what is your vocation in life essay

Calling & Vocation (Overview)

Introduction

When Christians ask about vocation (or "calling"), we usually mean, “Is God calling me to a particular job, profession or type of work?” This is a significant question, because the work we do is important to God. If work is important, it makes sense to ask what work God wants us to do.

In the Bible, God does indeed call people—some people, at least—to particular work, and gives all people various kinds of guidance for their work. We will explore biblical accounts of these “calls” in depth. Although scripture seldom actually uses the word “call” to describe God's guidance to jobs, occupations, or tasks, these occurrences in the Bible do correspond to what we usually mean by a vocational “calling.” So, as a preliminary answer, we can say “yes,” God does lead people to particular jobs, occupations, and types of work. But in the Bible, the concept of calling goes deeper than any one aspect of life, such as work. God calls people to become united with himself in every aspect of life. This can only occur as a response to Christ’s call to follow him. The calling to follow Christ lies at the root of every other calling. It is important, however, not to confuse a calling to follow Christ with a calling to become a professional church worker. People in every walk of life are called to follow Christ with equal depth and commitment.

In this article, after exploring the call to follow Christ, we will explore the calling to particular work in light of many of the biblical passages related to calling. We will show how the cooperative work of the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit guides and models our work.

Along the way, we will examine related topics such as:

how to discern God’s calling or guidance in the area of work
the community nature of calling
the calling to church vs. non-church work
callings to the creative and redemptive work of God beyond the paid workplace
the importance of how you work at whatever job you have, and
the ultimate freedom that Christians enjoy in their work.
Types of God’s Calling
The Call to Belong to Christ and Participate in His Redemptive Work in the World

In the Bible, the word “call” is used most often to refer to God's initiative to bring people to Christ and to participate in his redemptive work in the world. This sense of calling is especially prominent in the letters of Paul, whether or not the word “call” is actually used.

The calling to belong to Christ goes deeper than the kinds of workplace “calling” that are the main focus of this article. For this reason, it is important to start our exploration of calling with the call to follow Jesus. It is a call to a restored relationship with God and with other people and with the world around us. It encompasses all of a person’s being and doing. It reminds us that the call to a particular kind of work is secondary to the call to belong to Christ and to participate in his redemption of the world .

In particular, our work must be an integral part of our participation in Christ himself. His work of creation underlies the act of creativity and production in the universe (John 1:1-3). His work of redemption can occur in every workplace through justice, healing, reconciliation, compassion, kindness, humility and patience (Colossians 3:12). Christ’s redemptive work is not limited to evangelism , but encompasses everything necessary to make the world what God always intended it to be. This redemptive work occurs in harmony with the work of creation, production and sustenance that God delegated to humanity in the Garden of Eden . The Bible does not indicate that the work of redemption has superseded the work of creation. Both continue, and in general, Christians are commanded to participate in the work of both creation and redemption. [1]

The Universal Call to Work

Before we can discuss the possibility of God’s guidance to a particular kind of work, we must recognize both that God created people to work and that he commands people to work to the degree they are able. At the beginning of the Bible, God builds work into the essence of humanity. He creates people in his own image, and he himself is a worker . He puts Adam in the garden for the purpose of working it. Later, in various parts of scripture, God commands all people to work to the degree they are able. Work continues through to the very end of the Bible. There is work in the Garden of Eden, and there is work in the New Heaven/New Earth .

Based on these passages, we could say that everyone is “called” to work, as long as we recognize that in this sense “called” really means “created” and “commanded” to work. God created you as a worker, and he commands you to work, even if he doesn’t mail you a specific job offer. It can be difficult to discern the particular work God may be calling you to, but there can be no doubt that he made you as a worker and that he expects you to work, to the degree you are able.

Calling to Life, Not Only to Work

Although we are focusing on God’s call to work, work is only one element of life. God calls us to belong to Christ in every element of our lives.

Our jobs are not necessarily the most important aspect of our calling or our service in Christ’s work of redemption. First, we must remember that work is not limited to paid work. The work God leads us to may be unpaid work, such as raising children or caring for a disabled family member or tutoring students after school. Even if we are called to paid work, God probably doesn’t call many of us to jobs that would prevent us from also serving others through unpaid work.

Even if you have a paid job, the most important work God calls you to may be outside your job. Your job may meet your need for money — which in itself fulfills part of God’s command to work — but it may not fulfill all the other purposes God has for your work. We have seen that caring for children and for aged or incapacitated people is a kind of work, and many people who do it also have another paid job. On the other hand, a so-called hobby could be the most important work God is leading you to. You might work at writing, painting, music, acting, astronomy, leading a youth group, volunteering at a historical society, maintaining a nature reserve or a thousand other kinds of work. If something like this is your calling, you will probably engage it in a more serious way than someone else to whom it is a leisure activity, yet you may still earn your living in some other way. There is a distinction between work and leisure. [1] But any given activity could be work — paid or unpaid — for one person, and leisure for another.

Of course, if you have a job, it is an aspect of your calling for as long as you have it. Regardless of how your job relates to the other activities you are called to, you must do your job as unto God (Colossians 3:23). Therefore, a job can never be only a way to make money. It must also a way to serve others, a way to make the world more like God what intends, and a way to be formed by God. You might not consider your job to be a major aspect of your calling, but God might be using it to prepare you for the future in ways you can't imagine. If you ask God to help you do your job faithfully and to make the most of whatever opportunities it may offer, then it will never be a waste of time.

Second, we must take care not to let work dominate the other elements of life. Even if God leads you to a particular job or profession, you will need to set limits to that work to make room for the other elements of God’s call or guidance in your life. If God leads you to be married and to be a small business owner, for example, then you will have to balance the time and responsibilities of both callings. Work should not crowd out leisure, rest and worship. There is no formula for balancing work and the other elements of life . But take care not to let a sense of calling to a job blind you to God’s calling in the other areas of life. For more on this, see the TOW Project article " Rest and Work ."

