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I work at a highly selective monastery in the Midwest. I took a vow of chastity, relative poverty, and obedience. The six years of my novitiate were brutal, and I falsely imagined that becoming a full-fledged monk would allow for both greater peace of mind and greater autonomy. I was wrong. Whatever I gained was lost to additional obligations: all of that service that only the truly sanctified can perform . And to think I had, still have, a family on the side—indeed, a secret life— like one of those priests you read about in the paper. My spouse complained that I was never home, and she couldn’t understand my godly devotion. Vespers, Matins, Lauds—the Ferris wheel of light and prayer seemed to her an amusement , a joy that I preferred over her and our son. The fact that our son is autistic and requires more supervision than your typical child made her resent my vocation even more. But to say that she resented my vocation is to be ungenerous, especially when she has been as flexible and forgiving as my abbot has not. My abbot demanded, still demands, unstinting fidelity . There was no Mass I could forgo, no fruitcake I didn’t have to assemble, no pot I didn’t have to scrub. The fact that I published an award-winning memoir about our son—whom we adopted from foster care when he was six and whom we taught how to read and communicate on a computer—is, I admit, a bitter irony. To the world that does not know me as a monk I am the perfect father; to her, much less. I won’t even speak of my performance as husband.   I begin with this conceit because the year I came up for tenure I actually dreamt that I was trying to secure a place at Gethsemani, Thomas Merton’s monastic home. As a young man, I had been actively recruited by the Trappists of central Kentucky. Though I long ago abandoned my faith, the professor-as-monk analogy seems particularly apt, for institutions such as mine require absurd devotion and a willingness to talk about your activities Vespers, Matins, Lauds The Life of a Liberal Arts College Professor ralph jam es savar ese 83 02 Part 2_Manu 7/1/2010 5:30 PM Page 83 in almost mystical terms. In addition to excellent teaching and scholarship, to be granted tenure you have to perform all sorts of service—from advising students to sitting on committees to administering programs to conducting searches to attending events to being, as a colleague once put it (drawing out the word’s second syllable), available. Part monk, part EMT, you must be ready at a moment’s notice to rush to the scene of institutional exigency, whether that be a student’s emotional crisis or a recruitment fair put on by the admissions department. In the dream I kept saying, “I deserve to have a vocation” and “I need to support my family,” as if the two assertions were one and the same. Having to support my family allowed me to feel better about insisting on a vocation : work with both purpose and meaning (read: work that devours you). Despite its well-known advantages (such as lots of vacation time and the ability to set one’s schedule), my vocation has ensured plenty of conflict in my secret life. During the school year, for example, I sometimes leave at six in the morning and don’t return until late at night, especially if there’s a reading by a visiting writer, and so I’m gone a lot. Whenever I consider my time away, I think of a woman remarking at the memorial service for her husband, who had died of a heart attack while grading papers in his final semester before retirement: “In August Bill would always tell me, ‘See you in June.’ And now the June of our togetherness will never come.” The woman’s two sons, both still in college, wept in the front pew. Shouldn’t I be called to my wife and child as well? And what if my vocation at times begins to parody itself? As much as I derive satisfaction from teaching at a liberal arts college, there are moments when I think its demands are not only unreasonable but also counterproductive. To say that we coddle our students would be an understatement. I once described what we do...

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