Callings: When Work Is about More than Money
By William C. Placher-Wabash College
Last summer's version of a divine call, at least in the movies, came when Morgan Freeman called Steve Carell to build an ark, but those of you as old as I am probably still remember Bill Cosby's early comedy version of the same story. You may recall how it began.
Noah!
Noah!
This is the Lord, Noah.
Yeaaah, Riiiiight.
I suppose that little vignette captures the suspicions many of us have concerning the very idea of being called by God. If we heard a disembodied voice calling us to change our lives, our first thought would be, not obedience, but psychiatry. Talking with young people, as I sometimes do, about ordained ministry as a career, I find that the very language of "call" often scares them off. It claims something they are reluctant to say about themselves.
But I don't think "call" or its Latin version "vocation" need imply a voice from the sky. The best definition of call I know comes from the preacher-novelist Frederick Buechner: God calls you, he says, to "the kind of work that you need most to do and that the world most needs to have done....The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." Finding yourself called isn't so much a matter of hearing a voice as of finding such a place, somewhere that both enables you to flourish and makes the world better. Many places can be a place like that-certainly not just ordained ministry. Indeed, I doubt we will think constructively about how pastors or priests, rabbis or imams are called unless we explore the possibility that "calling" is a word that could also apply to the rest of us.
Now I am a historian of Christian theology. That's my job, and I even think it's my calling. So I'd like to reflect with you today about some things we can learn about vocation from the history of Christian thought. I know that some of you come from other religious traditions or none at all. But in a room full of smart people, I reckon I'd better stick to my own area of expertise, so I'll be concentrating on the field and the tradition I know best, in the hope that later on some of you can help me think about whether what I've said applies to your expertise or your tradition.
Let me start with some general remarks about vocation or calling-I'll be using the words interchangeably-before looking at how the idea of vocation has changed through Christian history-first at the time of the Reformation, then in the modern era, and then in our own time-before ending with what that implies for thinking about vocation today. I don't mean this to be just a history lesson. Right now, in our time and place, I believe that many young people are hungry for some meaning that vocation might have in their lives, and some history might help us sort out the kind of advice we can give them.
Work that you need to do and that the world needs to have done. There's certainly work that needs doing in the world-all kinds of work. I think of students who graduated from Wabash a year ago. One is in Peace Corps in Niger, maybe the poorest country in the world, teaching local farmers how to build small earthen dams to prevent the loss of good soil when the rare but powerful rains come. Twenty-three years old, he's the only American within fifty miles, but once a month he hitchhikes to the nearest city. Well, he says, we get a weekend off once a month, and, anyway, you usually get dysentery about that often and have to go see the doctor. He's having the time of his life. Another of our graduates is going to medical school, and wants someday to work with kids who have cancer. Another, the former editor of our college newspaper, is teaching inner city fifth graders as part of the Teach for America program. Another thinks he's in on the ground floor of a high-tech company working on a product I'm not supposed to tell you about that may change all our lives someday.
They are all doing work the world needs to have done, and they're all having a great time doing it. At least for now, they have found a place where their deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
Such calls have been part of Christianity since its beginnings by the Sea of Galilee. As Jesus walked there one day, the Gospel of Matthew tells us, "he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea-for they were fishermen. And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.' Immediately they left their nets and followed him." The great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred by the Nazis, observed that the commentators keep trying to add explanation to this story of call. Surely Simon and Andrew had known Jesus before. Or maybe there had been a significant decline in the price of fish in northern Galilee lately, and they were already looking for another line of work. But the text offers no such context. "Immediately they left their nets and followed him." No preliminaries, no explanatory background. It is Jesus who calls, and so they follow.
But what does it mean to follow Jesus? Virtually from the start, Christians have disagreed. In the fourth century, a twenty-year old Egyptian named Antony had recently lost both his parents, when he walked into a church just as the Gospel was read, "If you would be perfect, go and sell what you have and give it to the poor, and come follow me." So he gave away all his inheritance and went off into the desert to be a monk.
Another early Egyptian Christian, Clement of Alexandria, took a different view. If you give away all your money, Clement said, you will not have the resources to help people. "For if no one had anything, what room would be left...for giving?" Don't let wealth be your ultimate goal, but don't hesitate to accumulate it as a means to the end of helping others.