God’s Guidance to Particular Work

At this point, we are now able to delve into the possibility of God’s guidance to a particular task, job, career or type of work. We have seen that:

Everyone is called to belong to Christ and to participate in his creative and redemptive work.
Everyone is commanded to work to the degree they are able.
God calls us to a whole life, not just to a job.

Putting these together leads us to conclude that your profession is probably not God’s highest concern for you. God is much more concerned that you come under the saving grace of Christ and participate in his work of creation and redemption, whatever your job may be. Exactly what kind of work you do is a lower-level concern.

Although getting us into the right job or career is not God’s highest concern, that doesn’t mean it is of no concern. In fact, the distinctive work of the Holy Spirit is to guide and empower people for the life and work to which God leads them. In the Old Testament, God gave people the skills needed for their work on occasion, as we have seen with Bezalel and Oholiab in the building of the tabernacle. But now the Spirit routinely guides believers to particular work and gives them the skills they need (1 Corinthians 12:7-10). [1] He provides guidance for both what kind of work people do and how to do that work.

Read on to explore how God guides people to particular work .

Discerning God’s Guidance to a Particular Kind of Work
Direct, Unmistakable Call to Particular Work

With the understanding that the ultimate image of calling in the Bible is the calling to follow Jesus, we are ready to explore callings to particular kinds of work. If by “calling,” we mean a direct, unmistakable command from God to take up a particular task, job, profession or type of work, then calling is very rare in the Bible. No more than a hundred or so people were called by God in this sense. God called Noah to build the ark. God called Moses and Aaron to their tasks (Exodus 3:4, 28:1). He called prophets such as Samuel (1 Samuel 3:10), Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:4-5), Amos (Amos 7:15) and others. He called Abram and Sarah and a few others to undertake journeys or to relocate (which might be taken as a kind of workplace calling). He placed people in political leadership including Joseph, Gideon, Saul, David and David’s descendants. God chose Bezalel and Oholiab as chief craftsmen for the tabernacle (Exodus 31:1-6). Jesus called the apostles and some other of his disciples (e.g., Mark 3:14-19), and the Holy Spirit called Barnabas and Saul to be missionaries (Acts 13:2). The word “call” is not always used, but the unmistakable direction of God for a particular person to do a particular job is clear in these cases.

Aside from these examples, very few people in the Bible received an individual call to a particular kind of work from God. This strongly suggests that a direct calling from God to particular work is also rare today. If God is calling you directly and unmistakably to particular work, you don’t need guidance from an article such as this, except perhaps for the affirmation that, yes, this type of calling does occur in the Bible in rare instances. Therefore, we will not discuss direct, unmistakable, personal calling further, but will instead focus on whether God guides or leads people to particular types of work through less dramatic means.

Guidance to a Job or Profession

Although God does not give most people a direct, individual, unmistakable call to a particular job or profession, God does give guidance to people in less dramatic forms, including Bible study, prayer, Christian community and individual reflection. Developing a general attentiveness to God’s guidance in life is beyond the scope of this article. But we will look at three major considerations for discerning God’s vocational guidance.

The Needs of the World

The first consideration is the needs of the world. The single strongest indicator of what God wants you to do is probably your awareness of what needs to get done to make the world more like what God intends. This doesn’t necessarily mean huge, global problems, but simply anything in the world that needs to be done. Earning a living to support yourself and your family is one example mentioned in the Bible:

Another biblical example is working so as to meet the needs of individuals around you besides your family:

Working to serve the good of the larger society is also a biblical imperative:

Of course, it is impossible for you to meet every need of the world, so you have to narrow it down a bit. Start with needs for which you are personally responsible, such as raising your children or paying your debts. Beyond that, pay attention to needs that you are in a good position to meet, or that few other people are willing to address, or that you find especially pressing. You might be in a good position to run for an elected office in your own city or town, for example, compared to moving away to find work. On the other hand, you might be one of the few people willing to document human rights abuses in a country half way around the world. Or you might become convinced that teaching troubled youth is more pressing than joining a band. Moreover, it might become clear that something in your life other than your job or career is the most important way you are helping to meet the world’s needs. It would be pointless to get a job counseling troubled youth, only to neglect your own children.

The point is that God has given everyone the ability to recognize something of what the world needs. He seems to expect us to notice it and get to work, rather than waiting for a special call from him. There is no biblical formula for translating the needs of the world into a precise job calling. That’s why you need to seek God’s guidance in the various forms of discernment available to you.

Your Skills and Gifts

The second consideration is your skills and gifts. The Bible says that God gives people gifts for accomplishing the work he wants them to do, and it names some of the gifts and skills that God imparts:

As the last two passages show, when Paul discusses the gifts of the Spirit, he is usually referring to their use in the church. But if all work done by Christians is done for the Lord (Colossians 3:23), then we can infer that the Spirit’s gifts are also given for use in the workplace. Gifts and skills therefore provide an element of guidance for discerning God’s guidance.

A number of tools have been developed to help people discern their gifts and make use of them in workplace settings (see “For further exploration”). However, it is easy to pay too much attention to your skills and gifts. The present generation of westerners is the most gift-analyzed in human history, yet this penchant for analysis can lead to self-absorption, crowding out attention to the needs of the world. These passages say that God gives gifts for the common good, not personal satisfaction. Besides, in many cases, God gives his gifts only after you take the job in which you’ll need them. Paying too much attention to the gifts you already have can keep you from receiving the gifts God wants to give you.

Nonetheless, the gifts you already have may give you some indication about how to best meet the needs of the world. It would be narcissistic to declare that God has called you to be the world’s greatest pianist, and then expect him to download the necessary talent into you after years of mediocre piano playing and lukewarm practicing. Career guidance via skills and gifts is a difficult balancing act, which is why it must be sought in the midst of relationship with God and fellow Christians.

