"Ph.D." by Langston Hughes

He never was a silly little boy
Who whispered in the class or threw spit balls,
Or pulled the hair of silly little girls,
Or disobeyed in any way the laws
That made the school a place of decent order
Where books were read and sums were proven true
And paper maps that showed the land and water
Were held up as the real wide world to you.
Always, he kept his eyes upon his books:
And now he has grown to be a man
He is surprised that everywhere he looks
Life rolls in waves he cannot understand,
And all the human world is vast and strange–
And quite beyond his Ph.D.’s small range.

-The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes pg. 161-162

"Life without wonder is not worth living." -Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

quoted in Left Hand of God, The: Healing America's Political and Spiritual Crisis by Rabbi Michael Lerner, pg. 292

Putting Faith Vocations to the Real-World Test - Review of "The Calling" in the NYT

Yerachmiel Shapiro, a newly minted rabbi, shows up for his first job, with a tiny congregation in Red Bank, N.J. “We have no members, we have no money, we have nothing,” one congregant tells him. “What on earth did you see in this synagogue?” No rap or tattoo is going to help him here.

Mr. Alpert also made an interesting choice in introducing only five of the subjects in Part 1. The new blood that turns up in Part 2 helps energize the proceedings, especially Steven Gamez, a likable young man who is entering the Roman Catholic priesthood.

More so than some of the others, he goes beyond vague descriptions of feeling called by God and expresses some of the difficult questions people entering his line of work face. Doing the glum job of providing spiritual counsel at a hospital, he is confronted early on by the death of a child in a car accident.

“The easy answer, and the cop-out answer, is, ‘God is a mystery,’ ” he says. “But that doesn’t suffice. That doesn’t comfort me. It certainly doesn’t comfort Mom or Dad.”

http://tv.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/arts/television/20calling.html

(I didn't get to watch it yet)

Dropping Keys by Hafiz

The small man
Builds cages for everyone
He
Knows.
While the sage,
Who has to duck his head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.

-from pg. 206 of The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master