My Purpose - A Story of Becoming
I love quotes. Not platitudes or sayings like, “today is the first day of the rest of your life” – those actually irk me – but quotes from movies, songs, books, and speeches that ring so true that I feel them in my heart. Quotes from movies that simply bring me joy are also on the list of things I love – I have been known to recite lines from The Princess Bride, The Holy Grail, and Twister while watching them for the umpteenth time, a quirk I am thankful my husband finds amusing rather than irritating. One of the first movie quotes I remember loving so much that I looked it up…and wrote it down on my college English notebook in hopes that some cute boy would ask me about it…is from Don Juan DeMarco.
"There are only four questions of value in life, Don Octavio.
What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for, and what is worth dying for?
The answer to each is the same: only love."
The ancient Greeks recognized several types of love, from the romance of eros (which is what I was thinking about when I wrote the quote in my notebook) and the love within deep friendships known as philia, to storge, familial love, and philautia, self-love, which they believed could be healthy or result in a level of hubris that would result in self-destruction. And of course, agape, the universal and altruistic love of the other.
Socrates tells us that the unexamined life is not worth living, when I examine my life for those meaningful moments that made me who I am, those turning points when something happened outside of me that changed something inside of me, I find themes of social justice and education. When I was twelve, I stood in the square of my uncles’ Fire Island community and lectured a protestor regarding LGBTQ rights. When I was thirteen, I organized a demonstration on the steps of the Wisconsin capitol in protest of an anti-choice amendment. At fifteen, I was in the room with my mother when she defended her dissertation and earned her PhD after a journey that included three marriages, four children, two bankruptcies, and a host of other obstacles through which she persevered. I graduated with my first Master’s in 2001 and embarked on an eleven-year career in education, teaching everything from college-level communication to sixth-grade remedial math. My path led me to divorce the high school sweetheart everyone saw as my “meant-to-be” and then introduced me to the love of my life and deepest source of support: my husband Chris. Together we created a grades 6-12 school in 2008 which opened the door of college to highly at-risk students in Colorado – a school that is still going strong today.
In 2012, in order to become a core caregiver to my aging and ailing parents, we moved together (along with a dog and three cats) to central Wisconsin. For ten days during the summer of 2015, I spent between four and eight hours a day at the bedside of my dying dad, taking on the role of point person for my siblings, extended family, and hospital staff so that my mother could simply hold his hand. On my 41st birthday, I marched for Women’s Rights with my mother, my husband, my sister, and her two daughters with a sign proclaiming our belief in equality, science, and above all, love. Love, which, at deeper examination was the underlying motivation of each of these moments.
For the past nine years I have been working as the manager of a local-and-woman-owned café, wine boutique and bar. There have been ample opportunities to practice and hone my leadership and service skills within the organization, but over time I felt like I was getting smaller – becoming less. This came to a head during the worst of the pandemic. Every day felt like a battle of my values and duties – the need to serve my community by remaining in business, my duty to my coworkers to keep them employed, my need to keep my mother and husband safe, my duty to society to do everything possible to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. I felt like no matter what I did I was failing – failing as a worker, as a spouse, as a daughter…as a good person. Looking back on the disconnect and depression I was mired in, it is clear that I was experiencing what Parker Palmer calls a divided life, one in which our inner and outer works are not in harmony. He points out that when the demands of the institutions we inhabit are at odds with our hearts, it can become pathological, and can only be overcome through finding a new center for our lives. 
My search for my new center led me to Gonzaga. I believed that returning to school would help me become more – more relevant, more informed, more capable of identifying and succeeding at whatever my next step would be. Reading about Gonzaga's program felt like someone was listening to the thoughts in my head: the need to support people in becoming their best selves so that they can give the best of themselves to their chosen organization, and more importantly, to their community. I came into the ORGL program as a seeker – seeking a deeper level of self-awareness and spiritual growth and seeking an expanded and integrated worldview to ensure that I remain inspired and able to support, challenge, and serve others. For me, through challenging my brain and loving my heart, Gonzaga has welcomed me into the community I was seeking.
I have come to accept that, as Palmer says, wholeness is not perfection, but rather the act of becoming real through acknowledging the whole of who we are. I believe that everyone has a story. Everyone has experiences that make us who we are and effect how we make sense of our world. Living in the post-modern age means acknowledging and celebrating our differences. It also means that acknowledging only a single correct story leads to stereotypes and robs others of their dignity. Choosing to accept someone else’s story is valid, and working to understand their story, provides us with the strongest possible foundation for a relationship. It is those relationships that will allow us to change the world for the better. I believe actively inviting and listening to the voices of others is the first step in creating a better future.
Throughout my time at Gonzaga, I have experienced many moments of connection – with my fellow students, with professors, and with the literature. Some of the concepts that are now written on my heart, much the way my favorite quotes are, include Palmer’s challenge to greet new ideas and concepts with “soft eyes” rather than with instinctive fear or violence, Wheatley’s explanation that we can see the effect of a shared vision by observing behaviors, just as we can see the effect of invisible physical forces in the way objects react, and Block’s expanded definition of conversation to include how we choose to inhabit and arrange our spaces. Should I be accepted into the DPLS program, my intention is to dive into the place where all three concepts come together, and I believe that my career path to date path provides me with a unique perspective on where that place is, which I believe to be the idea of hospitality.
The word hospitality is derived from the Latin word hospes meaning visitor or stranger, and at its essence means welcoming the other in a way that offers a “home away from home.” Today we think of the idea of hospitality as synonymous with leisure travel and tourism, but at its heart, extending hospitality, to ourselves and to each other, is about inviting each other in, listening, supporting, and challenging each other to use our gifts to make the world a better place. Dutch priest, professor, and theologian Henri Nouwen shares this definition:
"Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines."
A disconnect between the stated and lived stories of an individual, organization, or community results in a lack of psychological safety, leading those involved to feel unable to express diverse opinions and challenge the status quo. Polarization increases, and the clarity of the shared vision suffers. Consistency between stated and lived stories leads to interpersonal trust and mutual respect, leading to the co-creation of a space that is both charged and safe; one with clear boundaries that encourages increased risk-taking and greater diversity of opinions and ideas.
As humans, we desire wholeness, growth, and connection with our inner self, our human community, and the world. We spend more time working than doing anything other than sleeping, and yet the majority of us keep our personal lives and professional lives so separated that it never occurs to us that we should (or even can) seek wholeness and connection at work. We need to flip the script – to realize that the real work is relationships, building community, and creating a better world – and that profits, sales, and salaries are the tangible and measurable results of doing the real work. If I could offer one final quote, Maya Angelou said, “[p]eople will forget what you said, forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” When there is congruence among our spoken and lived core values and the spoken and lived core values of our organizations, we feel heard, we feel empowered, and we feel loved.
Plato referred to love not as a god, but as a philosopher seeking truth and wisdom. I think that if Plato had access to the literature of today, he would see love as a servant-leader, fulfilling Greenleaf’s tenet of seeking to help us grow as persons, becoming healthier, wiser, freer, and more autonomous – and more likely to serve our communities with love.