Here again, we must not become focused on work to the exclusion of the rest of life. God also gives gifts for our family life, friendships, recreation, volunteering and the whole breadth of life’s activities.

Your Truest Desires

Finally, the Bible says that your truest or deepest desires are also important to God.

Christians sometimes expect that if God calls them to some job, it will be something they hate. Otherwise, why would God have to call them to it? One morbid Christian fantasy is to think of one country you would hate living in, and then suppose that God is calling you to be a missionary there. But the best missionaries have a great desire for the place and people they serve. Besides, who says God wants you to be a missionary? If God is guiding you towards some kind of job or profession, it’s more likely that you may find a deep desire for it in your heart.

However, it can be exceedingly difficult to get in touch with your truest or deepest desires. Our motivations become so confused by sin and the brokenness of the world that our apparent desires are often far from the true desires that God has implanted in the depths of our hearts.

For this reason, we cannot just say, “Do what makes you happy.” What makes you happy — or seems to make you happy — might be far from meeting the needs of the world, or using your skills and gifts for the common good, or even from fulfilling your true desires. And the opposite is often true. The work that would fulfill your true desire appears at first to be undesirable, and may require great sacrifice and difficult labor. And your truest desires may be met in many areas of life, not necessarily in work. Knowing what you truly desire requires spiritual maturity, perhaps more than you may have at the moment you’re facing a decision. But at least you can get rid of the idea that God only calls you to something you hate. In this light, Frederick Buechner writes: “The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” [1]

Freedom in Christ

These three considerations — the needs of the world, your skills and gifts, and your truest desires — are guides, but they are not absolutes. For one thing, in a fallen world, you may have very little ability to choose your job anyway. Throughout history, most people have had the job of slave, farmer or homemaker, and that is still the case in much of the world outside the most developed countries. It is hard to imagine that - residents of a few developed countries aside - God wants most people to be slaves, farmers or homemakers. Rather, it seems that circumstances prevent most people from choosing jobs they truly desire to do. This is not to imply that some people don’t or shouldn’t enjoy farming, homemaking, or any other kind of legitimate work, but rather that the circumstances of the world dictate that many people work in jobs they don’t like. Yet, under God’s care, even being a slave can be a blessing (Matthew 24:45-47, 1 Corinthians 7:21-24). In no way does this legitimize slavery in today’s world. It simply means that God is with you wherever you work. It may be better to learn to like the job you have — and to find ways to participate in Christ’s work in it — than to try to find a job you think you’ll like better.

Even in the developed economies, many people have little choice about the kind of work they do for a living. The Christian community would do well to equip people both to make choices about their profession, and to follow God’s leading in whatever work we find ourselves doing. Whatever your job, God’s gifts enable you to work for the common good, to find more contentment in your work, and to overcome or endure the negative aspects of your situation. Most importantly, God promises eventual liberation from work’s toil, sweaty labor, and thistles.

Even if you do have the freedom to choose your job, the three considerations we have been considering - the needs of the world, your gifts and skills, and your truest desires - are guides, not dictators. In Christ, believers have perfect freedom:

That means you have the freedom to take risks, to fail, and to make mistakes. God might lead you to a job you know nothing about, have no present knack for, and don’t think you’d like. Would you be willing to take that job? Conversely, you might discover late in life that you missed God’s professional calling for you. Take heart, at the end, you will not be judged on getting the right job or fulfilling your God-given potential. You will be judged on the merits of Jesus Christ, applied to you only by God’s grace in giving you faith. The calling to belong to Christ is God’s only indispensable calling.

The body of Christ on earth is the community of believers (Romans 12:5). Therefore, freedom in Christ means that God’s calling or leading is best discerned in dialogue with the community, not in isolation. We have already seen that the needs of the world (a form of community) are important as you discern what kind of work God is leading you towards. The community is also an important factor in how you discern God’s leading. What do others perceive as God’s leading for you? What do they experience as your gifts and skills, the needs of the world, and the deepest desires they discern in you? Engage in discussions about God’s leading with those in your community who know you well. It may be wise to talk with a spiritual companion or advisor, to gather feedback from people you work closely with, or to ask a group of people to meet with you regularly as you discern God’s leading.

The community is also an essential element in discerning who is led to the different kinds of work needed in the world. Many people may have similar gifts and desires that can help meet the needs of the world. But it may not be that God wants all of them to do the same work. You need to discern not only the work God is leading you to, but also the work he is leading others to. The community needs a balanced ensemble of workers working in harmony. For example, physicians bring powerful gifts and skills — and frequently a deep desire for healing — into the world’s great needs for physical healing. Yet in the US, at least, there may be too many specialists and not enough primary care physicians to meet the community’s deeds. One by one, medical students are matching their gifts, desires and the needs of the world to discern a leading toward medicine. But all-in-all, the ensemble of physicians is becoming a bit unbalanced. Discerning God’s calling is a community endeavor.

Is Church Work a Higher Calling?

Many Christians have the impression that church workers — especially evangelists, missionaries, pastors, priests, ministers and the like — have a higher calling than other workers. While there is little in the Bible to support this impression, by the Middle Ages, "religious" life — as a monk or nun — was widely considered holier than ordinary life. Regrettably, this distortion remains influential in churches of all traditions, even though the doctrine of virtually every church today affirms the equal value of the work of lay people. In the Bible, God calls individuals both to church-related and non-church-related work. For example:

Calls to Church Work

Calls to non-church work.

Given the Biblical evidence, it would be inaccurate to think that God calls church workers but not other types of workers.

Some confusion arises because many churches require that their individuals be “called” to be ordained or to serve as pastors, priests or other ministers. Often the word “call” is used to describe the process of selecting a minister or the decision to enter church work full-time. However, as in the Bible itself, these situations are rarely direct, unmistakable, personal calls from God. Rather, they may describe a strong sense of guidance by God. As we have seen, God’s guidance can occur just as strongly in non-church-related jobs and professions. Since the Theology of Work Project does not take church work as one of its subjects, we will not attempt to evaluate whether “callings” to church work are more intense, more direct, more evident or more necessary than callings to non-church work. We will affirm that church work is not in general a higher calling than non-church work, and that the term “call” applies just as much to non-church work as to church work.

