What is Vocation?
Since September 11, more and more people seem to be asking questions about the purpose of their lives, seeking meaning greater than going from work to home and back again the next day. As the economy shifts and jobs and careers disappear, the opportunity again arises to ask questions of life purpose. Sponsored by a grant from Lilly Endowment, Inc, the Guilford Initiative on Faith and Practice encourages the
Vocation, or calling, is an answer to the question "for what purpose was I born?" The word vocation comes from the Latin vocare, to call. While many people are fortunate to find career tracks that make pursuit of their vocation easier, there are others who have careers in medicine and education, for example, who are not called to heal or to teach. In other words you may find a well-trod career path in which to live out your vocation and you may have to find a career or a job (job = anything you do for a paycheck) to support living out your vocation, at least in the early years. (Think of all the people waiting tables and doing auditions.)
Don't narrow the field too quickly when thinking of vocation. Try to separate vocation from job slots, to use the verb form rather than the noun: "I'm called to heal others," not, "I'm called to be a doctor." "Doctor" limits too quickly what you can imagine. Maybe a side interest in herbology will pull you into Chinese medicine, or your contemplative nature into spiritual direction.
Parker Palmer says your vocation is what you can't not do. I have a friend who understands her calling to be that of bringing love into the world. I can imagine very few jobs from the least to the greatest where this calling could not be lived out. "Liz" enjoys math and is a natural teacher, so teaching high school math was an easy first step. At some point it seemed right to take courses at the local seminary, as she was able; the school invited her to declare a degree when she nearly had enough courses to graduate. Taking clinical pastoral education, she felt pulled into training to be a pastoral counselor and during that time also worked with inner city girls at high-risk of becoming pregnant. A deeply spiritual person, Liz always worked hard to listen for the appropriate place to offer her gifts, whether or not she understood why. Discovering a gift for being present to the dying, she worked with hospice for a while and then as hospital chaplain. Still called to bring love into the world, Liz is now in higher education administration and in her spare time partners with a nurse to work with the ill and dying and their families. She cannot help but live her vocation in the places she finds herself.
Frederick Buechner defines vocation as "the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." Vocation is the thing that will make your heart sing while at the same time meeting a need for someone else. Have you ever had the experience of gathering all your courage to ask for help and, instead of the resentment you feared from the other, been met with joy that someone wanted what they could give? Or even better, that the offer of your need actually made possible something the other person needed as well?
If Buechner is right—and I believe he is—then our vocations are not something we have for our own benefit. Your vocation is a gift given to and through you to the whole community. And if you don't live it, if you don't offer your gift, we all lose. So it matters to me and to the
Lest this all sound deterministic, I am not saying there is only one thing you can do and be of service in the world, and you won't accomplish anything until you find it. While there is that within you seeking to be of service somehow, you have many choices about how you will go about offering it. When you commit yourself to living out your particular calling in the world, doors will open for you to walk through, sometimes several at once. Choices will abound.
What does faith have to do with vocation? Just because our vocations will allow our hearts to sing doesn't mean we will know joy daily. You may have a calling to heal the wounds of racism or to restore the earth or to work with adolescents or to lead your community with integrity or to research cures for illnesses. On one level, these are impossible for you to accomplish (as in finish), and working toward them may bring discouragement and setbacks.
Faith invites us to live our lives as part of a larger story. It invites us, as Frodo and Sam talk about many times in the books (yes, you should read the books), to see our work as part of a much larger tale whose beginning and end we cannot see, but to whose positive outcome our doing our one little part matters greatly. Your spiritual grounding will determine how you and your companions are fed, encouraged and given what you need to get up and go back to your seemingly hopeless task when the enemy of your particular story seems to be winning overwhelmingly. It will keep you from becoming permanently embittered and cynical. If your story is small, the weight on you to achieve your goals soon becomes unbearable. The larger your story, the more characters you can see who have joined their vocations with yours and made valuable contributions to bettering your corner of the world. You also see how much help they needed from others and how they labored in spite of difficulties you can't even imagine.
Intentionally walking a spiritual path will challenge your belief that you are author, director and star of your own story and will invite ego deflation. It will open you to see the connections that exist between you and other people and all of life. Intentionally walking a spiritual path will challenge you to see yourself as you are, not as you wish to see yourself. It will invite you to see and own the ways you set back your own cause by acting out of your brokenness or fear or despair or rage or self-importance. It will enable your energies to become more and more life giving and less and less destructive. It will invite you to be healed and freed and transformed, and it will give you tools to use with and for others in the process.
To talk about calling does imply relationship with another who is calling. While many people who use the language of calling understand God to be the one inviting them into new and different opportunities to give of themselves to the world, others talk about the Universe, Love, the Ultimate, the Infinite and many other words trying to convey something very big and ultimately indefinable. When one is truly following a vocation, mystery will enter in. You are free to ignore it or explain it away, but when you say "Yes" to being and becoming that for which you were born, doors will open at odd times and places and the universe will seem to conspire to put you in the place that "feels right" even if it logically makes little sense. Having a larger story can provide metaphors for understanding mystery in your life and being more comfortable with that which you cannot know with certainty.
For what purpose were you born? What is your part in this story of Life on Earth? What helps make meaning of your life? Where do (or might) you give of yourself? Where do you find support and challenge to ask these questions or to struggle with answers? Answers come in living and reflecting over time, as vocation unfolds over a lifetime. Asking the questions, though, is well worth the effort.