduate instructor. 

My anxiety to underscore my competence (while understandable) belied the potent force behind transformative teaching and learning: generous reciprocity. I needed–and eventually would come to appreciate–a necessary shift in posture, an openness to being shaped, challenged, and strengthened by the community around me (which I could not control or even fully plan for). Balancing an evolving awareness of and gratitude for self and world is no easy matter; indeed, it proves a fragile, precious thing vital to our own development.

Early in his stunning, slim volume Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer writes:

With twenty-one words, carefully chosen and artfully woven, May Sarton evokes the quest for vocation–at least, my quest for vocation–with candor and precision:

Now I become myself.

It’s taken time, many years and places.

I have been dissolved and shaken,

Worn other people’s faces…

What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been! How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity–the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation.

Later in the same chapter, Palmer hints that this process of “authentic” self-discovery is never one of rugged individualism (certain US cultural narratives be damned), but rather something inextricable from the relationships and communal ecosystem surrounding us. We discover and respond to both this sense of self and world, growing and evolving in an always ongoing journey of life-giving reciprocity.

I’ve been thinking more about Palmer lately, in part because of some other work I’m involved in and in part because I’m daily reminded of impending graduations. Our soon-to-be alumni are making the rounds to say goodbye, to share life updates, and to tend to the many details that accompany a leavetaking and life “threshold” moment. These graduates have insight into the delicate balance of “self” and “world” in ways I find admirable and inspiring. They are preparing to lead and especially to serve with grace, humility, and honesty.

In two days’ time, this Friday, May 9th, at 5pm you have the opportunity to see what I mean. Graduating seniors Kuda Chikonyora, Noemi Vela, and Natalya Reister will speak at Baccalaureate–a ceremony preceding Saturday’s commencement programs and one that literally comes full circle from graduates’ convocation four short years ago. Gathering in the Chapel of the Resurrection, standing before the mosaic of sacred stories pieced together in stunning stained glass, each will offer their own story as they reflect on their time at Valpo and the myriad ways they have been shaped by and come to understand the value of community and service.

Kuda heralds this gift as ubuntu, noting the reciprocal showing up and supportive learning animated in robust communities. For Noemi, cultivating one’s self-knowledge and respect engenders honest engagement with the wider world, nurturing boundaries that revitalize relationships. Natalya reflects that ‘service,’ properly understood, is not so much a way of doing as a way of being–something that radiates outward to reinforce in a million small ways what ultimately adds up to both an inheritance and a legacy.

Natalya Reister

Kuda Chikonyora

Noemi Vela

Would that we all remember and honor these charges from our eloquent student speakers. We discover ourselves and our calling in service–the deep, honest, reciprocal engagement with the community and world around us. It is a gift we imperfectly proffer, and in so doing must also gracefully receive.

– Dr. Anna Stewart, Director of the Institute for Leadership and Service

The Institute for Leadership and Service is dedicated to preparing students for lives of leadership and service—lives shaped by a sense of calling, equipped for thoughtful reflection, engaged in the larger world, and responsive to its deepest challenges.

As a young toddler–bright-eyed and babbling happily–I loved few things more than a good story. I was known to pad into a room, book in tow, while clamoring for what I cheerfully called a “once-a ponce-a.” So many children’s books and fairy tales, after all, take narrative flight with the well-worn opening line, “Once upon a time…”  Hence, my half-comprehending shorthand. Slightly older and intent to share (force?) my love of story on my younger sister, I would solemnly intone the beginning for her the same way (to the doubtless mirth of any nearby adult). Nevertheless, “once-a ponce-a” rapidly became a family expression.

Perhaps I could channel this tale from childhood into destiny, invariably paving the way to my status as a justified book nerd with a doctorate in literature. A little tidy, but not without some merit.

Actually, though, this early anecdote has been on my mind recently for another reason: as a testament to the enduring power of story; a reminder of the propulsive force of narratives as avenues to deeper truths sometimes difficult to recognize in our workaday lives. As humans, we make sense of the world and the people around us through the stories we tell ourselves and others. Whether we pause to acknowledge this instinctual process or not, our story-making still wields tremendous power for how we show up and move through the world.

Knowing this, we can lean into the power of stories as a way of making sense of complex experiences and realities in our adult lives. By being more self-conscious in this process, perhaps we can also tell each other and ourselves truer stories to counteract the dishonesty that pervades our current culture.

Moreover, narrative agency is crucial to our vocational discernment and our educational journeys, and lately I’ve been particularly delighted to find deeper, common cause around this idea with friends and colleagues from a variety of disciplines and perspectives doing some amazing work on our campus. Dr. Reva Johnson in the College of Engineering has been training in, and drawing on, “story-driven learning” to help students more intentionally scaffold connections between scientific and narrative modes of understanding, between their personal and professional experiences and identities. In newly reimagined VUE courses, students’ topics of study meet active, experiential learning in fieldwork–whether they might be gardening, or volunteering with a local non-profit, or cooking, or exploring historic campus spaces, or observing peer-led organizations as sites of learning-in-action. Their reflections around these experiences can become avenues into deeper self-awareness about the ways they show up in the world, exploring the nuance of leadership and service. Meanwhile, in the honors college, Dr. Amanda Ruud marshals lively ideas from deep discussion about justice, community, and “the good life” to facilitate first-years’ inspiring creation of an original piece of musical theatre–a dramatic account of the conversations and ideas they’ve been wrestling with, making sense of the complex in story and song. It’s all really quite remarkable, and these are but a few potent examples of intentional story-making as avenues to deeper understanding and work in the world happening right here at Valpo.