We also affirm that non-church work is as much “full-time Christian service” as church work.

All Christians are called (that is, commanded) to conduct everything they do, round the clock, as full-time service to Christ :

Before concluding our discussion on this point, we should note that one stream of thought views 1 Timothy 5:17-18 as contradicting the view we have just laid out. According to this perspective, being a church elder (roughly equivalent to a pastor or priest in modern church usage) is in fact a higher calling.

Under this view, being a pastor is a “double honor” compared to other professions . But most Bible commentaries reject this interpretation. [1] A more accurate reading is that elders who do their work well are worthy of greater honor (or a greater honorarium) compared to other elders who do their work merely adequately. [2] The Old Testament quotations about pay further reinforce the sense that this passage is about rewarding high-performing elders, not about comparing church work to other work. The passage’s true comparison is among pastors, not between pastors and lay people.

The only jobs that do not have equal status in God’s eyes are those that require work forbidden by the Bible or are incompatible with its values. For example, jobs requiring murder, adultery, stealing, false witness or greed (Exodus 20:13-17), usury (Leviticus 25:26), damage to health (Matthew 10:8), or harm to the environment (Genesis 2:15) are illegitimate in God’s sight. This is not to say that people who do these jobs have lesser status in God’s eyes. People whose circumstances lead them to illegitimate work are not necessarily bad people. Deuteronomy 22:21 condemns prostituting yourself, for example, yet Christ's response to prostitutes was not condemnation, but deliverance (Luke 7:47-50; Matthew 21:31-32). Jobs of this sort might be the lesser of two evils in certain situations, but they could never be God’s desired work for someone.

A call to ministry or church work is no more sacred than a call to other types of work. What matters most is not one's job title or place of work, but obedience to God, the one who calls us.

Changing Jobs

If God leads or guides people to their work, could it ever be legitimate to change jobs? Wouldn’t that be rejecting God’s guidance to the work you already have? Martin Luther, the 16 th century Protestant theologian, famously argued against changing jobs. This was based largely on his understanding of this passage:

Let each of you remain in the condition in which you were called. (1 Corinthians 7:20)

Luther equated “condition” with occupation, and concluded that it was not legitimate for Christians to change occupations. However, Luther’s contemporary John Calvin did not accept this interpretation — and most modern theologians do not either. For one thing, it doesn’t seem to take sufficient account of the very next verse, which suggests that changing occupations is legitimate, at least in some circumstances:

Were you a slave when called? Do not be concerned about it. If you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity.

Miroslav Volf has written that since the factors by which God guides people to work may change over the course of a working life, God may indeed guide people to change their work. [2] Your capabilities should grow with your experience in serving God. He may lead you to bigger tasks that require you to change jobs. “Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:21).

Conversely, if you become a Christian later in life, might God require you to change jobs? It might seem that finding new life in Christ means getting a new job or career. However, generally, this is not the case. Since there is no hierarchy of professions, it is generally a mistake to think God wants you to find a “higher calling” upon becoming a Christian. Unless your job is of the illegitimate type discussed earlier, or unless the job or colleagues threaten to keep you stuck in unchristian habits, there may be no need to change jobs. However, whether you change jobs or not, you probably need to do your work differently than before, paying attention now to biblical commands, values, and virtues, as happened with Zacchaeus the tax collector:

When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.” Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham.”Luke 19:5-9

Discerning God’s Guidance for How You Work

How you work is at least as important to God as what job or profession you have. In every job, you have at least some opportunity to meet people’s needs, to employ your gifts and skills, and to express — or discover — your deepest desires. Your decision every day to serve God today is more important than positioning yourself for the right job tomorrow.

In fact, the little you may be able to do in God’s service today is often the key to being able to do more in the future. “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much,” said Jesus (Luke 16:10). Over a lifetime, you can serve Christ best by making the most of every job for his purposes, whether you feel called to every job or not. The specifics of how to follow Christ in the workplace are covered in a number of topical articles by the Theology of Work Project, available at www.theologyofwork.org , including Truth and Deception , Ethics at Work , and Evangelism - Sharing the Gospel at Work .

CONTENT NOT YET AVAILABLE: *The Meaning and Value of Work , *Relationships at Work , *Conflict , *Leadership .

Conclusions About Calling

We take seriously God’s calling and guiding of people to various kinds of ordinary work. In doing so, we are trying to correct the long-standing tendency to regard ordinary work as unimportant to God and unworthy of his calling. But it would be equally wrong to elevate the importance of your job or profession to a position of idolatry. Getting the right job does not bring salvation, or even happiness. Moreover, the true aim of work for the Christian is to serve the common good, not to advance his or her own interests. Over a lifetime, serving the common good comes far more from doing each day’s work to the best of your ability in Christ, than it does from finding the best job for yourself.

For further exploration

Historical-theological perspective.

For an historical-theological perspective on vocation at greater length than is possible in this article, see Vocation in Historical-Theological Perspective , by Gordon Preece .

The Legitimacy of Various Professions

Banks, Robert. God the Worker: Journeys into the Mind, Heart and Imagination of God. Sutherland, N.S.W.: Albatross Books, 1992.

Pope John Paul II. On Human Work (Laborem Exercens) . Vatican Translation. Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1981, especially chapters 6, 9, 10, 21 and 22.

Richardson, Alan. The Biblical Doctrine of Work . London: SCM Press LTD, 1952, especially chapters “Creative Craftsmanship and Skill,” “Work as Divine Ordinance for Man,” and “‘Vocation’ in the New Testament.” Richardson generally takes a dimmer view of ordinary work than this Note does, and his biblical approach reflects a 1940-50s sensibility that seems dated today. However, he compiled an excellent collection of work-related scripture, given the book’s brevity, and his chapters discuss many of the most important faith-work topics. Also, like the Theology of Work Project, he used a process designed to invite wide participation and response, which is incorporated in the published draft. We do not necessarily agree with his conclusions or biblical views, but we find his book highly thought-provoking.

