Notes

Introduction

1. Doris Lessing, Briefing for a Descent into Hell (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), p. 127.

2. See Frederic Hudson, Adult Years (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991).

3. This list represents some of my thoughts on books, authors, or categories of books not used for calling work, but which I think have merit. They may be overlooked, not in general, but as related to calls and our responses to them. I am not listing any of the books with callings in the title, not because they are not worth listing but because you can easily find them.

Reading about calls lived over a lifetime is one of my favorite sources for seeing calls at work. David McCullough’s biographies of Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) and John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001) are two I’ve read with joy. But Nelson Mandela’s life, Eleanor Roosevelt’s, and many more are rich sources in seeing calls working their ecstasy and demanding their response with relentless insistence. One of the first I read was about international civil servant Ralph Bunche. One caution: most biographies are about famous people and you can end up making the calls-are-for-big-people mistake.

Peter Block’s The Answer to How Is Yes (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2001) offers his usual provocative insight into how intensely our culture and parts of our consciousness conspire against callings; it is Thoreau’s Walden Pond updated and psychologized. Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999) is fine Palmer writing and has a great section on dealing with depression as part of the journey. Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (London: Beacon Press, 2000) may be the all-time classic for being called in horrific surroundings. (I heard him speak in person when I was nineteen.) Chained to the Desk by Bryan Robinson (New York: NYU Press, 2001) reminds us that workaholics suffer from selves that are squelched and the subsequent substitution of poor work strategies for callings. On the fiction side, read any edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Frodo is one called hobbit dude.

Chapter 1

1. Lily Tomlin, The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe (New York: HarperCollins, 1986).

2. Kierkegaard. For more on Kierkegaard, go to www.webcom.com/kierke/.

3. David Quammen, Song of the Dodo (New York: Scriber’s, 1997).

4. Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven” (www.2.bc.edu/∼anderso/sr/ft.html).

Chapter 3

1. Michael Downey, Trappist: Living in the Land of Desire (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), p. 140.

2. Downey, Trappist, p. 140.

Chapter 4

1. Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (New York: New American Library, 1989).

Chapter 6

1. Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution (Boston: HBR Press, 2000), p. 4.

2. Betsy Harvey Kraft, Mother Jones: One Woman’s Fight for Labor (Clarion Books, 1995).

3. S. Johnathan Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002).

4. Jeff Gates, Democracy at Risk (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2000), p. 243.

5. Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers.

6. Gifford Pinchot, Intrapreneuring: Why You Don’t Have to Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur (New York: HarperCollins, 1985/San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1999); Gifford Pinchot with Libby Pinchot, The Intelligent Organization (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1994); Hamel, Leading the Revolution.

7. “The Mad Farmer Revolution” from Collected Poems 1957–1982 by Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1985 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted by permission of North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Chapter 7

1. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001).

2. For more on Reinhold Niebuhr, see www.leaderu.com/isot/docs/niehbr3.html.

Chapter 8

1. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, 2nd ed. (New York: Touchstone Books 1998), p. 308.