At the risk of completely nerding out on everyone reading this reflection (sorry, not sorry), some of the most influential work around narrative identity and agency coming out of the social sciences hailed from none other than a Valpo alum, Dr. Dan McAdams ‘76 (Psychology and Humanities, CC Scholar), now professor emeritus at Northwestern University. McAdams pioneered a field urging scholarly study of our own narrative constructions and their power to shape who we are and who we become. (You can read more about his work here.)

Our story-telling matters, and it does real work, both in the world and in the ways we understand our own showing up and agency in that beautiful, broken, ever-evolving world. As a former colleague regularly reminded me–citing novelist Tim O’Brien’s powerful and true line: “Stories can save us.” Of course they can. One need look no further than the New Testament parables.

Less than a week ago, I had the privilege to observe this power anew as current Valpo senior Natalya Reister offered a poignant reflection at Morning Prayer, bearing witness to the ways our stories to ourselves can make and save us. (If you didn’t get a chance to be there in person, I would urge you to check out her moving remarks here on the Valpo Chapel YouTube channel.) Natalya recounts the overwhelm so many of us can attest to at the start of a new chapter in our lives, recalling herself as a first-year student huddled in the Lankenau chapel unable to see the bigger story she is part of and sometimes slowly, painfully helping to write. In her reflection, she casts herself back to this time, addressing a younger version of herself with tenderness and a deeper sensibility of things coming together in ways she cannot at that time see but must learn to implicitly trust:

“[R]ight now, you’re sitting in the Lankenau chapel, and you feel alone. And that’s okay too. It is a part of your journey and God isn’t going to give up on you. Our lives are a mural of experiences and stories. At the moment, though, you are living and focusing on just a small little corner. You don’t yet see the artistry in the narratives God is painting. So take a breath and slow down. The sorrows and the hurts are real, but they are not the end of the story.”

Would that we all would take that sort of tender care, choosing to narrate gently and truthfully from our own empowered voices… while also never forgetting that we are not, blessedly, the end of the story. We offer our “once-a ponce-a,” now and always, in a transcendent narrative frame.

–Dr. Anna Stewart, Director of the Institute for Leadership and Service

It turns out the roof is a great place to dry boots and shoes in Costa Rica.

The tap, tap, tap on the metal roof turned into pitter-patter-pitter-patter, and my mother-in-law and I looked at each other with an expression of urgency.  The clothes we had hung outside on the line the day before hadn’t dried, and for fear of night-time rain we had brought them in, damp in their hamper near the back door.  On this particular morning we had optimistically re-clipped them to the metal wire spanning the entire yard from the neighbors’ wall to the side of the house.  It had dawned clear over the mountains, but seemingly out of nowhere the clouds had rolled in, and it was now raining in what should have been the first days of the dry season in Costa Rica.  

In looking at our clothes and shoes and hiking boots in the backyard, it struck me that clothes-drying is a kind of microcosm for understanding vocation.  Discerning vocation asks us to consider how we respond to a particular moment, within specific limitations and parameters.  Our lives, routines, and identities start getting built around the ways we repeatedly respond to particular moments, with particular details, opportunities, limitations, and parameters.  How do we respond when we depend on sunshine to dry our clothes, and it is now raining?  We drop everything and run outside.  

What other limitations and parameters do you notice that determine your daily vocations?  Perhaps the cry of a baby or small child gets you out of bed each morning.  Perhaps aches and pains determine the way you use stairs or inform an exercise and stretching schedule, or a larger illness forces you into an early retirement.  How about other larger vocations?  Perhaps housing prices influence your decision of whether to buy or sell.  Or perhaps a particular injustice inspires you to work for societal change as a career or as a “side hustle.”

Middle class United States culture is pretty determined to prevent and mitigate as many limitations as possible.  We purchase appliances to save time, program our smartphones to anticipate and complete tasks, and engage in as many “life hacks” as possible to maximize productivity.  Our scientists look for ways to prolong life and increase crop yields, and our engineers seek out ways to get more mileage and battery life out of our technology.

And it’s true – some limitations are not fair or acceptable.  As I was struggling to get my clothes dry this past rainy December, there were women in many countries of the world struggling to dry the rags they use to manage their menstruation.  Overcoming such a limitation can mean the ability to finish school or find a job for millions of women and girls around the world.  

Injustices and exploitation place unfair limits on the lives of so many: those without access to even public transportation, let alone an electric vehicle; those who live in food deserts, unable to access healthy food that sustains a healthy life; those who cannot access even basic health care and suffer from illnesses that many of us don’t think twice about.  We as a society need to fix these limitations.

And yet, what happens when those of us who are allergic to limitations begin to embrace a few, or understand the opportunity that our limitations represent?  On one of the mornings I spent rehanging damp clothes in Costa Rica, I heard the cacophony of screeching parakeets that gather in the trees of local parks in the city.  The sound kept getting louder and louder as I clipped clothing to the line, and soon I saw huge clouds of perhaps one thousand parakeets in all flying across the blue sky, west to east, their screeches and silhouettes calling out the start of the day.  A sight I would not have seen if not for my need to greet the sunny morning with clotheshanging.  I exhaled, and felt a deep gratitude for such a day settle deep into my chest.