Stevens, R. Paul. Doing God's Business: Meaning and Motivation for the Marketplace . Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006, especially chapters 1 and 2.

Career Guidance and Discerning Gifts

Banks, Robert. Faith Goes to Work . Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1999.

Mackenzie, Alistair, Wayne Kirkland and Annette Dunham. Soul Purpose. Christ Church, NZ: NavPress, 2004.

Schuurman, Douglas J. Vocation: Discerning Our Calling in Life. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004.

Schuster, John P. Answering Your Call: A Guide for Living Your Deepest Purpose. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2002.

Calling in Christian Thought and Practice

Guinness, Os. The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life. London: Word Publishing, 1998.

Hardy, Lee . The Fabric of This World: Inquiries into Calling, Career Choice, and the Design of Human Work. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990.

Placher, Williams C., ed. Callings: Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on Vocation. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005.

Preece, Gordon R. The Viability of the Vocation Tradition in Trinitarian, Credal and Reformed Perspective: The Threefold Call . Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998.

Stevens, R. Paul . The Other Six Days: Vocation, Work, and Ministry in Biblical Perspective . Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000.

Volf, Miroslav. Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work . Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2001.

John Stott, Christian Mission in the Modern World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1975, 2008), 48-54.

The Steering Committee of the Theology of Work Project regards all gifts, skills and talents as coming from God. The gifts of the Spirit discussed in the New Testament (e.g., 1 Corinthians chapters 12-14, Romans chapter 12, Ephesians 4:11-16, and 1 Peter 4:10-12) are not limited to the particular abilities listed in those passages. Nor are they limited only to uses in the church. This article does not attempt to prove this position, but merely to acknowledge it. For more, see the discussion of 1 Corinthians chapters 12-14 in 1 Corinthians and Work at www.theologyofwork.org .

This verse (Romans 12:6), by the way, was the inspiration for and source of the title under which the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator was published, and there can be no doubt that many in the world at large regard God’s gifts to be an essential element of professional calling. See Isabel Myers, Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type (Palo Alto, CA: CPP Books, 1993).

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC , rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper, 1993) under “Calling.”

I. Howard Marshall, The Pastoral Epistles , The International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999), 610ff.

William D. Mounce, Pastoral Epistles , Word Biblical Commentary, Vol. 46, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2000), 309.

“Avail yourself of the opportunity” is the alternative reading given in the NRSV footnote. The main reading is more ambiguous: “Make use of your present condition now more than ever.” The NRSV alternative reading is congruent with most modern translations, including NIV, TNIV, NASB and NEB, as well as with the King James.

Miroslav Volf, Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 109.

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Are you letting God shape your plans? How do you know if you're submitting to God’s plan, or trying to fit God...

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The Doctrine of Vocation

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The Reformation doctrine of vocation teaches that all Christians are called by God to live faithfully in three arenas, the household, the Church, and the state, in which all Christians are to live out their priesthood as believers by offering up their lives as living sacrifices to God.

The Reformers formulated the doctrine of vocation in response to the Roman Catholic insistence that “vocation” or “calling” was reserved for those entering the service of the church through the priesthood or a monastic order. Those doing so would renounce marriage, secular work, and economic advancement through taking vows of celibacy, obedience, and poverty. In response, the Reformers argued that all Christians are called by God to live faithfully in the three arenas of life: the household, the church, and the state. As a corollary of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, all Christians are called by God to offer up their lives as living sacrifices in all areas of life. This means that all of life, including the most mundane tasks, are worship to God, not only select actions and vocations reserved for those who have renounced involvement in normal institutions of worldly life.

Introduction and Definition

The doctrine of vocation is one of the greatest—though strangely neglected and forgotten—teachings of the Reformation. Contrary to the common assumption, it is much more than a theology of work. Vocation has to do with God’s providence, how He governs and cares for His creation by working through human beings. Vocation shows Christians how to live out their faith, not just in the workplace but in their families, churches, and cultures. Vocation is where faith bears fruit in acts of love, and so it grows out of the Gospel. And vocation is where Christians struggle with trials and temptations, becoming a means of sanctification.

The word “vocation” is simply the Latinate word for “calling.” God calls us—addresses us personally with the language of His Word—and we are brought to faith. He also calls us to arenas of service. “Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him” (1 Cor. 7:17). Thus, the Lord “assigns” us to a “life,” and then He calls us to that life.

The Three Arenas

The immediate context of that verse from the Apostle Paul is a discussion not of the workplace but of marriage. According to Luther, we have callings in each of the three estates that God created for human life:

The household . This refers to the family, including its economic labor by which it supports itself. Marriage, becoming a father or mother, being a son or daughter, are all vocations. In Luther’s late-medieval economy, most work—whether that of peasant farms, middle class crafts, or the nobility’s political rule—were all based in families and usually conducted at home. The very word “economy,” which derives from the Greek words for “house” ( oikos ) and “management” ( nomia ), referred to the concept of the “household.” But our family relationships constitute our most important vocations.
The church. All Christians are called by the Gospel. God also “calls” pastors. Also elders, other church workers, and all other members, each of whom has a part to play in the congregation.
The state. We find ourselves in a certain time and place, under certain political jurisdictions, part of a certain culture. This is part of our “assignment” in which we are to live our Christian lives. Our citizenship is a vocation. We are called to our local communities, our nation, our surrounding culture. Christians are free to participate in the political life of their countries, as well as to hold public offices. We thus have vocations even in the “secular” arena, which is where Christians interact with non-believers and function as salt and light in the world. (Matt. 5:13–16)

The Reformers reacted against the Roman Catholic teaching that reserved “having a vocation” or “receiving a call” for entering a monastery, a convent, or the priesthood. To receive that kind of calling meant entering the “spiritual” life, which was considered far more Christian and meritorious than living a “secular” life in the world. To so devote oneself to the church meant taking vows of celibacy (thus repudiating marriage and parenting), poverty (thus repudiating economic productivity in the society), and obedience (thus being subject only to church law and not to that of earthly authorities). To the Reformers, not only were such vows a manifestation of works righteousness in opposition to the Gospel, they were also blasphemous rejections of the very estates that God ordained for human life.

