Without Meaning: A Call for Radical Renewal in the Theology of Vocation
I have a love/hate relationship with the theology of vocation.
The other day, a student at The Lutheran Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where I serve as a campus pastor, said he wanted to know what I thought about “calling.” He stepped into my office — uncertain of his future and unsettled by another student’s confidence in what she had discerned as her call to ministry. What was he to make of not knowing precisely where he was called? What was he missing? How would he find the meaningfulness that clearly discerning a call seemed to promise?
On its face, the query seemed pretty benign. It was another campus ministry conversation regarding the idea that each person has something out there that God or the world wants them to do, and if they simply discover with some sort of precision what that thing is, they will acquire authentic meaning and identity — those most valuable of goods for the privileged college-educated elite in late modernity. It was par for the course.
In truth, I’ve made the better part of a career as a Campus Pastor courting just such questions, drawing them out of the students with whom I work. After all isn’t that the gig — to walk with students who are trying to make sense of who they are and make choices about what they will do with their lives? I was deeply inculcated in college and in my first stint working on a campus to hear calling in the voice of Frederick Buechner who famously (or infamously) framed vocation as “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Calling, as I was taught it, is the place where joy and passion intersect the world’s need. Calling is about finding meaningful work. Meaningful in the twofold sense that it affirms your gifts, talents, desires, enneagram number, and in the sense that it matters for the life of the world.
This operative definition has continued to make its presence known in the form of countless blogs, sermons, and vocation-based conferences saturating the language of vocation with Buechner and his acolytes’ framework.
Yet, I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with this notion of calling and vocation.
Where the church and its related institutions are continuing to teach vocation principally in this way, we’re pushing what journalist Derek Thompson has talked about as “workism.” We’re teaching Christians “to make their passion their career and, if they don’t have a calling, [they’re] told not to yield until they find one” — as Thompson describes it, “to make our desks our altars.”
What’s so seductive here is the way in which many Christians, especially Protestants, hear this as something like Martin Luther’s universal priesthood. For Luther, they argue, all work is holy work insofar as it serves one’s neighbor. Luther, at a time when gender norms were hard and fast, argued rather unexpectedly for the profound goodness and dignity of a man changing his child’s diapers. (See Martin Luther, On the Estate of Marriage, in The Annotated Luther vol. 5: Christ in the World, 67-70). For Luther, they might assert, our desk, studio, co-working space, or diaper-changing table etc. is our altar. It is the place where we serve God and community. Fair enough.
But what is easily forgotten is that — contrary to some interpretations of Luther’s Small Catechism — Luther actually wasn’t terribly interested in what something means. He was interested in what something is. “Was ist das,” Luther’s common refrain in Luther’s Small Catechism is commonly translated as “What does this mean?” in English translations. However, the more literal and appropriate translation from the German is “What is it?” This small shift in translation toward “meaningfulness” has allowed contemporary hearers in English to assume that the primary question is a hermeneutic one rather than an ontological one. But this is to replace a medieval concern with a late-modern one.
For Luther, changing diapers was never valuable because it conferred something as breezy as late-modern notions of meaningfulness, but because it was necessary for the sake of one’s neighbor. Luther’s notion of calling centered God and the neighbor, not the self.
Luther wasn’t arguing that you should change a diaper because you’re particularly passionate about the work, or because it feels meaningful, or because it offers the diaper-changer some intrinsic benefit.
Sometimes calling is merely, and literally, the shit that needs to get done.
One could even argue here that Luther’s point is that it’s more valuable from a Christian point of view because it’s not terribly meaningful. The work of diaper-changing itself is “insignificant, distasteful, and despised,” Luther writes (On the Estate of Marriage, 67).
What makes it valuable is that it’s done in the Christian faith. Far from the ideology of workism, Luther is arguing that you do it because when you’re liberated from the fascination of the project of fixing the self (i.e. dying with Christ), all the sudden you live in the radical freedom of doing things out of love for the other (i.e. being raised with Christ).
Note that when Luther expounds on vocation, in this case, he does it within the context of the domestic estate. Here vocation is not located principally in a sphere called “work” or “career” but in the wholeness of the life of a Christian.
Thompson writes, “In the past century, the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings — from necessity to status to meaning.” What Thompson traces here mirrors, too, the way that the Christian church has come to understand its own language of calling and vocation post-Reformation.
Gone is the sense of calling in doing the dirty jobs of which Luther wrote, replaced by the oppressive and fleeting idea of calling as a quixotic quest for meaning itself. Especially for college students today, there’s a deep sense of the way that work confers identity. And with it, a deep ever-present anxiety about the potential for erasure if they cannot find work that authentically expresses who they are.
Today, especially in relatively affluent college-educated circles, calling and vocation have no need for their theological origins, since workism as a free-standing religious perspective has largely cut any remaining ties. Indeed, it is the gospel of workism that promises spiritual fulfillment through the discovery of meaningful work. For workism, this, and this alone, is the good news. But it’s the kind of good news you have to work for.
When the church teaches calling and vocation in ways that push the necessity of passion, gladness, and meaningfulness, it unwittingly ends up propping up a rather enticing idol that meshes neatly with the late-capitalist impulse to be productive. This way of teaching vocation authorizes workism through a divine mandate.
Keep hustling, it whispers to us, your dream job is out there. Meaning is just around the corner. God laid out the bread crumbs for you to follow. Don’t stop clawing away until you find it.
But, as Thompson points out, “Our jobs were never meant to shoulder the burdens of a faith, and they are buckling under the weight. A staggering 87 percent of employees are not engaged at their job … That number is rising by the year.”
Thompson’s prescription for this false gospel, “is to make work less central.”
For a renewed theology of calling and vocation to push back against workism will not be easy — especially within the realm of campus ministry where the anxiety related to work is thick. Yet, imagine the relief if, just for a moment, we were dispossessed of the notion that God wants us to find that job that perfectly expresses who we are and who God created us to be. How liberating would that be?
I suspect that the language of calling and vocation is not beyond redemption. It can be reclaimed. But if the church wants to reclaim the language of calling and vocation, it will need to begin by letting go of the idea that meaningful work is the locus of human thriving and hope.
We need to decenter “work” in our discussion of vocation and re-center the work of God in Jesus Christ.
The church needs to develop a way of speaking about vocation that moves the locus of identity away from human action toward reliance on the work of God in Christ. Such a shift opens up different horizons: horizons that have at their center the necessity of sabbath (as a work-stoppage which reminds us of our limited reliance on our own work), non-productive activity (as a cluster practices which displace production/work as the primary mode of meaning-making), and work as neighbor love (as a practice of freedom untethered from the weightiness of identity-creation).
This is not a merely academic exercise. I suspect such an account might really be needed balm for the students in Campus Ministry offices asking, “Who am I if I can’t figure out my calling?”