In a recent podcast of the Ezra Klein Show, Klein interviewed Oliver Burkeman, author of “Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.”

In their conversation, Klein shared a meditation that he practices that reminds him of his finite nature, and Burkeman’s response concurred:

“So many of the things that we call “self-improvement” can be best understood as a structure of emotional avoidance so that we don’t have to feel how uncomfortable and claustrophobic it is to actually be who we are as finite individuals.

“…I think the point is that when you really begin to let it permeate you that we are of the nature to be finite, you get to exhale. You get to let your shoulders drop. Not in order to veg out but precisely to move forward to do the most meaningful things with your day. It’s a refocusing.”

What limitation have you been fighting in your life?  What possibilities may open up if you embrace this limitation?  What new gratitude, what new path, might become available to you?  What unjust limitations can you become aware of, even as you seek to embrace your own finite nature?  

Read more about our total dependence on the sun for food and energy on the Living Connected blog, written by Lutheran Deaconess and environmental engineer Katrina Martich, and engage in reflective practice on the gifts of creation. 

• Deaconess Kat Peters, M.Ed., M.A., Assistant Director of the Institute for Leadership and Service

The Institute for Leadership and Service is dedicated to preparing students for lives of leadership and service—lives shaped by a sense of calling, equipped for thoughtful reflection, engaged in the larger world, and responsive to its deepest challenges.

The longer I’m at Valpo, the more I’ve come to appreciate the rituals that bookend our academic year. (Twenty year-old me would not have predicted this.)  I enjoy donning those odd, medieval robes, hood, and tam to line up and process down the magnificently long aisle of the Chapel in August, organ music swelling the usually thick, humid air as we welcome new students and the return of the academic calendar’s cycle. This year the cool weather granted us all a reprieve at Convocation–merciful when you’re attired in a polyester and velvet concoction.

As much as I appreciate the Convocation’s music, addresses, and honors of scholarship and service, though, my favorite part of the ceremony is its closing–when we file out singing to form two multi-colored lines curving out from the Chapel and campanile toward the West Lawn. As Valpo’s new students emerge from the narthex, faculty and staff break into applause, cheering and clapping them through our path and into their shared journeys here. It’s a powerful moment of community and welcome, establishing that we are joined together in our pursuit of knowledge, service, faith, and wisdom.

It’s also joyful.

Indeed, Arts & Sciences Associate Dean Richard Severe and Dean Bagel Johnson offered a boisterous example this year of radical welcome. Dr. Severe exuberantly high-fived every single student passing his way, insisting on celebration and gathering the rest of us in his wake. Dr. Johnson called out (as only he could), “Welcome! You’re all wonderful human beings…but do go to class!” His bellowed, good-natured advice drew grins and nods as students filed past.

After all, rituals–even well-meaning ones–can quickly tip into feeling artificial or, at worse, silly. To participate fully you need to feel something of the meaning and power that fueled the ritual in the first place. This might be especially challenging for students new to Valpo. It probably seems a little awkward to recite an honor code en masse, to witness a procession of strangely robed professors, and to subsequently pass through their ranks–sometimes painfully slowly because the students ahead of you are bottlenecked so you have to pause, self-consciously wondering if you should make small talk with those waiting around you. The only way such a ceremony “works” at all is for those of us not new to its rhythms to whole-heartedly lead the way and, in so doing, to reinforce the communal bonds these rituals perform.

Drs. Johnson and Severe did that for me that late Tuesday afternoon. I know their high-fives and shouts weren’t intended for me, but their ebullience also buoyed my spirits, reminding me of what makes Valpo the remarkable place that it is. It’s the people, the relationships, the community…the way we show up for one another doing a strange, hard, beautiful thing: formative education. Such insistent showing up is a gift in this place we share, even and perhaps especially when it isn’t easy.

A communal mindset is always crucial, but I believe it’s especially so in spaces of education and formation. In these spaces we’re more consciously attuned to how we purposefully engage in a process of becoming. In reality, this happens throughout our entire lives, but it feels more palpable in the transition years and threshold moments of college. Our decisions can loom critically, implying the false logic of an “either/or” and paralyzing us with uncertainty. That, at least, was how it felt to me two decades ago as an undergraduate and how I sometimes hear this period described by current students. I remember thinking that my college self needed to determine everything right in that moment, because this was my chance to jump-start the rest of my life. (No pressure, right?) And even if I knew, intellectually, that this wasn’t wholly true, it certainly felt true at the time.

With all this in mind, how do we ground ourselves in the larger arc of our still-evolving stories? How do we engage deeply in the education and discernment that might very well help guide our decisions, while not rushing and assuming that every choice must fix us on some path?

I would suggest that we need reminders to slow down and take our time, to savor the relationships of our community and the ways these bonds form and strengthen us. I observed an unwitting reminder of this while walking campus a few weeks ago with my colleague and friend Kat Peters. On the north side of campus, tucked behind Alumni Hall and the adjacent parking ramp, I noticed one of the new “Grounded” branding flags. “Grounded in Calling,” it proclaimed, scrolled out just above a 20 mile-per-hour speed limit sign. I began to chuckle to myself, but then it dawned on me that this was actually a fairly apt juxtaposition. 

Discerning our purpose–discerning to what we are called in life–cannot be pursued at breakneck speed or even a hurried rush. Rather, it requires our deliberate slowing down, pacing ourselves to pay attention to our experiences, our contexts, and the rich community around us. That community can reflect truth back to us, helping to guide us on our way and perhaps offering a jolt of good humor to spur us onward.

