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Following the Path: The Search for a Life of Passion, Purpose, and Joy - Hardcover

Chittister, Sister Joan

 
9780307953988: Following the Path: The Search for a Life of Passion, Purpose, and Joy
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 030795398X ISBN 13: 9780307953988
Verlag: Image, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

This book is meant to give someone in the process of making a life decision at any age—in early adulthood, at the point of middle-age change and later, when we find ourselves at the crossroads without a name—some ideas against which to pit their own minds, their own circumstances. Its purpose, as they wrestle with the process of trying to find and follow their own special call at this new stage of life, is to both provoke thinking and to clarify it. —Joan Chittister
 
In our modern and mobile society, the range of answers to the questions “What am I supposed to do with my life?” and “How do I know when I’ve found my purpose?” can seem endless and overwhelming. Following the Path by Sister Joan brings the insights of her years of teaching and contemplation to bear on this issue, providing readers with a new way forward. Through her examination of spiritual calling and gifts, change and discernment, she leads readers home to the place where, finally, we know we fit, where we are the fullest of ourselves and a gift to the world, a timely and much needed message that many will be happy to hear.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JOAN CHITTISTER is an internationally known author and lecturer, and the executive director of Benetvision, a resource and research center for contemporary spirituality. She serves as cochair of the Global Peace Initiative of Women, a partner organization of the UN, facilitating a worldwide network of women peace builders. Her books include The Gift of Years, The Monastery of the Heart, and Uncommon Gratitude (with the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams). She is past president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and was prioress of her community, the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pennsylvania, for twelve years.

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Chapter 1

 The Search for Happiness and meaning in life
 
            “If you never liked being an accountant, why did you stay in it for 30 years?” I asked him.
            “Well, it was steady and the money was good,” he said.
 
            We use a raft of words for happiness in this world: delight, enjoyment, contentment, fun, excitement, pleasure, cheerfulness. But none of them really make the mark. At most, they describe feelings that come and go with the wind. They all describe something that exists in relationship to something else. When the party is over, the delight goes with it. When the Ferris wheel stops, the excitement ends, too.
            No, happiness cannot possibly be any of those fleeting, transitory things.  Happiness is a great deal more than any impulse and its dependence on the mood of the moment. Happiness exists on its own. It is a steady-state operation of the soul. It sees every day through a filter of basic satisfaction.
            Traditional definitions of a person’s call in life, however, never mentioned happiness as one of its dimensions. At least not happiness here, on earth, while I lived. Thomas Aquinas, great philosopher-theologian of the 13c, for instance, argued that happiness had to do with union with God. Happiness was earned during our lifetime but was not necessarily expected to be enjoyed here on earth. Happiness, real happiness, this theology implied, could only really be expected when death united us with God. Earthly happiness was not a topic in this catechism.
            A call in life, in that world, meant to give one’s life to God, in some particular religious way. And even then there was no notion that a person would necessarily see it as a way to fulfill the search for personal happiness on earth. It meant simply to do the will of God, however difficult.
            Those called to religious ministry should simply accept the duty as inevitable, as much the will of God as it was of any dimension of personal choice. What accounted for that destiny, however, what it was that explained how that destiny got forge–other than the oblique or whimsical will of God, of course–who knew? Most of all, how a person might recognize the will of God in their regard or what might make that sacrifice possible, let alone a happy choice, went unexamined.
            In these theologies of life, the fact that a call to ministry was defined as a call from God sufficed for everything in life.  There was nothing else to know about the justification for choosing it, nothing else to desire, nothing else against which to gauge the value of it. Merely to have thought of it was sign enough of its reality.   
            In each case, simply doing something good, something institutionally religious, apparently, was enough. Human happiness was not the issue. The notion that being happy with something might be one of the signs of having a call to it was entirely beneath consideration.
            Except, we know now, that it’s not. Happiness, we have come to understand, is the driving force of life. It is the Holy Grail of human development. It gives to whatever we decide to do its dynamism. Happiness is the torch of life, the fire within, the very galvanism of our existence.  And science, of all things, confirms that.
 
            Neurologists have discovered that the brain is configured for happiness. We were born to be happy, just as much as we were born to communicate or to love or to reason.  The very physiology of the brain is designed for happiness–which is why mood-changing drugs work. They satisfy the needs of our neurological chemistry and lift us out of depression or calm us into serenity.
            Not to be happy, therefore, to be regularly dispirited or sad or negative, is not only not normal, it is an indicator of either life or chemistry gone wrong. Whole institutions and occupations have sprung up to help people find happiness. Their findings rank among the most startling scientific discoveries of the twenty-first century.
            Medicine, too, has for years warned about the relationship between stress and physical sicknesses. To live in long-term situations that wear us down, wear us out, sour our hearts and choke our hopes will soon show up in our bodies, they tell us. And yet, we know that some people live in very difficult circumstances, even seek them out as doctors in African villages, for instance, as care-givers in hospices, as counselors in detention facilities, as total care providers for crippled children and spouses and never seem to wear down. What’s the difference between choosing lives like that and being stressed to the breaking point by them? And what does it have to do with finding meaning, with having a call to a particular commitment, a special place, in the world?
            Psychologists, as well, recognize now that there is a set point for happiness in the human being that affects the way we see the world. This underlying perspective and attitude toward life in each of us is fundamental but not determinative. Just as there is a set point for blood pressure and weight gain and body temperatures in each of us that can be affected even if it cannot be permanently changed, there is a stable range of positive emotional responses in us, too, that can be shaped and reshaped in life. We can meliorate difficult situations and make life happy again. We can make changes. We can discover where we need to go to be happy and then take steps to get there. We can learn to distinguish the kinds of stress that invigorate us from the kinds of stress that deplete us and make the choices that give us life.
            I have known, for instance, what it is like to be sick but happy at the same time. I’ve lived with the effects of polio all my adult life and never, ever counted that among the things that made me unhappy. Tired, yes; limited in some ways, maybe, but not unhappy. And I have also known what it is to be doing something good, like teaching rather than writing, and be unhappy at the same time.
            It’s not difficult to understand that happiness is real. We have felt its fleeting presence. We know the depth of the pit within us waiting to be filled with it.  We have seen happiness in people whose lives we doubt we ourselves could ever possibly bear: in paraplegics, of all people; in the poor who have nowhere near the things we have to ease our way through life; in the forgotten ones from nameless barrios who come into our plush living rooms on TV screens.
            No, it’s not the possibility of happiness we doubt. It is how to find it that eludes us. The real challenge of life, then, is to understand what happiness is so that, from beginning to end, we steer our lives in that direction. If we feel a...

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Verlag
Image
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
030795398X
ISBN 13 
9780307953988
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
192
Kontakt zum Hersteller
LiveRowing
Verkauf@bari.de

D�lkener Str.20
Viersen
nrw
41747
Deutschland