| The name of the Lilly Endowment funded project on exploring vocation at Pacific Lutheran University, “Wild Hope,” captures key elements in how this university community approaches the understanding of vocation. Like hope itself, searching for one's vocation in life focuses on making sense of the world, not just getting to some place that turns out well. Also like hope, our vocations are not merely goals out there in the future; we live inside our hopes and vocations, right in them, right now. And the world needs hope. In needing us, it needs us as the deeply hopeful persons we can be. We will serve others only if we participate with them in gaining hope. Our hopes, our vocations, cannot be mere hopes for ourselves; they must also be hopes for the world. Such hope is no myopic good-feeling, but abiding imagination and determination. The search for meaning and purpose in one's life is not only a search for hope; it is also a wild search for a wild hope. At PLU, in a Lutheran university, it proceeds hand in hand with an unfettered search for truth; wildness is freedom, whether that be non-human animals living in the wild, or students and faculty living in a university with the precious value of academic freedom and freedom of conscience. That wildness is also not mere turbulence or lack of constraint. It is mysteriously creative and spontaneous—none of us, for example, can predict when the most important insights into glimpsing meaning and purpose in our lives might come. Such creativity and spontaneity not only mark the process of the search; they themselves are also reasons for a hopeful life, and reasons for hope for the world. There is more potential for human life than human beings can plan, control, or dominate (thank heavens!). It is thus wild hope that epitomizes our enduring vocation. |