My Vocational Narrative
By Roger Ward

I am pretty sure I grew up with the idea that one day I would be famous, important, and rich. As the last child of four I was the entertainer and I was always more interested that people knew me than that I knew them. I still am, if I am honest. So I was arrogant perhaps – smart but not brilliant, good but not great, known but not admired. Perhaps also because my father was a pastor of modest means I always associated God’s work with a degree of poverty and humility. I did not think this was the life that matched my soul – I wanted to live large, to cut a wide swath in the world that Ralph Waldo Emerson would be proud of. I wanted to really live!

This attitude led me into a lot of trouble. Not bad trouble, not legal trouble, but unsafe and unwholesome acts of defiance. I was playful – sometimes harmlessly, often destructively. And I could not leave thought alone. I thought about everything. I read some, but not widely. My parents are good souled people but not bookish. As least that wasn’t a part of my upbringing. So I decided to study business, to make money and live as large as my aspirations would allow.

Looking back I don’t believe I was ever satisfied with that choice. The classes that really interested me were humanities and philosophy. At Penn State there were no religion classes, but I found my way to C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity when I was a junior. Something happened when I read that book. It awoke my desire to think and the desire I had for God that was a constant but ignored companion. The idea that God created us to be little Christs – the very expression of God in flesh – that our destiny is God – hit me like a warm summer breeze in the middle of winter. It stirred me deeply with an image of where I belonged but was not. I was not even close. I thought, as I sat on that old sleeper sofa in my college apartment, I thought I want to do something like this, like Lewis. I want to have that kind of power in my thought.

I got a good job after college and worked well at it. I met Elaine, the companion, friend and lover I had always desired. I started racing bikes, playing volleyball competitively, working with the youth group at my church. I was beginning to explore passions that emerged with the years and experience, and now I had some money and some time to do it.

One day at work – I can remember it clearly – I did a little mental calculation. I was 24. I had about 40 years to work. What would I think if I worked them all at this company? What would I have produced with my life? The answer quickly came to me, Nothing worth my life! But what would be worth my life?

It was an easy decision to go to seminary. Too easy. My father had gone to this seminary, and my sister and brother. Elaine did not like going to Texas, but she shared my passion to serve God and was beginning to sense that I was called to that life in some way. So we went. Learning had never been easy or fun for me, but seminary opened me up like an early spring blossom. I worked hard and enjoyed it, but I knew that the pastoral life was not my passion either. I had few options of course. But I remembered Lewis, and so I began casting around for a philosophical calling. I cannot convey how difficult it was to even think about a degree in philosophy let alone a career in philosophy. I did not major or minor in it. I had nothing more than an urge. But I followed it to see where it would take me, and it is still going. Through the generous support of a professor at the seminary and Carl Vaught, who eventually directed my dissertation, I entered the strange world of philosophy. And why? That’s next.

What is vocation? Like the word that prompted Abram to leave Haran, and the voice from the bush calling Moses’ name, vocation comes to us like a stranger. Human life consists of habits, language, and practices that comprise our living and doing. But vocation is the why, the inbreaking word of God that both interrupts our living and doing but at the same time gives that living and doing a different kind of life – a new principle, a sense of the heart to use Jonathan Edwards’s phrase. A person’s vocation is that word that inhabits them, body and soul, that makes his or her life cohere into a something – a task, a purpose, a goal. Life without vocation is notes without a tune, words without a story, breathe without inspiration. All human life seeks this sense of the heart. Without vocation we are lumps of clay. With vocation we become moldable, useful, fully alive to the purpose of the universe that we do not control but that we can participate in. We are the unfolding of God’s desire for the universe, that divine creative word spoken across the abyss between the infinite and the finite, repeated in the words to Abram, to Moses, made undeniably real in Jesus, and spread to all who will have it by the Holy Spirit.

So there I was, a wandering seminarian, unsure of my calling to pastor, doubtful of my call to philosophy. What pretext did I have for claiming such a call? When I read philosophy the world opened up. I see the ideas like they are tables and chairs arranged in a room. But the arrangement does not suit. They need adjusted, turned, used to hold a different kind of meeting. I walk among the ideas and realize my place there, that philosophy requests my presence and my voice to make it more like it can be. Sometimes I talk about ideas and I listen to myself as I would another person. I cannot always claim the insights as mine. It is like they are spoken through me, that I discover truth even as I aim to speak it.

I feel in the middle of my vocation. I see where it has brought me, and I have a vague idea of where I am going. It stands before me, sometimes inviting, sometimes threatening, most often challenging me to dwell exactly where I am. It is not easy and never very secure. The coherence of my thought and life is sometimes strong like a nylon rope, and sometimes as whispy as a stream of smoke. Where I find security is living and keeping on the task in my community of friends, church, and students. These people and relationships allow me to see myself concretely, and they give me something to celebrate. My work, my vocation is a reality for them as much as it is for me – and when the narrative of the community is challenged, then do I feel the purpose and power of my vocation most strongly, and in that work I feel most like myself.