My friend got his dream job, and it was everything he never wanted. This friend (let’s call him John) arrived at his vocation, his calling. He received a position at a top Christian think tank of sorts. They were doing deep, meaningful work — the kind he had always wished for, the kind of job that he trained for. He made it.
Well, of course, until John started his job. The problem was that his boss was demanding in a belittling and borderline abusive way. He had to commute an hour to work, and he was already working over 10 hours a day with the irrational demands made upon him from his first day at work. He wanted to like his calling, but he began to resent it. He was not happy. He did not find meaning or purpose. He struggled to get through each day. His vocation let him down.
You see, John was raised in the world of Reformed evangelicalism, where vocation is a sort of shibboleth for happiness and purpose. (Drawing on the story of Jephthah’s conflict with Ephraim, the Gileadites ask fleeing fugitives of Ephraim to say, “Shibboleth,” but Ephraimites apparently couldn’t pronounce the “shh,” so they respond, “Sibboleth.” Dead giveaway. Slaughter ensues.) So when Reformed folks talk about vocation, it functions as a passcode, an entry fee, a shibboleth. Who’s in, and who’s out? Those with a good sense of vocation are in.
In 2006, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published a book that studied people who claimed to be happy. He wanted to discover the factors that contribute to a happy life — and who doesn’t want to be happy? He found that the happiest people view their work as a calling rather than a job or career. A job is a mere means to make money, which one then spends on hobbies or vacations. A career seeks promotion and prestige. A calling, on the other hand, finds work intrinsically fulfilling and serving a greater good. Even “secular” research shows the benefits of an understanding of vocation.
Martin Luther King, Jr. outlines three aspects of a complete vocational life. The length is your personal, inward passions. The breadth is your outward concern for others. And the height is your upward responsibility, a duty to a higher being. A whole life needs all three. A vocation meets all three. By contrast, the late pastor Tim Keller defined vocation along a similar three-path vision, but with different terms. A vocation is where affinity, ability, and opportunity meet. What do you like, or what are your desires? (Affinity). What natural gifts (and limitations) do you have? (Ability). And where has your community encouraged you or the world offered? (Opportunity). Your answers to these questions are a key to unlocking your vocation.
Perhaps most popularly, Fredrich Buechner defined a vocation as that “place where your great passion meets the world’s great need.” Sometimes, though, we use the world’s need to justify our great passion.
There’s a good precedent for the importance of vocation. The Protestant Reformation ushered in a renewed interest in the ordinary person, arguing that what we do for work matters. Holiness is not confined to the priesthood. As Martin Luther comments on Psalm 147, God uses human vocation as a mask of himself. How does God strengthen the gates of the city? By city planners and architects. How does God protect the city? Through police officers and firefighters. How does God bless children? Through teachers and administrators. How does God feed his people? Through farmers and packagers and truck drivers. In these and other ways, our vocations are God’s invitations to do his work in the world. This is where the Reformed notion of vocation sings: your work is meaningful regardless of whether or not you can articulate that, whether or not that’s a tangible feeling.
Unless, of course, you have a bullshit job. (Pardon Dan Graeber’s French). But what does the techno-hellscape of today cultivate other than bullshit jobs? These jobs do not produce or accomplish an especially meaningful thing. They do not build buildings or protect the innocent; they manage people, check boxes, give surveys out, make higher-paid people feel important, etc. The ultimate purpose simply seems to be keeping people employed because if they are employed, they are paid, which means the economic purchasing power can keep flowing. Even state governments admitted (publicly, no less!) how many of us work bullshit jobs. For example, how many of our jobs became bullshit, I mean “non-essential,” when COVID hit?
Our notion of vocation imagines the way of the world as the world of work, what Josef Pieper calls the “proletarian.” Call it the work-a-day world, or industrialism, or technocracy. Underlying it, we’ve been hoodwinked to think that we are fettered to the process of work. Never-ceasing productivity is life: whatever we do, we ought to be doing something special. We now live to work. We’ve used industrial productivity and masqueraded it as a Christian virtue. We’ve overvalued the world of work. We’re glorified functionaries who have been trained for employment. We’ve accepted that we’re destined to be a cog in the proverbial machine — but we can be a meaningful cog. We can be passionate about being a cog.