As we begin a new academic year, I am grateful for the many people who shape and re-form our community anew at Valpo–those who have been here many years as well as those who’ve just joined us. In the coming weeks, the Division of Calling & Spiritual Life wants to begin recognizing and lifting up people who distinctly promote belonging and community on our campus. Be on the lookout for more information, and thank you for your contributions to shared journeys and collective goods.   

–Dr. Anna Stewart, Director of the Institute for Leadership and Service (ILAS)

Last week, I had the privilege of conversing with Dr. Kevin Gary’s CORE 115 students, who are exploring “Vocation and the Good Life” through their reading, discussion, and writing this semester. College can be such a rich space for delving into these questions, particularly at Valpo, and I was deeply curious. What were they mulling over? What did they think it might mean to live well?  How were they seeking to  understand and discern a sense of vocation or purpose? What sort of conversation were they having, with writers and with each other, to get at  such questions in earnest?

In our discussion, students brainstormed, teasing out the defining elements of “vocation” and a “good life” from their previous reading and reflection. They highlighted the importance of intentionality and humility in cultivating a deeper sense of joy or contentment (as opposed to chasing happiness). They mentioned how crucial self-reflection and awareness are, and how we must lean into growth (and sometimes discomfort) to discern and live well. We also reflected on role models and communities that anchor and orient us, the ways we are called outside of ourselves, and how–for many–faith underpins even trying to frame these questions at all. Suffice it to say, they were pondering and synthesizing an impressive range of potent ideas–ideas that suggested more fulfilling ways of being in the world, ways of leading and serving with intention.

Exploring such questions and concepts isn’t tidy and easily determined. Indeed, it’s not something you can assume you’ll have fully figured out at twenty two, or even thirty five or seventy for that matter (see “humility” above).  But then again, exploring questions that continue to yield nuance and new insights across your life should be part of the point of college. We invite these questions in many places on this campus. It’s happening through informal conversations, advising meetings, student org groups, and cafeteria lunches, as well as in classrooms. I’m grateful that we as a campus community can cultivate space for that reflective work in all sorts of environments and contexts. Because, as most of us already know, that sort of deeper engagement can be hard to find time for elsewhere.   

In a recent book project, Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko compellingly differentiate between the approach to what they label the “surveyed life” versus one rooted in reflection and examination, suggesting that there is a persistent pull to skate on the surface rather than probe the depths of messier complexities: 

“This survey approach is everywhere in our lives right now. And in the right doses, it can be healthy. Although the constant data collection and behavioral management can get a bit intrusive, there’s a reason we let our phones count our steps, monitor our heart rates, remind us to meditate, and organize reports in easy-to-digest diagrams. . . . Still, the survey approach is radically insufficient to address the bigger questions. A well-lived life is integrated and thoughtful; it doesn’t consist in robotically conforming our lives to whatever the data suggests at the moment…” (9-10). 

To put this another way, as much as we might wish or pretend otherwise, we can’t life-hack our way to purpose. Information is not the same as insight. There isn’t “one weird trick” that can magically transport us to a good life.

Rather, we’re called to something more interesting and complicated: an iterative process of discovery and engagement, experiences of reflection and practice that move us beyond ourselves. I know I’m still figuring it out, in community and with the gift of good conversation partners–among them, first-year students raising thoughtful points about vocation on a recent Tuesday morning.

–Dr. Anna Stewart, ILAS Director

It’s that time of year—in the calendar and in the rhythm of college life—when we instinctively look ahead.  Perhaps we declare a resolution to those around us, or search out an app to download that will help us track and manage our habits.  (Our consumption culture has just finished a season of encouraging us to indulge, after all, and now we’re exhorted to take control so that adds some pressure, too.)

On college campuses, soon-to-be graduating seniors are often peering more earnestly into the future, as well—perhaps finalizing applications or awaiting graduate school decisions; seeking to network and interview for positions that are still coming into focus; wondering with a mix of excitement and uncertainty about a position that they may have already secured; navigating relational commitments and how best to live into them in this next period; recalibrating as plans shift.

In all this, possibilities beckon, sometimes pulling in quite different directions.

I often think of these as “threshold moments” (a term I’m not alone in embracing but one whose genesis is unclear to me). This metaphor implies a rich backstory with any number of experiences that have formed and shaped us, and we’re about to walk into a new space, still connected to what came before but also distinctly its own.  In my personal experience, thresholds stir up all sorts of emotions because I’m more keenly aware of being poised between past and future, moving forward and looking back. If I’m being honest, my life is a series of these thresholds, and not just at the big milestone markers like graduation. Thresholds always seem to loom larger, though, when accompanied with extra signposting and expectation.

Lately, I’ve been privileged to share thoughtful, searching conversations with several seniors approaching graduation as they weigh options and an abiding desire to live fully and meaningfully into their values while embracing a sense of purpose. Even if they are still discovering more about themselves everyday (as we all are), they can eloquently describe what they care about, what they are good at, and what is life-giving for them as individuals and as community members engaged in broader concerns…but how precisely do you fit those pieces together?  What shape does it make?  How do you choose this shape over that one? 

I can hear my own deliberations echoed in these questions, and even though I recognize it as a fallacy, I feel the pull of single, simple answers. We seek clarity and certainty. It must be this…just one clear thing, please.

