Callings : Finding and Following an Authentic Life

Rating:
Summary: Callings helps to identify the winks and nods of YOUR path.
Review: "When you're on the right path, the Universe gives you winks and nods." Gregg Levoy shows how to look and listen for the clues. This book has the JOY of people finding their way and recognizing that the road may hard, but journey worthwhile. I recommend it highly for those who are seeking a change in their life or who encountering problems on their current path.

Rating:
Summary: Eloquent and moving
Review: from the author of DREAMING YOUR REAL SELF: A PERSONAL APPROACH TO DREAM INTERPRETATION; and DREAM BACK YOUR LIFE: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO DREAMS, DAYDREAMS, AND FANTASIES.

Written in lyrical, poetic prose, Gregg Levoy's CALLINGS is a beautiful book that offers hope for all of us to realize our dreams. Like one of the reviewers below, I was charmed by so many sections that much of my hardcover copy is now highlighted in yellow.

I especially liked: "...we often end up trading our authenticity for what we perceive as survival, terrified to swap security for our heart's deepest desires, which is the imperative of all callings and none of the dominant fears in responding to them." and "The great breakthroughs in our lives generally happen only as a result of the accumulation of small steps and minor achievements." (And these two quotes are in the first five pages!) This book is truly a gift to readers everywhere.

Rating:
Summary: Listening for a call...
Review: Hearing a call is a very difficult discernment process. Sometimes the call is clear, but the path is not. Sometimes the path is clear, but the desire is not. Gregg Levoy has done an exceptional job at being an in-print spiritual director for those seeking an entrance into the process of finding a true calling and a more authentic life.

I recently met Levoy, and heard him speak on the topic of vocation and discerning a calling at the college adjoining my seminary. His manner of public speaking is very much in concert with his style of writing -- vibrant, interesting, engaging, and honest.

What is right for me? and Where am I willing to be led? are the two essential questions -- Discernment requires that we ask these two questions continually and devotedly.

As Levoy says, 'people won't pursue their callings until the fear of doing so is finally exceeded by the pain of not doing so.' I have found this to be very true. It took a very long time to discern my call to the priesthood, and yet more time to decide that it is something I must do at all costs (and the costs have been heavy). Yet, I cannot imagine myself doing anything differently and being in any way fulfilled.

'The truest calls seem not only to keep coming back but also to make their way to us through many channels.'

Levoy integrates so much material here, from spiritual masters and the scriptural traditions of many religious faiths to modern psychology and artistic/cultural experts.

Perhaps the greatest chapter for me was that on 'Finding Clarity', in which Levoy says that 'there is such a thing as thinking too much about a calling.' As Emerson said, sometimes it is best to let the bird sing without trying to decipher the song. 'A calling is ultimately mysterious, and the process of discernment is always a bit of a guessing game.'

Levoy's guidance, in cooperation with others in my community, helped me to see a change of mindset, a change of events, a change of personalities were all converging to tell me something that I had closed my mind to, or, more accurately, had closed my heart to. So, I began to pray, even if only subconsciously, and the path began to materialise before my eyes. 'When I pray, coincidences start to happen. When I don't pray, they don't happen.' - William Temple

It also taught me that I couldn't wait for 'someday' -- how we spend our days is how we spend our lives, according to the apt observation of Annie Dillard.

And finally, it made me face what it was to keep saying no. There is a cost, and eventually God will get you anyway -- Jonah (remember Jonah and the great fish?) said no, but eventually had follow his call anyway. I learned that one source of my fear: 'One of the frightening prospects of saying yes to a calling is that you may find out who really supports you and who doesn't.'

Figuring out how to bring my call into being was the final task, and Levoy provided wisdom here as well. 'You cannot cross a chasm in two small jumps', he quoted Lloyd-George as saying; I was forced to create a response to my call, one that did not exist before.

Thus, not too long after discovering this book, I became Father Kurt, and I owe much to this book for that. But please, don't assume that it will tempt or trap you into a ministerial role--it is an excellent guide for discernment, and discernment is one of the most personal tasks for any human being. Prepare to be enlightened.

