With deep gratitude I have some links and brief excerpts to share from a couple reviews of Finding Livelihood. After years of writing alone at a desk it always feels like rather a miracle to find that those solitary words can go like an arrow into someone else's mind and heart and Voilá, there is human camaraderie on this journey.
The first review is written by Kenneth Garcia in a column in Notre Dame Magazine. I love that he starts out by stating he also has had a struggle to come to terms with "a spiritual calling that both demands attention and 'refuses' to come to fruition." I wish I could get a show of hands for who else can relate to that.
About one of the vocational quandries Finding Livelihood poses, Garcia writes:
"Nordenson admires the theologian Frederick Buechner's poetic phrase about vocation: 'the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.' She also finds the sentiment unconvincing. Why? Well, life happens. The need to make a living in tough times and the responsibilities one has to others exert their own call, and those calls obligate as much or more as one's 'deep gladness' and spiritual desire. 'Who but a very small minority,' she asks, 'can find that exact intersection [of one's deep gladness and the world's deep hunger] and from it feed a family?'"
Maybe you've had these thoughts and questions too. Here's the link and I do hope you click through and read the rest of Garcia's review.
The second review, written by Greg Richardson (aka "Strategic Monk"), is in the Presence Journal, a publication of Spiritual Directors International. Writing to readership of spiritual directors, Richardson calls Finding Livelihood "an insightful, personal tool for our work with people on a spiritual and occupational journey."
He continues:
"Finding Livelihood is not a how-to book filled with checklists and targeted goals. It is deeper and more rewarding than that, reflecting on deep truth. Spiritual guides will find this a useful resource, particularly while accompanying spiritual directees who desire to integrate the daily place where love and labor meet."
The image of this - my little book being used to help others "integrate the daily place where love and labor meet" - is thrilling and humbling. May it be so. Here's the link to read the rest of Richardson's review.
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If you find my writing on this blog or in my book to be something that's good in your life, would you consider sharing one or both of these reviews, perhaps with someone who you think might like to read the book, maybe someone who is on a spiritual and occupational journey? Or would you consider writing your own review on Amazon? Thank you for considering. I'll be back next week with something noncommercial. :)
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[Photo: taken of a bulletin board at U of Chicago; don't call any of the numbers for job opening you see because it's several years old; does anyone still use "physical" bulletin boards to post jobs anymore?]