The Reformers responded by exalting the family—particularly the callings of marriage and parenthood (vs. the vow of celibacy)—as a realm of Christian love and devotion. They exalted the workplace as a realm of Christian service (vs. the vows of poverty). And they exalted not just the state but the society as a whole as realms of God’s creation and sovereignty (vs. the vows of obedience).

The Reformation teachings about vocation are facets of the doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers.” This does not mean that every Christian is a minister leading a congregation or that there is no need for pastors. Rather, it means that one does not need to be a pastor—who himself has a calling to proclaim God’s Word—in order to be a “priest.” Farmers, shoemakers, lawyers, merchants, soldiers, rulers, husbands, wives, mothers, children, etc., are all “priests”— performing “spiritual” work in their ordinary labors, interceding in prayer for everyone they deal with, bringing God’s Word into their everyday lives.

A “priest” is someone, above all, who offers sacrifices, something even pastors do not do (except for Catholic pastors who call themselves priests because they believe they re-sacrifice Christ in the mass). But though Christ has been sacrificed once and for all so that we no longer need any other sacrifice for our sin (Heb. 9:6), we now are called to present our bodies as living sacrifices (Rom. 12:1) and “to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 2:5). This happens in vocation.

The Purpose of Vocation

Every vocation, according to Luther, is to love and serve your neighbors. Your vocation brings specific neighbors into your life: your spouse, your children, your fellow-citizens, the members of your congregation, your customers. God wants us to love and serve them.

Loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves encapsulates “all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37–40). Our love of God is based solely on His love for us in Christ:

“In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). Thus our relationship with Him is based not on our works, our service to him, or our vocations, but upon Christ alone. “God does not need our good works,” observed Luther. “But our neighbor does.” God saves us apart from our works, then calls back into the world, into our distinct callings, to love and serve Him by loving and serving our neighbors.

This love and service, these good works, consist largely not of special “good deeds” but of the ordinary tasks of the vocation. Parents changing their baby’s diaper, which Luther hailed as an act of holiness; farmers plowing their fields; a shopkeeper selling something useful; an engineer designing a useful piece of technology; an artist painting a beautiful picture; a citizen casting a vote—these all can be offered as acts of love and service.

Vocation as the Mask of God

Luther stressed that God himself is living and active in and through vocation. He gives us our daily bread by means of farmers and bakers. He creates new human beings and cares for them by means of mothers and fathers. He protects us by means of lawful magistrates. He proclaims His Word and gives his sacraments through the voice and hands of pastors. Vocation, says Luther, is a “mask” of God: We see only the human face, performing ordinary tasks in everyday life, but behind that calling, through which we are blessed, God himself is hidden, giving his gifts.

God in his providence works even through non-believers. Often the non-Christian is motivated solely by self-interest or self-fulfillment. Christians can experience some of that, but they can also make their work the fruit of their faith—“faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6)—and bear the burdens of their callings as a “daily” cross of service and self-sacrifice (Luke 9:23–24).

To be sure, we often sin in our vocations. Instead of wanting to serve, as Luther observed, we insist on being served. Instead of loving and serving, we harm the neighbor of our vocation. We “lord it over” those under our authority rather than using our authority to serve them, as the “Son of Man” does (Mark 10:42–45). Sin in vocation puts us in conflict with God’s purpose, as we resist God’s love for others and work against Him. Often God still blesses others through our vocation, despite ourselves. But we must be broken to repentance by God’s law, whereupon we can know Christ’s forgiveness again, which restores our vocation.

This is the texture of the Christian life—which plays out in our marriages, parenthood, work, congregation, and cultural life—which, along with the trials and tribulations that also afflict us in these callings, can become occasions for spiritual growth and sanctification.

The doctrine of vocation brings the Gospel into ordinary life. It transfigures the mundane routines of ordinary life, charging them with purpose, spiritual significance, and the very presence of God.

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Hannah’s Winning Vocation Essay

June 7, 2018 by Parishioner

Many people think a vocation is a calling to the priesthood or maybe to be a brother or a sister, but a vocation is actually a calling from God to a Christian lifestyle. Certainly some are called to a vocation as a priest or brother or a sister; however, one could also be called to a vocation of married life, single life, as a teacher or a doctor, as a religious/ordained, or many more. One quote I found from the Bible in the book of Jeremiah says, “Before I formed you in the womb, and before you were born, I consecrated you.” In saying that, God is telling each of us that He knew what our vocation would be from the moment He formed us in our mother’s womb. When children are young, teachers usually ask them what they are going to be when they grow up. Most kids answer with their dream job. What teachers should be asking is: “What do you think God is calling you to be when you grow up?”

How does a disciple of God discover his/her vocation? Many holy men and women pray to God and ask Him to help guide them and direct them along their way through life. Sometimes God will help us through life in a pleasant way that we appreciate. But sometimes we will have to go through struggles, which I think helps to build our faith in God and draw us closer to Him. If we pray to God and ask Him what He would like our vocation to be, He will eventually answer our prayer. Praying is a great way to discover a vocation. When we pray, it builds a strong relationship with God. The more we pray, the more intimate our relationship with God becomes. So, pray to God, ask Him what He wants you to do, and be ready and willing to do it. You also need to make sure that when you pray there is some silent time so you can hear God’s answer.

Sometimes God calls us when we’re least expecting it. For example, I heard a story about a woman who was journeying on the Walk to Mary. While she was walking, she felt God calling her to be a nun. God calls some people to their vocation through unexpected miracles.

