"Why Are You Still Here?"

Should you be here? (I like roads like this one.)

 

Like my previous post, this one begins with a question others ask me fairly often: 

"Why are you still here?"

Thankfully, when I hear this question people generally aren't asking me to leave. Rather, they're asking why I stay. And they're usually asking about one of three things:

• They want to know why I continue to be a member of a church in an age when fewer and fewer people find themselves connected to traditional houses of worship or faith communities. (I have written about this in a few places, but you might like what I have written about prayer.)
  
• They wonder why I am still a professor in a small liberal arts college at a time when students seem disengaged, and when colleges are threatened by political headwinds, rising costs, apparent diminishing returns, and by our own decisions that weaken public opinion against us. (You can see a bit more of what I've written about the liberal arts here and here.)
  
• And they wonder why I continue to work towards environmental sustainability in a place that doesn't seem to value the environment, and where sustainability is viewed as a harmless hobby at best and a threat to business and freedom at worst. (My work focuses on the environmental humanities, and I've done a good deal of work in sustainability with my university, with my city, with our local zoo and aquarium, and internationally with organizations like IBM. You might also like this article I wrote about insects on Medium, but be forewarned that it is paywalled.)
  

I have answers for each of these, and they're all important. My faith matters to me. So does my community, and so does the environment my community inhabits. I want my neighbors to thrive, and that means I want them to live in a place that fosters health for the whole person: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and economic. And my idea of "neighbor" is fairly expansive, and it includes all those whose lives are connected to my own, including the lives of other species. Jesus once pointed out that not even a sparrow can fall to the ground without God noticing it. If the sparrows matter to God, then I'd like them to matter to me.

In other words, for me, these three questions people ask me are all related to one another.  

I think they're all also related to my vocation, and to my sense of calling. In some way I feel called to and by God; I feel like teaching is my vocation; and I feel called to be a good steward of all Creation. 

Those "callings" are different, but they all also feel like "deep calling unto deep." I can't explain them, and I don't mean to say they're others' callings as well. But they're part of who I am, as far as I can tell.

One thing all those callings have in common is that they all seem to be growing:

• When it comes to faith, I often find others' stories more interesting than my own, and I'm glad to meet others who are seeking the way ahead with humble curiosity even if we use different words to talk about what we're seeking and what we're finding. So my calling is not to a building, or to a religion; rather, it feels like a consistent calling to love God and to love my neighbor as myself.
  
• When it comes to teaching, I have taught every age from pre-schoolers to older graduate students. I love it all. For now, I'm a tenured professor at the highest rank available to me. It took a lot of work to get here, and positions like mine are the envy of graduate students everywhere. I wouldn't be surprised to see more and more schools eliminate tenure and reduce jobs like mine to some version of the gig economy (these things are already happening steadily around the world.) So if I were to leave this job, I'd be leaving something I probably would never find again. But I don't feel the calling to comfortable tenure so strongly as I do feel the calling to meaningful teaching that helps others to flourish. So my calling seems always to tug me beyond my faculty office and my assigned classrooms.
• And when it comes to environmental sustainability, I often find myself scratching my head. Why wouldn't we want to be not just good neighbors but also good ancestors? Why wouldn't we want to pursue solutions that help people and the planet to thrive while also making sure we all flourish economically? I get it: so many of the solutions offered by environmentally-minded people threaten to cost us more in taxes, or they threaten particular practices or certain sectors of the economy. If someone came for my job or my hard-earned savings, I'd bristle as well. But it doesn't have to be that way. We can make good use of the water we have AND we can make sure those who live downstream have clean water too. We can make good use of our soil without depleting it, and we can do it in a way that boosts profits. Etc. Here my callings all seem to come together: I feel called to help my neighbors--all of my neighbors--flourish, and to love them as myself. And to include as neighbors everything that lives, and everyone who might inherit this earth from me. I'd like my great-great-grandchildren whom I will likely never meet to look back on my life with gratitude.
  

So my best answer to this question "Why are you still here?" is this: for now, I feel called to be here. 

Of course, like I said, my callings all seem to grow.

It may be that soon I'll find a better way to answer this triple calling I feel, and if so, I hope I won't hesitate to leave tenure and comfort and my favorite ideas when I find better ones.

Because I believe we are all in this life together, and, as some of my favorite authors have said, "all flourishing is mutual."