Beginning Thoughts: The Imperative of Finding Your Vocation

Why should we be concerned with vocation? Is wondering about our “calling” just an additional worry, like the poor fellow who was fretting because his writing teacher said the class would write prose the next day – and all he had written were sentences!

Raising the issue of vocation is a matter of correction. What needs correcting is not your education but the education we hope to provide for you. Vocational reflection is something people do, have always done, and benefit from doing. We realize, however, that in our effort to make a “formal” education program we may have overlooked this vital element. Our goal is to develop the ability of students to reflect on their lives and their talents in relation to the great needs and demands of human life and community. In this class we will read about people who find God’s call to do remarkable things – in fact our western and American tradition draws heavily on the sense of meaning that comes with following a divine call or divine leading into some great work. So this course on vocation is an effort to correct our educational program, not to correct your failing. Many academics have lamented that our education focuses on some skills, what the Greeks call techne, and less on the larger motivations for good thinking and action, which the Greeks call wisdom or sophia, perhaps even well-being, eudomonia that we translate happiness.

You are all familiar with this division in your education. The technical aspects of education need little explanation. You seldom have to defend yourself if you say “I am training to be a doctor.” No one says, “But why?” On the other hand, if you say “I am training to be a philosopher to think about the good life,” or “I am a religion major,” you expect the “Why?” In this day we need to reassert what educators have taken for granted for centuries and millennia: the aim of education is to enable men and women to think holistically about their lives and to learn how to discover and recognize truth.

The book on Martin Luther King we will read includes a revealing premise of his civil rights work. He says that the political strategy of securing rights depends on seeing people, white and black, as consumers. What we are today, he muses, are consumers. As a preacher this admission troubles him, but it is true that the understanding that people are equal and deserve equal treatment begins with this connection – we all buy, we all earn, we all live for and with money. We are, at base, consumers. King is right that this is both politically necessary and troubling. It is troubling because the rightness of justice and the blessings of peace and fairness seem somehow very different from the “way of life” in America that means limitless consumption. Is there another way to conceive of human life and its purpose apart from consumption? Could we appeal to people today to leave their possessions and follow Jesus, as he commanded the man in the gospels who asked him “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Vocation, however, is not salvation. Salvation concerns every person the same. We are all standing on the same ground beneath the cross. But what we must do with our lives in light of that salvation is different from that man in the gospel. Vocation refers to the way we are called, as a community and as individuals, to find this other kind of meaning in our work. Let me be blunt. Finding vocation means demonstrating the divine purpose of God’s intention in the world in our labor and our words. For many people the noun “vocation” refers to the work peculiar to ministers of the gospel, as pastors, missionaries, brothers and sisters in religious communities. Vocation also means the peculiar life that moves our culture toward becoming more like God’s kingdom. That movement can occur in education, healthcare, business and government.

Divine Meaning in Work

I tell students in business ethics that the real untapped potential for human well being is a career in business conducted as a work for God. This doesn’t mean giving money away once in awhile. It means finding a way to work in business that makes the world more like the kingdom of God – where justice, peace, and mercy are practiced, where the hopeless find hope and the strong serve with passion. If you find work that incorporates divine meaning into your practical activity you have found a kind of paradise. My work as a teacher approaches this ideal for me. But we cannot all be teachers any more than we can all be dentists. The full range of human activity and work is required if we want to fully express the goodness of God’s creation. Human work is a part of the “good” that God made. To be as good as it can be, to be as complete as God intended our human lives to be, the labor of every person must be oriented toward achieving the standards of divine creation. Just imagine what that world would be like.

If you have never read an example of idealism, you have just now. My term “divine meaning” as a central and motivating notion is an ideal. This ideal refers to the dynamic and creative power of God described in the Bible and witnessed throughout the Christian tradition. Divine meaning is an ideal because I believe it is real in a way that our work is not when it is separated from that real. Another aspect of my idealism is the sense that human work can become fuller and richer by becoming more like divine meaning. This is ideal in the sense that advancement toward a distant goal is possible in our working and living. We may not get there, but we can get closer than we are. And closing the distance between what we are and what we could be is a worthy goal. “I have a dream,” Martin Luther King said, and that dream was that one day his children would be evaluated not by the “color of their skin but by the content of their character.” This is an ideal we are still trying to meet.