Partly, there are real disagreements here, but partly there's a recognition that different people have different callings-that theme continued throughout Christian history. In the thirteenth century, a young Italian was praying before a cross in an old ruined church just outside the village of Assisi. The cross, incidentally, is still there; my friend Bill Cook can tell you all about it. It spoke to Francis, saying, "Go and repair my house, which, as you see, is falling completely into ruin." His father, a wealthy cloth merchant, had given Francis a shipment of fine cloth to sell for a profit, but Francis gave all the money to repair the church. His angry father brought a lawsuit against his son before the local bishop, and Francis gave everything he owned, stripped off all his clothes, handed them to his father and stood naked before the bishop, who, embarrassed at the nudity of this young man in the middle of the city square, gave him a cheap old robe, and off Francis went into the woods, singing one of the new songs of the French troubadours.
In contrast, at about the same time, Louis IX, king of France, kept his crown and his possessions, but he used his power and influence to work for justice and peace in all his territories. The Catholic church has judged that he too was a saint.
What strange stories they can be, these stories of people transformed by a call from God that redirected the whole of their lives, some called to poverty, some to power. We hear these stories with wonder and fear, maybe a bit hoping that something so extraordinary might happen to us, but also dreading the thought that everything we have and are might be so disrupted. Such stories continue to happen down to the present, but other things have changed with respect to how Christians think about vocation.
I suppose the Reformation represented the most dramatic change in the history of the Christian understanding of vocation. For most of the Middle Ages, priests, monks, and nuns had callings; everyone else just had a job. God called some people, like Antony and Francis, to the religious life; in Medieval times, no one else had a call.
Martin Luther disagreed. In one of his Christmas sermons, he preached on the story of the shepherds to whom angels appear. They go to Bethlehem to see the baby Jesus, promised savior of the world, and then they go back to their flocks of sheep. What? Luther demanded. You mean they didn't go off and join a monastery? Nosiree (I'm translating loosely from the Middle High German)-they went back to take care of their sheep. That was their job, and God wants us to tend to our jobs, whatever they may be. "To leave one's own calling and to attach oneself to alien undertakings, surely amounts to walking on one's ears, to putting a hat on one's feet and a shoe on one's head, and turning everything upside down." A revolution had begun, with the new idea that any honest job could be a calling, if it was what God wanted you to do.
To be sure, there was a conservative edge to the Reformation view of calling. Your job is your job. Shut up and be glad you're doing it. Not much room for upward social mobility. But within those limits, there was the egalitarian idea that prince and preacher and peasant were all equally called by God. As John Calvin wrote, "From this will arise also a singular consolation: that no task will be so sordid and base, provided you obey your calling in it, that it will not shine and be reckoned very precious in God's sight." Three hundred years later, Walt Whitman wrote in "Song of Myself, "And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero," and everyone thought he was a radical. But he was repeating ideas enunciated long before by Luther and Calvin.
My own favorite phrase for capturing the best side of this Reformation idea comes from the seventeenth century English Puritan preacher Joseph Hall. He writes: "The homeliest service that we do in an honest calling, though it be but to plough or dig, if done in obedience and conscience of God's commandment, is crowned with an ample reward....God loveth adverbs, and cares not how good, but how well."
God loveth adverbs. The governor of the state, the president of the university, the managing partner of the law firm-those are all nouns, offices, positions. Performing brain surgery, preaching every Sunday, winning the Super Bowl-those are verbs, things you do, things you accomplish. But God loveth adverbs, not what you do but how you do it. Whatever you do, you can do it cheerfully, conscientiously, faithfully, and that's what God loves.
I've described that recognition of the value of all work as a product of the Reformation, and I think it was initially, but it has been adopted more widely. Among Catholics, for instance, the Second Vatican Council declared that in "even the most ordinary activities" people can "justly consider that by their labor they are unfolding the Creator's work, consulting the advantages of their fellow human beings, and contributing by their personal industry to the realization of the divine plan." In every sort of human activity, people can "as individuals and as members of society" hope to "pursue their total vocation and fulfill it." The Catholic council declares in effect that God loveth adverbs.