It is both fortunate and frustrating that our purpose is more complex and more multi-faceted, that it can’t be neatly winnowed down to one role, that it resists the bounds of being defined by just position or career. This is actually life-giving news (even if it doesn’t always feel that way). It translates into the abundance of “both/and” possibilities, eschewing the logic of “either/or.”

In my conversations with college students, it seems to me that they often perceive their threshold as a front door as they leave the relatively safe confines of home or college life for a wide and somewhat unfamiliar world. In these sorts of moments, we are called to the present, to paying attention and responding as we discern and take the best next step. But that step doesn’t have to be perfect or permanently defining. One of the lessons that I personally take away from Christianity and the Lutheran heritage of this particular place is that we are not fully defined by where we find ourselves. There is a God who travels beyond all thresholds—there in our spaces of home and comfort, there on the open road, always with us and holding us.

For me, the words from what our family calls the Holden Prayer ring true at the threshold. We are called to “ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden.” We are invited to a next step on still unfolding journeys.

–by Dr. Anna Stewart, Director of the Institute for Leadership & Service

Why are we here?  What is my purpose in life?  Who am I and how do I show up in the world?  These are a few of the very big questions that we ask around here, in the Division of Calling and Spiritual Life, at Valparaiso University, at the Institute for Leadership and Service, in the church.

I admit, there are days when these questions are a little too big for me, to the point of being incomprehensible or illogical.  In fact, the older I get, the less I profess to know, as Anne Lamott points out in her recent essay on knowing less and less every year.

What to do when we look around at society?  What are we supposed to do with a refugee crisis that is sending thousands of people into our cities and towns every day?  What are we supposed to do with wars that find their way to our streets and campuses?  What purpose can we find in climatic events that destroy homes, livelihoods, and political stability?

Does the concept of Christian vocation stand up to these deep challenges?

Jennifer Grant Haworth provides helpful direction in her chapter entitled “Discerning God’s Call,” in the volume On Our Way: Christian Practices for Living a Whole Life, edited by Dorothy C. Bass and Susan R. Briehl.   Haworth does not suppose that living into our callings, or vocations, will somehow solve all of the world’s problems, or tell us which path to choose after graduation.  Rather, she describes vocation as a “call from God to love and grow in love – with self, others, and God” (p. 37).

We can do this through a centuries-old Christian practice known as discernment.  Here is how Haworth describes the practice:

“Through individual reflection and conversation with others, the Christian practice of discernment invites us (1) to pay attention to our daily experience and what it stirs in us; (2) to reflect on what we notice there, sorting and sifting in order to understand what is leading to greater life and love and what is not; and (3) to take loving action on what we have learned” (p. 41).

Susan L. Maros, for her part in her book Calling and Context,  reminds us that this process of discernment has to do with work that God is already doing in the world.  We are listening for this transforming work, and looking for how our own experience and formation equips us to be a part of God’s work.

It turns out that this process of vocational discernment is not so much future-oriented as it is a practice of being in the present moment, of paying attention, reflecting, and then acting when the Spirit urges.  We also consider our past formation, understanding that God is preparing and equipping us all along to meet the present moment.

Recently, a group of Lutheran Christians in Valparaiso that I know discerned that they will support a Venezuelan refugee family who is trying to make their way to the United States.  For now, this support meant lending two names to a document of “US Contact Persons.” While sitting in the meeting where this was decided, I was struck by how the group relied on their past experiences, knowledge, and formation, and how they carefully listened to God’s voice in the wider situation and in each other, telling them that they are ready to take on this challenge.  

A different group, with a different past, would not come to the same conclusion.  Yet this group has had past formation through helping other refugee families, through visiting Central America and hearing refugee stories firsthand, through their connections with agencies and individuals in Valparaiso who know how to help make things happen for folks in need.  

This group had prayed for a chance to serve in their own community, and had prayed for a chance to help refugees, and God provided the opportunity.  They still don’t know when or even if the family will be able to make it to the United States, but they are living out their calling in the moment, responding to promptings of the Spirit, making the next small step in faith toward an unknown future.

Sometimes (most times!) those big and lofty questions of calling and vocation point us to exactly where we are, to some unexpected and yet usually obvious (in hindsight) answer of where God is already acting.  Much like the song by Will Todd sung by the Valparaiso University Chorale at Christmas at Valpo this past weekend: 

“Shepherds, called by angels,

Called by love and angels;

No place but a stable.

My Lord has come.

Sages, searching for stars

Searching for love in heaven;

No place for them but a stable.

My Lord has come.

His love will hold me,

His love will cherish me,

Love will cradle me.

Lead me, lead me to see him,

Sages and shepherds and angels;

No place for me but a stable.

My Lord has come.”

In our Division of Calling and Spiritual Life, we are currently accepting applications to our summer fellowship program called the Calling and Purpose in Society (CAPS) Fellows Program.  This is an opportunity to live out a calling in the moment, but also to practice the steps of discernment and deep listening, to learn about situations in the world that require attention and response.  The experience will prepare students to approach future issues of calling and purpose with tools of reflection, community, and a responsive attitude.  

If you or someone you know are interested in the CAPS Program, you can find more information on our website, or write to us at lead.serve@valpo.edu. 

