- Aug 30, 2022
As we come to summer’s end, Labor Day and a new cycle of work and school, it’s good to reflect a bit on how we understand our vocation (latin, “calling”).
More than likely on the golf course if someone wants to get to know me a bit they will ask first my name, and second, within a couple of minutes, “so what do you do?” This reflects a modern cultural understanding of my identity being bound up primarily in what I “do”. Vocation is my career, what I do.
A bit of a quick history lesson helps understand how we’ve gotten here. Back in medieval times, vocation was seen narrowly as a call to a monastic life as a monk or nun, or to serve the church as a priest. These were the special callings of some. Martin Luther and other reformers changed all that with the call to see the primary understanding of vocation as “christian” and that this calling was to be lived out by all christians in their daily tasks. Vocation here is WHO I am (christian) and that affects HOW I do my work, whatever it happens to be.
An example would be a first grade teacher who roots her work in her own experience of the love of God, and extends that love to each of her students, thinking the best of each one and seeing the rich potential in each child. She engages students and families with respect, care, and compassion. First seeing herself as a disciple of Christ, she then is able to live for God’s glory and neighbor’s good in her classroom, and with her colleagues. She lives out her relationship with God (her vocation) in her work as a teacher.
This seems a proper corrective of these two other understandings of vocation as “a career” (what do you do?) and vocation as a special calling for a few (monastic life).
The lat archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, said it well: “How beautiful will be the day when all the baptized understand that their work, their job is a priestly work, that just as I celebrate Mass at this altar, so each carpenter celebrates Mass at his workbench, and each metalworker, each professional, each doctor with the scalpel, the market woman at her stand, is performing a priestly office! How many cabdrivers, I know, listen to this message in their cabs; you are a priest at the wheel, my friend, if you work with honesty, consecrating that taxi of yours to God, bearing a message of peace and love to the passengers who ride in your cab.”
So for every follower of Jesus, our vocation is the same: Christian, minister of grace. The work we do at our job or in school is how we live out our call to be a christian witness. It’s a helpful and important distinction, I think, to root our vocational understanding in who we are, first, and then how who we are shapes what we do day by day.
Writer Frederick Buechner, who recently left us, had a favorite saying, that “Vocation is the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” That’s an invitation to relationship with the world and those we meet in it that flows from our New Life in Christ. That makes us all ministers and priests.
Contemplate these blessed realities as you take a deep breath and jump back into a new year!
Love from here!
Peter Hawkinson