I wish I could say that the idea pervades our society. Too often, though, we value most the work that makes the most money and doesn't involve getting dirty. Those who teach our children or guard our streets get little recognition in such a scheme, and those who pick up our garbage or clean up our beds in our old age too often get something like contempt. That may be the contemporary attitude, or the American attitude, but, for both Protestants and Catholics, it's not the Christian attitude-nor, I think, the Jewish or Muslim attitude. All our religious traditions call us to a set of values about jobs that are at odds with the dominant beliefs of our culture.
I thought about such implied values a lot last year, when my mother was dying, and received wonderful care as she fell into senility from people who get little pay and less respect. People like them will be caring for many of us at the end of our lives. Quite apart from Christian faith, you'd think that just common sense would teach us how important their work is, yet somehow our money-centered, power-centered values keep us from seeing it. We need to recover that Reformation sense of the value of any job as a calling.
That Reformation insight was one important transformation in the understanding of vocation. Another change came a century or two later, with the increasing possibility of choosing a career.
As a teacher of college students, I spend a lot of time asking them, in one way or another, what they want to do when they grow up. Most people, most of the time, in most of the world, haven't had the luxury of even thinking about that question. A peasant on a Medieval manor, a slave in the American south before the Civil War, a shoemaker a hundred years ago, most people in an Indian or African or Chinese village today. Ask their children, "What career are you considering?" and they'd rightly think you were crazy. Boys followed in their fathers' footsteps; girls expected to help their husbands and care for their children. That was the only choice they had.
How different things have come to be! Producer of organic vegetables or astrophysicist, struggling artist or wealthy industrialist, neurosurgeon or kindergarten teacher-all those choices and a thousand more may confront a sufficiently smart and ambitious twenty-two year old, female or male. Glorious freedom and, at the same time, heavy burden. How do you know how to make the right choice? How do you define what "right choice" means? Many a college senior would be at least briefly grateful if someone were to say, "OK, I'm ordering you into this career; you don't have a choice."
But we can't lose a freedom once given, even if we want to. Join the Marines, and they'll tell you what to do, but joining the Marines was still your choice.
In the modern West, then, we live in a time and place where, for most of us, we have both the joy and the burden of vocational choice. More recently, even in the last generation or two, we have come to live in a time full of doubt about single-minded devotion to one's vocation. The word "workaholic," near as I can track it down, first appeared in 1971. My father, who had died five years earlier of a heart attack, was a perfect case study of a syndrome that had not yet been named. Working late every night, making every extra effort, was for his generation not a disease but a virtue, not just the way to succeed but the way to be a good person.
He remains the man I most admire. I wished he had lived longer, but I don't mean to criticize the way he lived his life. But all that hard work, which his generation saw as a virtue, my generation has come to view ambivalently, and the generation after us, I think, considers with even deeper suspicion. One of the grounds of that suspicion is that, while my dad was working that hard, my mother was staying home and raising me. I knew, unquestionably, that he loved me-but I didn't see him a lot. Two parents who both put in the long hours my dad did will find it hard to raise children responsibly, so if both parents want careers, we find ourselves reexamining what it should mean to think of your job as a vocation.
My job shouldn't come first in my life. If the big promotion to a job in California requires that my spouse abandon a career, or that my kids, just at a difficult time in their lives, be uprooted from friends and grandparents, maybe I should turn down that promotion.
The Reformation taught us that any job could be a vocation, and that pursuing one's vocation well brings glory to God. That brings a "singular consolation," Calvin said, to those whose work is sordid and base. But it could also bring people to devote themselves to their jobs with a passion that left little room for the other aspects of their lives, and many of us have come to wonder if that's a good thing.
I suppose we've also started to wonder if every job should be seen as a vocation. The Reformation taught us that the peasant farmer, the cobbler, the street-sweeper could all feel proud of their jobs and the way that, through them, they honored God. And maybe that even made good sense in a sixteenth century village. But Karl Marx made the case that it doesn't make good sense in a modern industrialized society. In earlier times, Marx said-many of you know all about this argument-the local cobbler made the shoes for himself, his family, and his neighbors. When he saw a neighbor walking down the village lane with a comfortable gait, he could think with pride, "I made those shoes; they're serving well."