Vocation is peculiar because it runs ideals together with the rough and tumble of work. Can we find work or do work that moves us and others toward an ideal expression of God’s meaning in creation? Many would say no. Work is work, a drudgery that is necessary for survival and enjoyable only to the few who are lucky to have easy jobs. I strongly disagree with this sentiment, although I have worked in drudge jobs that were not enjoyable at all. Vocation as a topic of reflection raises the whole issue of work and the meaning of work to the foreground.

“I need to get some work done” is a phrase that I use to transition my activity from something frivolous or distracting to some other activity. We Americans put a lot of stock in work and the value of work. Strikes have raged and people have died because they wanted to “save their jobs.” We want to work so badly we will die or kill for it. The Iraq war was justified in part because “it will be good for the economy.” Waging war for work or profit tells us a lot about who we are.

A person out of work often feels like they are living a kind of death, and retirees fear the abyss of emptiness in retirement. Work, especially for us, is the primary means of human interaction. Most of us leave our homes and our loved ones every day to go to work. At work we make friends, enemies, find spouses, have conversations, earn our living, and grasp the world. Our idea of who we are and where we are is formed much more by our work than by almost anything else we do, perhaps even more than where we go to church and what religious hope we have. Work binds us together with others, to those in the same professional or industrial enterprise, and to those people who depend on the product or service we supply. We participate in the life of the world primarily through our work. The base meaning of the word religion, religio, means to bind together. This binding together refers to the divine-human relationship, but it also means the human relationships that hold us together with other humans, perhaps our distant ancestors or our remoter progeny. Work has religious meaning for many people because it binds their lives together with the lives of others, and as I alluded above, it binds us together with an image of ourselves.

Karl Marx, the originator of communism, became convinced that the primary human action was work not thought. As a philosopher Marx thought that the great problems of his society were the result of a gap that had developed between what people thought they were doing with their labor and what they actually accomplished. His notion of communism is not a political plan for totalitarian control, it is an argument that what makes us most human, what might make us more human, is to produce things by our labor that return to us rather than diminish us. For example, if I write a story or compose a song the product of that labor is unquestionably mine. But if I make a car on an assembly line, that car, all those cars, leave the factory and none of them are mine. My labor is absorbed into that product. In fact if I get very good at what I do, attaching mirrors lets say, and I can do it faster, that improvement only means that every time I attach a mirror I have improved the profit of the manufacturer. The value of each mirror attaching becomes less significant because I can do it faster and it is a smaller and smaller portion of the whole car’s cost. Besides, because the manufacturer has paid me for my labor, I no longer have control over it. It is gone, like the breathe I exhale. But our work is much more than a by product of our living. Marx calls our work the substance of our “species being”, that which makes humanity human is our ability to choose to work, work that is necessary to make our lives possible. Unlike birds and rabbits, humans must change their natural environment to survive. Even more importantly, humans must work well in order to live happy, fulfilled lives.

I differ from Marx on the kind of labor that makes the return of value to us possible. Marx thinks private ownership is the problem. I think that producing the right content is the problem. Henry David Thoreau once commented that people in his town built fine houses but had terribly small souls to inhabit them. “While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them.” (Walden, 77) Owning a house or building our own house does not make us good and happy people. John Steinbeck, in his epic novel East of Eden, weaves a story of people who spent their lives and fortunes to build magnificent houses only to fill them with desperation and sadness. Both Thoreau and Steinbeck are aware that ownership and surroundings don’t satisfy us. The truly divine power of work is not realized in changing the natural conditions we inhabit, but in changing ourselves.

What can we change about ourselves through good work? I do not think there is any way to know the complete answer to this question. Perhaps everything about us can be changed. Certainly there is always some change in us that comes from our work, by virtue of the motivations we exercise in our work, or the people we know and emulate, or the product we make and sell. I think about the thousands of people who use the telephone to sell sham products to old and confused people in our country. What must it do to those people to make their money in this way? Would this make you a better person? I think the answer is clearly no.