Rating:
Summary: As much as I liked it, I was left wanting more
Review: I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Levoy last year at the Whole Life Expo in Chicago. He was hosting a lecture, unfortunately opposite James Redfield (author of "The Celestine Prophecy.") I was wooed by the bigger name. Later, as a crowd gathered around Redfield at a book signing, I found myself standing in front of Levoy. I told him that I had wanted to come to his lecture, that it was unfortunate that he was scheduled opposite Redfield. He looked almost annoyed when he said, "Yeah. I know." I bought his book. He signed it. And I just finished it, 9 months later. I was impressed by his style: surprisingly lyrical. What I was anticipating was a book that would help me find the path, to determine where it is I should be heading. This is not a workbook, though one writing exercise does spring to mind. Still, it DID manage to spur on a great amount of thought. This copy is heavily highlighted and underlined, with hasty notes crammed into the margins. Levoy will not tell you where you should be heading. He respects us enough to know that only we possess that knowledge. But he does tweak the landscape, leaving us asking questions about ourselves that may just be the nudge we were looking for.

Rating:
Summary: An eloquent, entertaining discussion of our callings in life
Review: I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Levoy last year at the Whole Life Expo in Chicago. He was hosting a lecture, unfortunately opposite James Redfield (author of "The Celestine Prophecy.") I was wooed by the bigger name. Later, as a crowd gathered around Redfield at a book signing, I found myself standing in front of Levoy. I told him that I had wanted to come to his lecture, that it was unfortunate that he was scheduled opposite Redfield. He looked almost annoyed when he said, "Yeah. I know." I bought his book. He signed it. And I just finished it, 9 months later. I was impressed by his style: surprisingly lyrical. What I was anticipating was a book that would help me find the path, to determine where it is I should be heading. This is not a workbook, though one writing exercise does spring to mind. Still, it DID manage to spur on a great amount of thought. This copy is heavily highlighted and underlined, with hasty notes crammed into the margins. Levoy will not tell you where you should be heading. He respects us enough to know that only we possess that knowledge. But he does tweak the landscape, leaving us asking questions about ourselves that may just be the nudge we were looking for.

Rating:
Summary: Transcendentalizing dribble
Review: I'm somewhat ambivalent about this book; if it were possible to give two ratings, I'd give it a four and a one. The four for the fundamental idea of the vital importance of being aware, of keeping your eyes, ears, and soul open; of not ignoring anything, of gathering your insights, of giving yourself time, of being a full-time listener. All of this doesn't come naturally to us; at best our life experience forces the realization of these things--and oftentimes we still manage to ignore it. On that level this book is thought provoking, and I'd give it a solid four were it not for the following:

Contrary to what some reviewers here say, the book is NOT well written: it is mind-numbingly wordy, imprecise, preachy, vapidly transcendentalizing, politically correct, high-falutin and vague, affectatious (it's not a "singer", it's "vocal artist"; it's not a historian, but a "mythologist", not a "writer", but "storyteller", etc.)

There's this typical combination of artificial, purposely inflated vocabulary ("purgation", "liminal", oh man, I needed to look this one up in the dictionary,) with a ton of--yes, plain and dumb--usage errors: p. 180 "in this deep strata" ("strata" is plural), p 218, "...without an advanced degree; voluntarism counts for little on a resume" -- surely "volunteerism" was meant here. Page 228, "in the Afghani tongue, the verb..."--there's no such thing as "the Afghani tongue"; p. 242, "he often got sidetracked by the arguments of practicality", where something like "practical matters" is actually meant; p.243 "which fits neatly into a run-on sentence"--related to the phrase that is not a run-on sentence by any means; p. 323, "Every time we honor a calling, we also ameliorate our fear of what lies hidden in us..."--ameliorate means to improve, not lessen, or obviate, or palliate, or diminish, or lighten; you can't "improve" your fears. Page 142, "Not all myths follow this structure to the letter of the law". The idiom is either "to the letter" or "letter of the law", but not both jumbled together.