But those days are gone, Marx argued. The worker on the modern assembly line contributes only one routinized operation to the making of the whole. It's hard to feel much pride in the car rolling off the end of the line when all you did was tighten the bolts in the right rear tire. Moreover, who knows where that car will go and who will drive it-unlikely that it will be anyone you know. This is the condition Marx called "alienated labor," and today it's a condition as likely to afflict a young lawyer in a big firm as an assembly line worker. Karl Marx was wrong about a great many things, but he caught something right in his description of alienated labor.
Now what does a preacher say to a congregation of alienated laborers? Do you say, "That seemingly unimportant job you have is just as valuable as any other in the eyes of God; praise God by giving it your best"? Remember the line from Walt Whitman: "And there is no trade or employment but the young man [or young woman] following it may become a hero." Really? Or is it more honest to admit that in our world today only some of us are lucky enough to have jobs that it makes sense to think of as vocations? Other people might better say, "My calling from God is loving my spouse and raising my kids and being a good citizen in my community. My job isn't a vocation; it's just a way to pay the bills." In a fascinating book called Waiting for the Weekend, Witold Rybczynski writes that people used to display their competence on the job, while holidays were for messing around. But if your job involves no place for imagination or skill, you may have the chance to do meaningful work only on the weekend.
So some contemporary Christian ethicists argue that we should just get rid of the idea that God calls us to our job. There's good evidence, after all, that the Bible never really proposes such an idea. Amos says he was called to be a prophet; he never claims that being a herdsman and dresser of sycamore trees was a calling. Jesus' apostles were called to follow him; no one ever said that fishing had previously been for them a vocation. So if this talk of vocation leads to workaholism, if it forces people with meaningless jobs to pretend to find meaning in them, and it's not really a biblical idea anyway, maybe better stop talking about vocation altogether.
Another reason for questioning the language of "vocation" is the increasingly secular nature of our society. Lots of people today don't believe in a divine being of any sort, and there's a question of whether it makes sense to talk about "calling" if there isn't anyone out there to call us. Not Bill Cosby's voice from the sky, to be sure, but some orderer of our affairs who so arranges things that the work that brings us gladness finds some fit with the work the world needs to have done. If many of our contemporaries don't believe in such a caller, might it be best even for those of us who hold to religious faith to stop talking about callings?
I don't think so. I think we need to talk about the work we do in our jobs as part of God's calling for us.
Now first some qualifications. I believe that our primary calling is to serve God. If my job demands that I betray my faith or work against the good of my fellow human beings, then maybe I should quit. If my job gets in the way of properly caring for my family, then maybe I should find a different job. Moreover, for some people, women and men, the care of their family may be their vocation. Some handicapped folks, some of us in old age, may still find ways to pursue careers triumphantly, but for others just being a patient and loving human being in the midst of affliction may be what God has called them to do. For some, their job may be a way of feeding themselves and their families, and they may find their calling in loving parenthood, or in service to the church, or in spending their weekends organizing a soccer league that benefits the whole community. Not everyone has to be thrilled about their job.
But some of us have the privilege of having jobs in which, at least on the good days, we find joy and where we think we can make a difference in the world for good. It feels like this is what God wants us to be doing, and doing as well as we can. I think that's one of the things it can mean to have a vocation. Given the amount of time we put into our jobs, how odd it would be to refuse to think of how we are serving God in that part of our lives. So here I am, doing other things too, but also doing a job. How can I serve God's glory in that job?
Young people, I think, are waiting to have us ask them hard questions about callings. As I said early on, I find the current generation of college students eager to find ways to serve others. Many of them respond to the call of the Peace Corps or Teach for America-or the Marines. But too often their religious communities, their churches or synagogues or whatever do not call them to anything difficult. We've been so anxious to keep them happy and coming to a place of worship that we confine ourselves to taking them bowling or setting up the ping-pong tables and feeding them pizza afterwards. We want to assure them that coming to a place of worship can be fun. But there are lots of places to have fun; if we just compete at that level, we will probably lose. But if your place of worship is the place where you glorify God and serve humanity, well there the competition might not be so stiff. And I think young people, more than we sometimes realize, are looking for such a place. They are more eager to be called to challenge and service than we are to call them.
Maybe our primary call is not to our jobs, but it might be. If we're lucky, or blessed, we will find that place where our great gladness and the world's great hunger meet, and we will rejoice that there we have a chance to live lives of service to the glory of God, that there we will sense ourselves to have been called and will find our vocations.