I know that if I want to keep putting food on the table I should probably start an Energy Star-certified skylight-installation company in Atlanta, but I am sustained in my vocation in part by the chance to meet people who have briefly resided in the strange mansions of my consciousness.
Without the sustaining grace of vocation or devotion to a partner (like those of Clementine Churchill and Giuseppina Verdi), as Dinnage writes, loneliness gnaws at the soul, as it did in the case of Henry James's sister, Alice, whose diaries and letters fervidly document "her slow self-murder".
The irony was that the self-absorbed, anxiety-ridden and even antisocial virtues of the person of vocation could be sustained only in the thick disciplinary milieu of small-scale associational life.
That's why they have vocations.
She says that having two bishops in one family may seem excessive, but that it is their marriage that's sustained both her and her husband Frank, as well as their shared vocation - even if her new appointment means they'll both be busier than ever.
In this situation the artist is denied both the payment he deserves for his hard work, as well as the ability to keep practicing his vocation while sustaining a living.
In alternating chapters the reader learns about Watson's brief, youthful service as a pilot during World War II and his harrowing experiences as a P.O.W., his postwar marriage to the nurse who accepted what torture had done to his "basic equipment," his religious vocation and sustaining friendship with a few fellow survivors of that terrible camp.
Through it all, Farrell was sustained by the same deep Franciscan spirituality that remains at the core of her identity and vocation -- an element that is often lost in the prevailing political narratives about the LCWR's struggle with the hierarchy.
As a boy he'd been the beloved baby of a large, well-off family, and as a man he was sustained by his wife, Katharine S. White, a distinguished editor whom other people found formidable but who doted on her husband's vocation.
Music is one of the few vocations that offer a kind of sensory and cognitive immersion similar to surgery: the engagement of hand and eye, the challenge of sustained performance, the combination of mind and motion — all of it animated by the full force of the imagination.