-by Deaconess Kat Peters, M.Ed., M.A., Assistant Director of the Institute for Leadership and Service

Lately, I’ve been stopping to admire the light a lot.  The way autumnal light, beaming lower on the horizon, bathes the crimsons, ambers, and golds of trees this time of year.  Earlier dusks painting the sky in clear, breathless beauty as I walk to my car under increasingly bare tree limbs.  The warmth of a single candle flickering by the sofa – one among many antidotes to those fast-darkening evenings and the chilly mornings when I rise.  The pastel hues of my daughter’s miniature lava lamp, casting patterns across her ceiling at bedtime to ward off unwelcome shadows.

These may be small details, observations half-formed in a midday or mid-evening moment, but for me they are also potent reminders – calling me to pay attention to the world around me, to the sacred and the small, to the reverence such details and moments can invite.

In An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, writer Barbara Brown Taylor delves lyrically into how being intentional, purposeful, and fully present not only grounds us as human beings but points us toward God and deeper meaning.  In one of the book’s chapters, “The Practice of Paying Attention,” she describes the virtue of cultivating reverence, a practice she now recognizes that she encountered early in her childhood:

“From [my father] I learned by example that reverence was the proper attitude of a small and curious human being in a vast and fascinating world of experience. This world included people and places as well as things. Full appreciation of it required frequent adventures, grand projects, honed skills, and feats of daring. Above all, it required close attention to the way things worked, including one’s own participation in their working or not working.” [19]

Brown Taylor draws on philosopher Simone Weil (among other writers and thinkers), braiding together considerations from several religious traditions as she ponders how truly paying attention – or with a nod to my own English-major desire for verbs with flair! – lavishing attention on the people, places, and things around us can open us up to reverence. Those seemingly small details just might contain multitudes.

In other words, what might at first blush seem like pausing to consider the trivial in fact becomes a path to something far bigger.

Paraphrasing another philosopher, Brown Taylor muses that reverence (borne out of a kind of sustained attention) is ultimately “the recognition of something greater than the self – something that is beyond human creation or control, that transcends full human understanding.”  Reverence, she writes, “stands in awe of something – something that dwarfs the self, that allows human beings to sense the full extent of our limits – so that we can begin to see one another more reverently as well.” [21] 

As a lifelong lover of literature and a longtime teacher, I found additional appreciation for this cycle of attention and reverence, walking students through complex texts and guiding them through the practices of close reading. Carefully attending to details, small moments, nuance, and texture – truly lavishing attention, even between the covers of a novel–can open us up to one another. Reading narratives this way can help us to also read the world, inviting us into one another’s stories. These practices of close reading, in books and in life, help us reckon with our limits even as we also celebrate our part in a human story far greater than our own.

A little over two weeks ago, I was preparing a brief homily for Monday Morning Prayer.  Drawing on the Division of Calling and Spiritual Life’s “Reset/Refresh” theme as well as the year’s morning prayer series “This is How I Sabbath (or Try To),” I decided to reflect on how Sabbath-time can summon us toward this sort of lavish attention. 

The scripture for the morning, Psalm 104, delights in the reverent details. The psalmist imagines:

“the sea, vast and spacious, 

teeming with creatures beyond number–

living things both large and small. 

The ships go to and fro…”

Even a sea-monster appears, “frolicking” in the expansive ocean. 

The psalm offers a beautiful meditation on how lavishing attention can reorient us, pulling us into reverence.  I found myself pondering and grappling with this anew when, the day before the scheduled Monday Morning Prayer homily, our campus community learned that one of our students had been violently attacked and rushed to a hospital across the state for critical care.

Tomorrow we will gather as a campus to remember Varun Raj Pucha, who tragically died of those injuries, and to lift up his life.  I did not have the privilege of knowing Varun, but I have been grateful for glimpses of him carried through the words of his family, friends, and professors. The pieces of his story and others’ memories of him do not constitute his life, all that he was, or all that he was in the process of becoming. But they can offer us a chance to attend, to revere even as we say goodbye, to gather around a few powerful reminders of a beautiful story that was still being written and of a reverence that beckons us all.

-by Dr. Anna Stewart, ILAS Director

Photo credit: Amy Smessaert, Lutheran Diaconal Association

Dear Valpo Community,

Valparaiso University has a long-held tradition of celebrating All Saints Day, in which we remember those who have passed away in the last year.  Names are read on All Saints Sunday (November 5, 2023), including the names of those who have died from our university community, whose photos are displayed all year on the third floor of the Christopher Center Library.  Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is a Latin American tradition to honor and commemorate the lives of the loved ones who are no longer with us, and to welcome acknowledging their continuing presence in our lives. The main part of this cultural-spiritual tradition is the ofrenda, an ornamental space dedicated to honoring our relatives. This year, Valpo wants to bring this important tradition to four key locations on campus to celebrate Dia de los Muertos in the university community.

We want to invite you to join us in celebrating that death does not separate us from our loved ones. You can be part of this tradition by sending a picture of your deceased loved ones through this form before October 27th, to be placed in one of the four ofrendas. We will print and frame your pictures to be placed on the ofrenda of your choice.

Consider joining us Monday evening, October 30th, in the Helge Center Multipurpose Room at 6:30 PM, to eat pozole and prepare elements of the ofrendas.This cultural tradition brings communities together. We hope that all Valpo Families can gather together to spend time sharing stories from their ancestors. The Ofrenda will be displayed in the Gloria Christi Chapel (lower level), the Christopher Center (2nd floor), the Harre Union (Grand Lounge), and Loke Hall (Brave Space)  from November 1st to November 8th.  The Chapel will be open until 10:00 pm During this time, please use the Gloria Christi Chapel entrance (east side of the Chapel) during concerts and events.