But what if we moved from thinking of vocation as what will make me happy and whole to what will make me more faithful in attending to my place and my family? Instead of seeking work to make us happy, what if we looked to rightly belong to a people — who your work is with and who it is for? Kurt Armstrong has written about his vocation as a handyman. He wrote that “Handyman work is not my passion, not by a long shot. I don’t hate my work, but I don’t do it because I love it. I do it because I love my wife and kids and want to provide for them.” Armstrong’s household is the center of his life, not his job.
In some ways, the sexual revolution and the egalitarian movement promised that women, too, can work outside the home and find happiness external to family ties. As laudable (and necessary) as this was, it traded one set of problems for another. Now women could be just as dysfunctional as men without consequence. Imagine a world, however, where men and women were called to mutual homemaking, where the career vs family struggle disappeared altogether. How would our homes be different if we were building something together versus being exhausted away from home and apart? Instead, we’re part of an exploitive economy that doesn’t end with the products we buy or those who make them. The exploitation comes after us all, twisting our desires and priorities into mutual enmity.
Rather than pursuing a meaningful and fulfilling vocational career, a higher calling pursues good work. Here’s how Wendell Berry defines good work:
Good human work honors God’s work. Good work uses nothing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit.
Good work, indeed, a good vocation, is less about feeling something special or significant about your job and more about the affection you give to the material world in and through your vocation. It’s doing good work with and for good people. The specifics of what that work is (and how much money you make) is secondary.
This vision of vocation would require a different orientation and imagination of what the world is and what it is for. As it is, we’re after the undefined “objective,” but with no lineage or family to honor. We become “the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated,” which sounds like a success to the modern world. But the next word in Wendell Berry’s poem is “homeless.” All the promises of work end in aloneness. We’re after personal success and happiness, disconnected from family or roots. The goal is to be financially and, as a result, relationally independent. This leads to a loveless and heartless life.
Of course, I have no romantic visions about such a change in common life. COVID restrictions taught me that working at home with small children is damn near impossible and comes with a frustrating challenge. But why did I view my children as obstructions? How has work gotten so important that my kids were/are productivity impediments and, therefore, a problem? How did my vision get so blurred? Well, I live in a work-a-day world. We’re not building something together as a family. I’m advancing my career. Any sort of dependence or need becomes an issue.
I currently work in academia. Just saying that makes me feel like a nerd. But you know what? I love it. I’m not sure students feel their great need, but it sure does feed my deep passion. It’s what I personally love and what I’ve been affirmed in. Like Pam Beasley from the Office felt in Chili’s, I feel God in this classroom (most days).
At my college, one pillar of our mission statement is “preparation for calling and career.” It’s a big emphasis as students matriculate in and throughout their careers. I teach a freshman-level entry course, where a big component is discerning one’s calling based on their gifts and interests. So far, I’ve never read a paper where a student’s family or place has played any role in vocational discernment. It’s about paycheck and passion, baby.
I also teach a senior-level integrative exit course. There are three weeks devoted to vocation wherein I try to deprogram them from thinking that their jobs will make them happy. I’m not sure it works, but I hope a larger vision will make them question what makes a good life. I know that many have dreams of changing the world and making a difference and starting a career. But I also know that we will release several hundred students a year to drab, boring, and entry-level jobs. And if they don’t quit these passionless professions, they may spend years working these seemingly pointless, meaningless, dumb jobs to enter a middle-management role where they become responsible for other pointless, meaningless, dumb jobs. All in search of a bigger dream and bigger paycheck so that they maybe – just maybe – they could one day be happy doing the thing that never actually made them happy. I think it’s my job to disillusion them before they get there. I hope.
Perhaps God wants to meet them in the ordinary and mundane. Maybe God’s favor doesn’t rest on the success or failure of their upward mobility. I think God may want to meet them right where they are — even in their non-dream job. God may be happy with them just showing up.
In this dream job of mine, I may be let go tomorrow. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but higher education is in an enrollment crisis. I may not be needed. Or someone may come along who is unimpressed with my Wendell Berry quotations, and then bye-bye to all my passion and dreams. I admit: that would be a tough pill to swallow. I would lament that loss. But I hope I wouldn’t be crushed. I hope that I haven’t attached my meaning, purpose, and happiness to a job that cares very little about who’s doing it. I would hope that I care more that I simply do my work, don’t complain, and don’t have a ladder-climbing five-year plan. Jobs — even vocations — are impersonal. Institutions don’t care. That’s not a knock on my employer. It’s the reality for anyone.
