Your Vocation or Calling

Upon graduation from high school young people are typically told to ‘discover yourself,’ ‘follow your passion,’ ‘define what you want from life,’ ‘establish a career trajectory that will bring you a life filled with fulfillment,’ etc., etc.  The rhetoric suggests that by achieving material ‘success’ you will in fact be successful and ‘live happily ever after.’ 

President John F. Kennedy famously suggested a different focus:  “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Another focus, somewhat akin to President Kennedy’s suggestion, I would suggest is not asking, “What do I want from life?”, but instead asking “What does life want from me?”  My hero Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “People wish to be settled.  It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.”

We have all been thrown into a specific place, and time, and circumstance, among certain people, and needs and challenges and we need to figure out how we should proceed with the physical, moral, and intellectual tasks put before us.

Writer Frederick Buechner put it this way: “At what points do my talents . . . meet the world’s deep needs?”

I submit that this life is a test and an opportunity to see what we will do with our talents and for whose service they will be used. 

 

Consider the perspective of World War II prisoner Dr. Viktor Frankl from his book Man’s Search for Meaning:  Life, he said, has not stopped expecting things (a proper response) from any of us—no matter how wretched our circumstances might be.  He told his fellow prisoners that someone was watching them—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or God—who did not want to be disappointed. 

Our vocation or life calling probably will not bring great material ‘success’ to ourselves; it may be something as common but as important as being a good mother, or a conservationist, or teacher or social reformer, or nurse or truly dedicated Church member; or something as uncommon as a great statesman or explorer or pioneering scientist.  In fact, we may not even choose it (our job or occupation or career) as our most significant life work but it will present itself to us; it will choose us.  As David Brooks has said, such people who respond to their ‘calling’ “submit to their vocations for reasons deeper and higher than utility. / Such a person becomes an instrument for the performance of the job that has been put before her.”

It is the response of our greatest efforts to the call of felt necessity.  Regardless of what it is, it will bring something of great value to other of God’s children and have intrinsic worth. Ralph Waldo Emerson was, as always, on point: “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods [like his friend Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond], the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

Not only Frankl’s ‘watchers,’ but we ourselves should have a good sense if we are meeting the measure of our creation—and that is discovering our true vocation.