Blessings,

Calling and Spiritual Life/Institute for Leadership and Service, Office of Multicultural Programs, Department of World Languages and Cultures, Christopher Center for Library and Information Resources, Student Life

By Kat Peters, Assistant Director of the Institute for Leadership and Service

Calling and Spiritual Life Newsletter, October 11, 2023

My friend Julio is a rapper in Costa Rica – he comes from a Nicaraguan immigrant family that lives in a precario (what we call in the English translation a “shantytown”).  He raps about social issues that he sees in his community, an active place filled with the noise of life – music, conversations, construction, cooking, playing, vehicles, and more.  In order to hear himself think and without having regular access to a recording studio, he regularly records in his car, where he can have some quiet.  In both literal and artistic ways he’s trying to cut through the noise to help us listen to his message.

As a staff here at the Institute for Leadership and Service we have been talking a lot about listening this semester.  ILAS thinks about leadership and service on campus as flowing from a sense of purpose and calling.  As part of the Division of Calling and Spiritual Life, we recognize that our purpose and calling are genuine expressions of being in alignment with the work that is already going on in the world, work being done by God.  

In his 1980 speech at Spelman College, Howard Thurman called this alignment with ongoing, true work the “sound of the genuine”. Thurman pointed out that we are all listening for the sound of the genuine in ourselves, and in other people. 

What does it take to hear the sound of the genuine in ourselves in others, and to hear it well enough to come into alignment with it as we explore our purpose in life?  It takes real listening, which requires attentiveness, quiet, and a willingness to engage with difference, something Sharon Daloz Parks calls “the power of constructive encounters with otherness.”

Valparaiso University Black Student Organization (BSO) President, Tékeidra Masters, expressed this idea in a recent interview with the Torch for We Matter Week: “We have to realize that in order to be a servant leader, you have to be willing to serve those in need… and 9 times out of 10… they’re going to have some kind of difference, because we’re human and we’re diverse… [We Matter Week] isn’t just a BSO thing.  This is a community effort to uplift voices that are unheard, a community effort to listen, a community effort to learn, a community effort to celebrate, a community effort to pass on this information…”

As we listen, we are open to the reality that the stories people tell will be different from our own narratives, and each of our “narratives are shaped by the context in which we are embedded,” as Susan L. Maros points out in her book Calling in Context: Social Location and Vocational Formation, which we as an ILAS staff are working through this year.  These contextual differences make careful listening, accompanied by thoughtful reflection, so important.

Maros argues that “storytelling is an essential part of how we articulate our understanding of the unique nature of our individual and communal responses to God’s calling” (p. 10). We discern the work that God is already doing and contemplate how we are being called to participate in that work, listening to spiritual stories, to our own inner voices, and to each other’s stories.

At ILAS we will soon be unveiling a new podcast called Listening For Purpose.  Our student staff will be interviewing campus community members – students, faculty and staff – to listen to those stories and to come to a deeper understanding of our community, with all of the contexts and callings that make it up.  

We invite you to listen.

Kat Peters is the Assistant Director of the Institute for Leadership and Service at Valparaiso University. 

September 25, 2023 

Kat Peters (on “How I Sabbath, or Try To”)

Text: Genesis 2:4-7

How is your breathing today?  When was the last time you took a deep breath?  

Several people have already spoken about the story of Creation as a place for us to ground our thinking about the Sabbath.  Today we return to Genesis to look for more clues on how our identity as creatures of God connects us to God’s life-giving self.  God breathed into the first human’s nostrils the breath of life.

Breathing is something that we don’t often think about, at least not on a day-to-day basis.  If you do yoga, you might remember that you are often asked to return to your breath as you deepen a stretch or a pose.  People who are giving birth are coached to breathe as a way to focus through intense pain.  

But on a day to day basis, many of us may fall victim to a now-studied phenomenon called “email apnea,” or “screen apnea.”  When Linda Stone, a former Microsoft executive studied this, she found that 80 percent of people hold their breath or breathe shallowly while checking email.

During the pandemic, when I was confronted (not for the first time in my life) with the realities of anxiety, I came to understand that a lot of my anxiety can be mediated through physical practices.  Getting enough sleep, exercising sufficiently, eating healthy food and drinking water, and yes, breathing, would help solve a large part of my anxiety.  

As I focused on my breath, I experienced the strange sensation of questioning whether I deserved to take a deep breath.  It was as if I was rushing from obligation to obligation, thought to thought, and that taking a deep breath was somehow wasting time, or being selfish.

Author James Nestor writes in his book “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art” that deep breathing, especially through the nose, has many positive health effects.  He writes about “how the nose filters heat and treats raw air…how it can trigger different hormones to flood into our bodies, how it can lower our blood pressure, how the stages of a woman’s menstrual cycle are correlated to different areas of the nose, how [the nose] monitors heart rate – on and on and on – even helps store memories.”  The nose does that.

Nestor also found that deep breaths have calming effects, while fast breathing amps up energy, as a sort of fight or flight response.  This is why we have email apnea – like how a cat that is waiting to pounce on prey takes shallow breaths, so we contemplate our next moves on email with bated breath.  And then we end up exhausted, even if we were just sitting at our computers all day.

Our reading from Genesis reminds us that the breath into our nostrils that gave us life comes from God.  Perhaps this can remind us how sacred our breath is.