God performs many miracles. Maybe you might encounter someone on the side of the road, and God might inspire that person to tell you your vocation. Maybe you have visions or dreams about a future vocation; I know I have visions, but I haven’t figured out what specific vocation God is calling me to yet. God has a plan for each of us and, eventually, in some way, we will all discover our vocations.

A vocation is a great gift from God, but we have to choose to accept it or leave it. “Vocations; your life was made for it, your soul depends on it.” That quote by an unknown author holds deep meaning. We did not design vocation. We receive our vocation from God. Fr. Mike Schmitz states that, “God knows you better than you know yourself.” That’s obviously true. He created you, so He’s going to know you better and know what your vocation should be. He knew who you were going to be from the moment He created you. God also loves you more than anything, and He wants you to discover your vocation, His plans for the rest of your life. You can trust God because He loves you and knows you. He is not trying to fool you. Go to where God is calling you, and you will be very joyful. In 1 Peter 4:10 God declares, “As each has received a gift, serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace.” Ultimately, listen to God speaking to you, and whichever vocation He leads you to, use your gifts and your vocation to help others become better disciples.

The Serra Club of Green Bay’s 6th Grade Vocation Essay Winner by Hannah Greisen.

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Discerning One’s Vocation: Some Personal Reflections

Posted by Meghan Clark | Jul 6, 2011 | From the Field | 0 |

What is a vocation? Or more specifically, what is MY vocation? How do I figure it out? And, once I do, can it change? How is one’s vocation related to one’s job? Vocation was a hot topic today on two of the theology blogs I follow: Daily Theology and WIT (Women in Theology) .

Over at Daily Theology, my good friend Katie O’Neill reflects on the question of vocation and her recent discernment between the vocation of the theologian and a vocation to nursing:

In the past I have always thought that vocation was toward a specific field or specific line of work. For instance, one was called to be a social worker or a doctor, or a parent or a musician or create delectable foods, or more then one call at the same time. To some degree, the economic collapse of 2008 along with other life circumstances and choices has made gaining employment as a working theologian very difficult and the experience of watching myself procrastinate with writing my dissertation has shown me that this might not be my true passion. As a result I have worn many hats while adjuncting the past few years and have finally concluded that the plan of becoming a professor is either financially unsustainable (as adjuncting and selling makeup only stretch so far) or I will have to sacrifice having any control over where I live and take a job anywhere I can get one. After a year of deliberation I have finally made a decision…I started nursing school last month. ….I feel so privileged to have been able to study in the ways that I have. But in the end I think my concept of vocation is expanding and growing. First and foremost, my vocation is to be a baptized Christian. From there, vocation is the use of whatever skills I have to make the world a more merciful and just place.

As young adults, we spend so much time trying to figure out our vocation and unintentionally it merges with the quest to find the right job and career. In her post, Katie O’Neill captures beautifully the heart of Christian vocation – it begins with our baptism, not with our career choices. As Christians, the foundation of all our vocations is the call of the Gospel.

As theologians, my colleagues and I spend considerable time discussing our “vocation” as it pertains to the academy, the university, and the Church. The complexities of inhabiting these various communities is something younger scholars, myself included often find overwhelming. However, when we remember that at the heart of our vocation isn’t “theologian” but “Christian” – a beautiful but challenging unity emerges in the recognition that embracing one’s vocation is to respond to a call from God. Once one recognizes this the stark distinctions between a vocation to be a nurse and a vocation as a theologian starts to blur. And, the pressure to get it “right” as if it then becomes a closed subject fades in light of the Christian’s ongoing call to discernment and conversion.

Through personal experience, I have learned that discerning my vocation to be a theologian was just the beginning; discerning HOW to do that and WHAT that means requires a perpetual openness to the call of the Gospel. For me, I began to appreciate both the complexity and simplicity of my own vocation through being asked, as a moral theologian, to give advice concerning end of life care. Just as I was beginning my dissertation, my grandfather had a hemorrhagic stroke and died after 7 days in intensive care. Those 7 days felt like an eternity full of painful decisions, gruesome medical realities and a lot of waiting. A few weeks after his death, I received my first “request for advice as a Catholic moral theologian.” A family friend called seeking my professional advice concerning care of a dying family member in light of Church teaching. In that moment, it was the blending of my academic theological knowledge and my first hand experience with end of life decision-making that allowed me to provide pastoral care. This practical, pastoral role of the moral theologian in personal relationships had not previously been part of my understanding of my vocation. Questions of medical ethics and concrete cases tended, in my head, to involve medical ethics boards and such. I had not really thought of the pastoral role of the moral theologian as distinct from that of a priest, parish minister, or counselor. (In part, probably due to the tensions between academic theology and ministry examined on the WIT post.) Through that one month – personally painful and professionally challenging, I began to embrace “being a moral theologian” in a new and more integrated way.

How do I live a life of discipleship as a crucial part of any vocation? And, how do we form a just and faithful community? When we begin with our Christian vocation as the foundation, perhaps we will be less likely to wed our vocation to a career or to set up a hierarchy of competing vocations. In doing so, we can become more likely to embrace our own vocation with humility and appreciate those of our neighbors; and thus, to incorporate this within the broader lifelong process of discernment and ongoing conversion. To do so poses a great challenge to all Christians, but it also takes off a great deal of the pressure to “get right” that “perfect career choice that is one’s unique vocation.”

About The Author

Meghan Clark

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August 19, 2011

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Your vocation: a personal calling from god.

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“There was a strong and violent wind rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the Lord—but the Lord was not in the wind; after the wind, an earthquake—but the Lord was not in the earthquake; after the earthquake, fire—but the Lord was not in the fire; after the fire, a light silent sound.” This passage from First Kings is what I often think about the process of trying to discern a vocation. The Lord comes in silence, not in the loudness of the wind or earthquake or fire but rather in silence. But cultivating this silence, discovering the voice of God speaking in our lives, and then mustering the courage to follow the call are all difficult in and of themselves. Here I hope to give you a path, some hope, and a little guide to discerning your vocation.

