Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling
By Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore
Oxford University Press, 224 pages
Published July 30, 2024
Presbyterians value call stories. Pastors, nominating committees, and all those who discern who should serve a particular congregation are eager to hear a good story, particularly one in which someone hears God’s call and confidently responds, “Here I am!” However, not all call stories are that simple. Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling deconstructs and deepens our understanding of call.
Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, a practical theologian from Vanderbilt University, deconstructs the conventional “follow your bliss” wisdom, popularized by writer Joseph Campbell, Oprah (and any number of graduation speeches) as the key to a meaningful life. Miller-McLemore argues that following our bliss is a lie, built on a romanticized ideal insufficiently grounded in the realities of our lives.
Instead, she offers a more dynamic understanding of call. We live multiple callings over our lifetime: in our 20s, we may be called to a career, marriage and starting a family. Careers, marriages and families evolve and change in our 40s; in our 60s, retirement and “third third” of life issues call us to new and different actualities. Miller-McLemore shows that our call stories are deeply relational and communal. In addition, only some callings are chosen, while others are imposed. She writes, “calling is a more fluid term with resonance across many traditions for what we’re meant to do in life and how we’re related to other people, including the divine.”
Adding to the complexity, Miller-McLemore provides an enlightening typology of various calls, including:
- Missed calls. We made decisions and choices, but there are always the roads not taken. Miller-McLemore includes a profound explication of Frost’s poem.
- Blocked calls. Our hopes and aspirations were deferred, ambushed, or denied because of circumstances beyond our control. Perhaps racism, sexism or another form of discrimination thwarted us from fulfilling certain callings.
- Conflicted calls. Family, work, exercise, hygiene, holidays, and sleep competed for our time. How did we set and sustain the proper priorities?
- Fractured calls. Callings did not work out because of something we did or failed to do. They are redeemed as failure turns into good.
- Unexpected calls. Life put us into situations we did not seek or anticipate.
- Relinquished calls. There will come a time in our lives when we are to give up a calling, willingly and generously. We are to let it go and lament as we do.
This last part spoke to me: giving up a calling can hurt. It hurts because it undermines our self-identity at the most basic level. We must push our ego out of the way, replace our inner chatter, and dismiss our self-made concepts of God to make room for a new understanding of God to take hold. This is how we become new again, even in retirement.
But something is missing in the various calls described here: the central character in call stories is not us, but the “Caller.” The presence of a Caller and the Caller’s agency is not central to Follow Your Bliss. Regardless, Miller-McLemore’s poignant description of her own callings and her helpful description of multiple calls offers language to grasp the complexities of our own stories — and to love them even more.
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