When I have been able to give myself permission to take deep breaths, I find that I can slow my thoughts and get a better handle on whatever anxiety I might be experiencing.  And cultivating a daily practice of deep breathing (a daily Sabbath practice, if you will) has helped to prevent anxiety from rearing its ugly head too often.

It turns out that this focus on the breath lends itself to prayer and worship.  James Nestor found that many religious prayers and songs follow the framework of slow breaths – specifically a five-and-a-half second (or longer) exhale.  For the past several weeks I have been noticing in Morning Prayer that many of our hymns and liturgical songs have this exact amount of breathing built in.  This morning, I have asked our musicians to do a purposeful breath after each 4 bars of the hymn.  I invite you to sing intentionally this way in the last 2 verses of the hymn.  

I would like to close with a practice taught to me by the President of my Lutheran Deaconess community, Deaconess Deborah Graf.  She encourages the board and the community to practice what is called a Trinitarian Breath Prayer.  After I name each person of the Trinity, I invite you to take a long inhale, and a long exhale.  It doesn’t much matter what you think about when you do so – the breath, the living breath that comes from God, will do its own work.

Creator God, we thank you for giving us the breath of life.  We come to you as creatures in the name of the Father….. And of the Son…. and of the Holy Spirit…. Amen.

The start of the academic year invites us to new beginnings and renewed commitments.  The welcomes and exhortations at Convocation in the crowded heat of our stunning Chapel.  The crisp, clean syllabi passed out, signaling knowledge to explore and problems to solve.  A new calendar or planner, awaiting the events, due dates, student org meetings, and group study sessions we will fill it with soon enough (if we haven’t already).  It can feel heady and promising–ours to claim and relish as we dive in.

But as much as I love being back on a full campus that’s rich with community, the beginning of the year overwhelms me.  I am conscious of all the things that I need to do.  Right now.  I am conscious of the desperate need to establish new (efficient!) rhythms as campus comes to life and our attendant work (whether we’re students, faculty, or staff) responds in kind.  I am conscious of the hubbub–which can be invigorating in its smaller moments, but A LOT when all taken together–that seems to define August and early September.  

Basically, I want a break.  And we just “started.”

Based on my conversations with others, I don’t think I’m alone.  I think it’s pretty normal to feel both excited and overwhelmed this time of year–that so much is calling for our attention and time, and that we want to be present for it but that we also have limits.

One reason I’m naming this start-of-the-school-year feeling is because it’s a potent reminder of the radical power of a pause.  

Pastors Kate and Jim have already made a pretty compelling case for this in previous Wednesday newsletters, calling us to remember our human-ness and the ways in which we are made to rest and to Sabbath and “to be.”  The Division of Calling and Spiritual Life is leaning in, embracing a collective initiative this year called Reset/Refresh.

In order to get to something like a “reset” or a “refresh,” we have to give ourselves true license to pause and slow down.  With any luck, we hopefully encourage one another in the practice, granting each other that same license for rest and reflection so that it’s communally supported. Such support is critical because a thoughtful pause can be a countercultural act. After all, it’s taking time and space apart from the busy-ness that always beckons and seems to reward us in systems built on productivity and a hollow sort of value. (Even as I type these words, I’m blushing at my own hypocrisy and the ways I unthinkingly prop up these false systems of value and the worker-bee mentality they generate.) All that to say, I’m writing about the radical power of pausing and slowing down, not because I’m particularly good at it [see above] but because it’s too important to neglect. 

Over the summer, I moved into a new position at the university as the Director of the Institute for Leadership and Service, which is part of the Division of Calling and Spiritual Life. While transitions are always bittersweet, I’m excited to help guide conversations and programs on our campus around value-laden words and accompanying practices: vocation; calling; leadership; service; purpose. There’s such rich possibility to plumb. How do we show up in the world, individually and collectively? How do we discern that, both on our own and in necessary conversation and reflection with others? How do we sort out the distinctive gifts and talents we bring to the world, in dialogue with the urgencies and needs of our neighbors and those we are lucky enough to walk alongside?  These are generative questions, but that also means that they elude quick, pat answers and require our thoughtful, fuller attention.

In other words, they require space for reflection.  They require pause and the permission “to be.”

As the beginning of the school year calls you into the gifts of a full and active community (which is wonderful and life-giving), I would invite you to participate whole-heartedly, while also giving yourself permission to pause and reflect (which is also wonderful and life-giving). This can be a productive tension, and one that opens you up to a deeper sense of your place on a still-unfolding journey.

As I’m often reminded, it’s a gift to have others accompanying you on the journey, and there are many of us walking alongside you across this campus.  Here at the Institute for Leadership and Service (ILAS), we’re a relatively new team, and we’re looking forward to being thoughtful fellow-travelers with you. My colleague Kat Peters (who will write a reflection in this newsletter next month) now heads up our Calling and Purpose in Society (CAPS) fellowship program, among other initiatives, and many of you have already had the privilege of working with our colleague Rachel MacDonald, who now oversees the Christian Formation & Leadership program (including Allen Scholars). We’re eager to be part of the good and meaningful work already taking place on this campus, and to help guide programs that support our campus community members in discernment and reflection, leadership and service.

We look forward to getting to know you better, and to leaning into the invitation being extended by Calling and Spiritual Life this year to reset and refresh. To pause. To be.  

Yours on the journey, always.

Dr. Stewart

Learn more about the Institute for Leadership and Service here.