Let me try to set out some of the positive aspects of the alteration that can come to us through work. Good work gives us the opportunity to create peace in our world and in ourselves. Peace is not the absence of trouble or conflict; peace is the active presence of an orienting power that brings people into harmony with others, and that brings people into harmony with God. The production of peace depends, in my estimation, on grace. Grace is the unmerited good that we cannot manufacture or demand, but that which we need to be fully human. It is a gift. Grace is forgiveness, and we participate in the conditions of grace only by forgiving each other, as many of us pray together “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Work is good when it makes both forgiveness and grace more possible. Work is good when it produces peace in our bodily interaction with the world of nature and the world of humanity.

The Imperative of vocation

The greatest commandment, Jesus said, was to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. You may remember that the story that follows these words is the parable of the good Samaritan, that cultural and religious outcast who rescues a stranger in need. This story may be too familiar to sound a challenging theme for us, but it should. The people who avoided the wounded person were religious people, people who were clear about their calling. You may even say their vocation kept them from helping. The Levite could not touch a dead person and still complete his “work for the Lord.” A point this story makes is that as people called by God we must continue to critique our actions. We need to be able to correct our thinking and our practice. The law that keeps the priests clean fails if it keeps priests from extending the peace of God in healing a wounded person. The command to love God and love neighbor means that our work is properly oriented when it has the goal of helping a stranger. The purity of the priest is unhealthy, unwholesome, and even unholy if it is disconnected from the binding reality of another person in need. Let me be more contemporary. The gift of professional life is unhealthy, unwholesome, and even unholy if it is disconnected from the binding reality of another person in need. How much money you might make to give away at a later date doesn’t enter into the picture. God does not call us to work in order to fund a separation between ourselves and others. Just the opposite, we are called to work for the good that is the true good, the good that is worthy of our divine nature as sons and daughters of God. Vocation means finding that true good that is within our power to create, considering the needs that surround us and the gifts and abilities God and nature has given us.

But why is finding our vocation imperative? Can we think that finding a vocation is a command from God? I think the imperative of vocation appears in the last phrase of the verse above: love your neighbor as yourself. How do we love ourselves as Jesus says we ought? The only way is with the same fullness with which we love God; heart, soul, mind and strength. We are devoted to ourselves fully. Our desires are our desires and these are denied only at the risk of insincerity and contradiction. The love of self is not a self-exaltation, but the idea that God has made us in a unique way for a purpose. This purpose makes our life and our development different from every other person. When we try to “find our purpose in life” we do not look outside, we look inside. It is like we are mining our own lives to find the treasure buried deeply inside of us – our character and our work. This treasure will be found only if we focus our attention on this task. “Love yourself” is a love of God’s creation. The phrase “love the Lord” points us outward, toward the Creator. But this love of God is not in opposition to loving ourselves, it is connected to it. In a sense, we cannot love God like we should without loving ourselves as well. But how is this connection made between God and ourselves?

This is where “love your neighbor” comes in. When we love our neighbor, we are able to see our self-love reflected in the way we treat another person. “Love your neighbor” gives us the way to reach out to someone else, and Jesus says to use the way we love ourselves as a guide for that action. Jesus is saying that we contain in ourselves the principle of action that will make our work for others fruitful and delightful. What if our actions to our neighbors were as natural and as sincere as actions we take for our own delight? That would still be “work”, but imagine what work it would be! This is the command: Engage in that kind of work that comports with who you are, that expresses the beauty of yourself most fully to those around you, and that reflects the beauty of divine grace that gives our action its highest meaning. This is the imperative of vocation, and like all of God’s commands, it intends us to make us perfect and happy, happier than we can possibly conceive ourselves worthy to be. And that is why vocation must in the end be a work of God in and for us, because we are worth far more than we know or think. Jesus tells his disciples, “Have no fear, little flock; for your father has chosen to give you the Kingdom.” When we work with God we are not laboring in order to become owners; we have already been given ownership of everything. Rather, we are working to please God, and expanding God’s pleasure is the divine imperative we must obey in everything we do.