That's just a sampling.

The author does not like to say what he wants to say in his own words, sharply and concisely: he prefers to endlessly quote someone else: there's half a dozen quotations on every page--"as this guy says", "as that girl testifies", "as this genleman puts it", "what renown therapist Joe Blow describes as", and so on and so forth; this gives the book a distinct taste of quotation dictionary. As a result what he's intending to say comes out ten-times-the-volume, half-irrelevant and distracting--thus frustrating the reader anticipating a (hopefully, sharp) expression of the author's original thought. Perhaps this is simply a trick, an insidious new way of padding books? Whatever the case may be, the book is unenjoyable, hard to read (and even to parse at times.)

I've mentioned just a few crudest, most jarring errors, but the overall writing is simply impossible, though I'm no editor and don't want to get into the structure, paragraphs, and sentences. This great gury can't write--and his editor didn't want to edit either; there are typos too ("heiroglyph", "reknowned"), it's not even proofread.

The overall book, in intent and style, seems to be inspired by Nachmanovitch's Free Play (which is a wonderful book; please read it before or even instead of this one: it's refreshingly sharp AND small) and something like Csikzhentmihaly's Creativity; Callings is a knockoff, and not a well-made one. Another thing I've noticed is that the writing is very uneven throughout the book: it feels like different parts of it were written at different times and even by different people. To be fair, most of the last third of the book feels better than the rest (maybe because it stands out against the dismal background?)

The main problem with the above, as I see it, is this: the idea of being aware is a very important one--for the young (youth being a relative notion; it's more about maturity of course than age.) But I could espy this message in this book only because I have already discovered it on my own; for me, it was not learning, but recognition of the already known. So, while I'm glad to agree on fundamentals with the author, strictly speaking, people like me are not the target audience. Otoh, someone who objectively stands to benefit from a book like that--a young reader, most likely--will probably be repulsed by the annoyingly inferior writing and simply refuse to read the book. And, I regret to say, be the better for it.

Go read Nachmanovitch's Free Play instead (or anything by Csikzhentmihaly.) Unlike Gregg Levoy, these two aren't men of letters by profession, but they did a much better thinking, articulating, and writing job somehow.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written
Review: Mr. Levoy's book is a work of art. His writing is sheer poetry and his command of language outstanding. The substance of the book itself, was to me a practical guideline of how to live one's life to the fullest, after being absolutely sure that the chosen path is the most beneficial, all things considered. There are times when I wished I had read this book before I followed what I was sure at the time was my calling. However I console myself with the thought that when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

Rating:
Summary: well researched and grounded yet very inspirational
Review: The readers ahead of me have already written stunning specifc content reviews, so this will be brief!

This book is more than a book, it feels like a work of art. It's the kind of book that you know in your heart, you will read over and over, hundreds of times, and be struck each time by something different.

Mr. Levoy has followed his own calling and in doing so, has written a book of such wit and grace, that I found myself trying to memorize whole sections! In following his call, he has turned on the lights for the rest of us, still working our way through the confusing dark places.

I will buy copies of this book for my friends, but my hardcover copy will permanently stay on my bookshelves! There are only a few books that are so amazing you want them for life, and this is one of them!

Rating:
Summary: Exellent insights on the purpose of life
Review: This book is a delightful read. The subject matter is handled in a personal and interesting writing style. Greg Levoy writes about authenticity of purpose from a very authentic and honest place in himself. It does take a little time to get used to his rhythm that includes numerous references but it is very worthwhile to give the book a chance early on. The numerous references lead to a wonderful and useful bibliography. This is the first book in many years that I have gone back to read again.

Rating:
Summary: Goor Overall read
Review: This is a well written and informative book. It is not a how to do it book that gives you specifics to find your calling. It makes a important point that calling is not just about work but life. The author has some wonderful metaphores and anecdotes. I enjoyed it but was looking for something more direct.