What Does the Search for Your Vocation Look Like?
What will you live for ? What are you called to be and to do? These questions express a search for meaning and purpose in one's life—your “vocation” in the fullest and original sense of the term.1
Within the last century “vocation” has accrued a much narrower, merely occupational sense—witness the term “vocational education,” for example. In our most sustained desires, though, the rich original sense of vocation has never stopped dogging us. Life seems empty unless we sense that what we do and who we are is part of something larger than just a livelihood. We want to bring ourselves into some sense of connection with the world, some genuine service to it.2
Yet how can you, as a particular person, discern how to do that? It is dangerous to generalize, but the search for meaning and purpose in one's life does have some markers.
• Finding your vocation is not just “discovering your bliss .”3 The connection of vocation to service to the world shouts loudly and clearly that meaning and purpose in life are more than personal happiness. To be sure, living with meaning and purpose manifests the joy of being alive, but it is more than that. It is living with a discernment that something for you truly makes sense . And it makes sense even after all the searching, critical examination of life and society that comes with a liberal education such as you get at PLU—no, not “even after” such critical examination, but especially because of it! The stakes in what you live for are too big—for yourself, and for the world—for you not to use the best mental faculties you have to be as discerning as you can be in pursuing something truly worth living for. Sometimes this process is uncomfortable, even painful, and it certainly involves frankly seeing the world's pain as well as its possibilities.
• Your “gifts” are terribly important, but you do not necessarily find meaning and purpose for your life by discerning your most exceptional talents. In the search to find your calling, you may suppose you should be looking for your greatest talents. Indeed, the search for vocation has a lot to do with discovering one's talents, but it is more than that. People might tell you, even correctly, where your greatest talents lie, but using and manifesting those may still not make your heart sing. You might, for example, not see that developing those talents makes much of a genuine contribution to the world. In searching for meaning and purpose in your life, listen to your heart and to the world, not just your talents. No objective psychological inventory of your greatest native capacities alone will do the trick.
• Insights come in part from asking “big-enough” questions.4 For example, not “what will the neighbors think?” but “what makes sense for me to do for the world as I have now come to understand it?” Not “how can I make good money, more money?” but “what is the meaning of money, and how much is enough?” Big-enough questions challenge you; they push you to make some deeper sense of the world, and deeper meaning for your life. Perhaps, in fact, much of the meaning and purpose that people finally discern for their lives stems simply from continually asking such questions as they bump up against the world. The answers may not always be clear, but the questions continue to act as “sparks of instructive fire.”5
• Your search will involve hard work, experimentation, real choice, and sometimes downright courage. Discovering meaning and purpose for your life is not likely to come through any orders from on high, or in any one instant. It involves hard work , serious experimentation with possible and real options, always choice , and sometimes courage . These characteristics make what you ultimately find authentically yours, and all the sweeter to gain. Such hard work, wide exposure to different viewpoints and experiences, and authentic choice will not likely pay off in any sudden revelation of your calling. The insights usually come in glimpses, as still small voices in daily life.
• Despite all the hard work and choice that go into it, forming a sense of your vocation will require letting the world shape you. It is a matter both of self-created meaning, and of “destiny.” Po Bronson surmises at the end of his best-selling What Should I Do With My Life?6 that, previously, when he started out to write that book, he wanted “to change the world. Now I'm open to letting it change me.” The world calls—your job is to let it in. And even before that, your first job may be to put yourself in a position for the world to get in. That means, for example, not being afraid to associate with people very different from yourself, not always playing it safe in looking for and taking a particular job, or deciding to travel or study in parts of the world that you are nervous about visiting.
• A rich sense of vocation will allow you to overcome the debilitating opposition between personal ambition and compassion for others.7 You can easily beat yourself up with personal doubts, and beat others up with doubts, too: “In wanting so much to succeed, aren't I just being personally ambitious, not really living to help others?” Or about someone else: “If she really rejected that opportunity which had such obvious potential for personal prestige in order to pursue something else she thinks is more meaningful, isn't she still acting for her own sense of self-satisfaction?” In the process of developing a sense of meaning and purpose, however, the call of the world is powerful enough to blunt those questions—never totally silence them, perhaps, for they shouldn't be silenced. But it allows you to put them aside enough to act in the world with enthusiasm and creativity, and without duplicity.
• In your search, it helps to have real mentors. You need not only to put yourself in a position where the world can call you to something, and to work hard to discern the glimpses into what life might harbor constructively for yourself. You also need mentors—people who recognize what you could become, who challenge and push you with big-enough questions, who support and encourage you in the often difficult struggle that ensues from those questions, and who inspire you by their own example. Just as with the world, don't shut them off. There is tremendous pressure in our society to get on with some viable career, but there is often precious little encouragement and support for asking big-enough questions about your life. Mentors—constructive “tor-mentors,” Levoy has called them8 —can provide you precisely that challenge and encouragement.
A PLU education is about expanding your personal possibilities. It will very likely enhance your success in the world, but it is about much more than that. For Martin Luther the notion of vocation was central to the equal dignity of all persons: people were called to serve neighbor and God in all areas of their lives, including their work and professions. Each occupation was a source of meaning and dignity for those who practiced it, and each could contribute to the humanization of others. But vocation did not apply only to one's work and profession; one's vocation was to serve the dignity and humanization of life in all its realms.
In this vein Martin Luther challenged his own gathering of university students nearly 500 years ago. Perhaps you can hear him challenging yourself today:
You will become more powerful, not that you may make the weak weaker by oppressing them, but that you may make them powerful by raising them up and defending them.
You will become wise, not in order to laugh at the foolish and thereby make them more foolish, but that you may teach them as you yourself would wish to be taught.9
1 The Latin root of “vocation,” “vocare,” means to call, to summon.
2 Theologian Frederick Buechner captured this in his now famous statement that vocation is found “where [our] deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.” Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC , 1973, p. 95.
3 Samuel Torvend, “Professing the Heart's Deep Gladness” Teaching & Learning Forum (newsletter of the Center for Teaching & Learning, Pacific Lutheran University), fall 2003. Not just the quoted phrase, but the claim that it is inadequate as a portrayal of vocation, is Dr. Torvend's suggestion.
4 The phrase “big-enough questions” is from Sharon Daloz Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams (Jossey-Bass, 2000), pp. 137-138.
5 P.L. Travers, quoted by Gregg Levoy, Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life (Three Rivers Press, 1997), p. 7.
6 Random House, 2002, p. 365.
7 Brian Mahan, Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose: Vocation and the Ethics of Ambition (Jossey-Bass, 2002), p. 11.
8 Gregg Levoy, Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life (Three Rivers Press, 1997), pp. 304-305.
9 Martin Luther, from an address at the University Church of Wittenberg , 1519.