As for my friend, John, he’s moved on from think tanks and higher ed. He’s using his advanced degrees tangentially in the educational sphere. His job satisfaction could be better, but he’s also not looking for a job to fulfill him. He’s primarily a husband and father. He has time to devote to those important good works. There could always be more satisfaction, of course. We’re pilgrims after all.
Often, talk of vocation leads to an excuse for careerism. And while I hope you always feel fulfillment in how you make money, we must love something more than a career and more than money. There should be a common love that goes beyond the 9-5 or the productivity we do. We need a more connected, rooted, and affectionate vision of vocation, or maybe we can just call it good work.
Alex Sosler is an assistant professor of Bible and ministry at Montreat College. He researches spiritual formation, education, and theology. His upcoming book, A Short Guide to Spiritual Formation, is available for preorder from Baker Academic and Amazon.
COMMENTS
8 responses to “Overselling Vocation”
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I first read Dorothy Sayers pamphlet,” Why Work” doing independent study with Glen Sadler at Westmont College in 1971. It stuck and informed my life as a mother of four and then as an English teacher. It’s easily available online, and the fifteen minutes it will take to absorb it is potentially life changing.
I always enjoy your insights Alex , thank you for the article
There is a huge difference between “vocation=work/job/career” and the theology of vocation as taught by Luther that continues in confessional Lutheran circles today. The theology of vocation is about loving and serving the people in your life–the focus of your callings is on your relationships with the people connected to those callings. The book “God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life” by Gene Edward Veith Jr. helped me to have a much better understanding of this.
As someone building in Workforce Development, my hope is that people find a sense of satisfaction in the “work of their hands.” Giving 40+ hours a week to a career that you don’t love, or even like, is sad to me, because I know there is work out there that would likely satisfy them more, particularly here in America. Whether the “fault” of the unfulfilling work is a crummy environment (as in the case of your friend John), or a lack of understanding of what type of work would really satisfy, it’s certainly possible to find employment that does make you happy, and doesn’t conflict with the integrity of your values, like being home for your family in the evenings and on the weekends.
In the many conversations about vocation/careers/work that I’ve had over the years, I’ve come to learn that for some of us, how we spend that 40+ hours matter deeply to our life satisfaction. For others, not so much.
I have a friend who tolerates his job. He’s been working for the State Department for twenty-four years and is only a handful away from retirement. While he doesn’t find any “passion” in his day job, he doesn’t need it. For him, the steady paycheck that keeps food on his table, a roof over his head, enough extra for his toys, and the flexibility in his hours to accommodate his family schedule…all of this is enough. He doesn’t need that “love of work” because he lives out his passion on the weekends and the fishing trips he takes with his father.
For another friend, the dissatisfaction in their daily vocation was enough to push them to quit their job, put their finances at risk, all to follow their passion. Putting 40+ hours into something they weren’t excited about was soul crushing and intolerable. These are the people who find people like me for help.
I think both are right.
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I will say, that in all of my conversations about career satisfaction over the years, one that still “haunts” me is a statement along the lines of, “It’s a great privilege to be in a situation to choose work that is satisfying. Many people around the world work for survival without the privilege to consider their enjoyment or happiness.”
I think it’s an appropriate perspective to keep as we discuss vocation and passion. It’s a privilege to even have this discussion.
Great work, Alex. Thanks for the thought-provoking article.
This is really wonderful Alex: thank you! I teach a similar vocation and theology class at my Christian College (“English and the Professions”) and love what you say here (just going add this to my reading list going forward). Coming out of a non-Reformed, its all going to burn form of Conservative Evangelicalism, and teaching and living a lot of such types now, I do hear your concerns but also realize that so many of the people I grew up with and live with now have almost no sense of work as a calling or as a way of doing the work of God in the world. Some people in short need to make less of work in my expereince (as you say) and not make vocation into a clandestine form of careerism, but I am confronted more often with folks who desperately need to make more out of work and imagine that the work of the church/Chruch might be more than evangelism, mercy or politics.
[…] Take a page, for example, from a recent piece at Mockingbird, which articulates much of the current thought on this within Chr… […]
[…] a page, for example, from a recent online essay in Christian commentary site Mockingbird titled “Overselling Vocation.” Writing about the false promises of the sexual revolution and the egalitarian movement, author […]
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