Vocation: A Matter of Whole-Life Obedience

From the Desk of Dr. Jon Thompson, Executive Director

Our Paideia Fellows recently explored and discussed the topic of Vocation, using texts from the excellent volume Leading Lives that Matter. We often take the question of vocation to be simply the question of career—what am I to do during work hours for paid employment? And one of our readings certainly emphasized this aspect. Dorothy Sayers’ essay Why Work? holds forth that the main purpose of human beings is to work, and Sayers holds ‘work’ very closely to the idea of creation or acts of creativity. (Being a playwright and author herself, one can understand perhaps her equation of these two things.) Sayers famously (and boldly) told her fellow Christians that their aim ought not to be to serve humanity by their work—or to subordinate work to life—but to ‘serve the work’ itself. The moral theologian Gilbert Meilander responded to Sayers’ famous argument by claiming that we do in fact work to live: our paid employment may (if we are fortunate) be enjoyable in itself. But many people don’t get that privilege. Yet their work provides their needs, serves their fellow human beings, and provides them with the capacity for the things in life that matter more: friendship, worship, and service.

While Sayers and Meilander certainly raise vital issues about the questions of ‘work’ and ‘vocation,’ I believe there is a more coherent Christian path forward. On this view, vocation is the single, yet multifaceted, calling of God on each human person to an individual life. In other words, vocation is the particular life God has called each person to live—including one’s paid employment, one’s service to neighbor, one’s family obligations and joys, and one’s worship of the living God. This, I think, better captures Paul’s command to the church in Colossae: ‘Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.’ (Col. 3:17) But, we must note, learning the wisdom to lead such a life of integrity in all these spheres is itself a whole life’s work.