To Be Called

First off, a vocation cannot be chosen. It is a call from God and thus the initiative begins with Him. We find this in the very word vocation, which comes from the Latin word “vocare” which means ‘to call’. God makes the call, it is up to us to discern this call and answer it. Discerning or discernment is also a word that needs a little explanation. It is not simply making a decision but rather it is a word used to describe the entire process of figuring out what we should do and then doing exactly that.

Often we speak of discernment only in terms of the priesthood or religious life (monks, friars, sisters, nuns, etc.) but discernment is used to describe one considering marriage and even married men considering a possible call to serve as a permanent deacon. All of these require proper discernment. Here are some steps to discernment that will help you discover the will of God for your life and have the courage to begin to follow it.

Steps for Discernment

First, if you are serious about this get a spiritual director. A spiritual director is like a personal trainer but for the spiritual life. Somebody who listens to us, prays with us, and has the maturity and spiritual development to help us figure out what movements of our heart were placed there by God and which were not. If you have somebody in mind, ask them. If you have no idea where to begin to find a spiritual director call your local parish and ask a priest there for their suggestion. Many people think that every priest is a good spiritual director. This is not the case. Spiritual direction is a gift given by God and one that not every priest has and one that is not limited to the priests alone. Be open to having a spiritual director that is not a priest. If you have a particular vocation that you think you may be called to that you are considering, possibly find somebody already living that vocation. So if you think you may be called to the priesthood, ask for a priest. If you are a woman and think you may be called to join religious life, consider a religious sister for your spiritual director.

Secondly, make sure your relationship with God is strong. This should go without saying, but I want to make sure it is said. Personal prayer and frequent celebration of the sacraments are the bare minimum.

Begin to develop a habit of time spent in personal prayer, especially prayer in front of the Blessed Sacrament if you have the opportunity near you. This will involve silence. Silence is vital as we read in the passage from First Kings. And silence does not just mean absence of sound. There are a lot of things in our life that make a lot of noise without making a sound. Cell phones are one. Anxiousness about things is another. Worry is one. If we can begin to carve out time away from these things we can begin to enter into the silence that is required to begin to properly discern. Try turning your cell phone off Saturday evening as you go to bed and not turning it on until after Mass on Sunday, or even better, all day on Sunday. Give Sunday to God and to the Mass. The emails, social media notifications, and phone messages will be there Monday morning. But remove the cell phone for a while, remove the source of a lot of noise in our life that gives God the silence he needs in order to speak so we can begin to recognize his voice. Try other ways to give yourself some silence. Fast from TV for a dedicated period of time or find some other activity that you often fill empty time with and decide that you will not do that activity and instead you will offer that time to God.

Make sure you are taking advantage of frequent celebrations of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and confession. Every two weeks or even more frequently is not too often to go to confession. And, if you can, daily Mass. If your job or other responsibilities don’t allow daily Mass try to make it at least once or twice IN ADDITION to Sunday and Holy Days of Obligation. Receiving the Body and Blood of Our Lord will put you more in union with him and allow you to more easily hear his voice.

Be open to the ways that God might speak to you. A recent study of priests being ordained in the spring and summer of 2018 indicated that those being ordained were highly encouraged by somebody to consider the priesthood. Almost 90% of them reported that either a parish priest, teacher, friend or family member, or somebody else encouraged them to at least consider the priesthood. God uses other people in our discernment. Take some time to consider what others have been telling you. This certainly is not a be all and end all, but it is certainly worth something and is something to talk to your spiritual director about.

Go and check out what your vocation would entail. If you are considering joining religious life ask various orders if they have "come and see" days or overnight or weekend retreats so you can at least experience a little bit of what the life might be like. Or if you are considering the priesthood ask if you can shadow a priest for a weekend or if you can visit the seminary for a few days. You’d be surprised at how much a short little visit like this can help make clear if God is calling you to pursue this life or not.

Finally, act! Saint Pope John Paul II was fond of saying “Be not afraid.” This piece of advice applies in spades to discerning a vocation. Don’t be afraid of making a mistake. If, after meeting with a spiritual director and deep, intense prayer begin to pursue what you think God may be calling you to do. Some people think that if they enter the doors of the seminary that first day they have signed on the dotted line for ordination. No way. Just like you don’t buy a wedding ring on the first date over coffee so to when you enter a seminary or novitiate. There is no failure in taking a leap into what you think God might be calling you to do and discovering that you are not called to it. Don’t let the thought that you might be disappointing others leave you paralyzed either. This is between you, God, and the Church.

Prayer, the sacraments, a spiritual director, silence and the courage to leap and give it a try. These are the keys to properly discerning a vocation, be it marriage or religious life or the priesthood. May God bless you as you pursue your vocation or if you are living your vocation now, that you may live it in such a way to give glory to God!

About the author

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What’s a vocation? 8 tips for finding yours

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What’s a vocation?

The 2 types of vocations, why does finding your vocation matter, how to find and pursue your vocation: 7 steps, move forward with courage.

"It's my calling." You’ve probably heard this phrase when someone’s raving about their career. They seem sure about their path forward and speak with pride and enthusiasm about their profession.

When you understand what your vocation is, this temperament is common. People with a robust sense of purpose regarding their professional lives often enjoy better physical health and emotional well-being .

And a life full of meaning and goal-driven personal growth is circular: the positivity your work brings encourages you to make healthy decisions in other aspects of your life, and good physical and mental well-being provides you with energy to pursue your calling . Finding your vocation really can be life-changing.

A vocation is a job or career that does more than pay the bills — it fills you with a higher purpose typically related to helping others and contributing to a greater societal good.

The word “vocation” derives from the Latin words “vocatio” and “vocare,” both meaning to call or summon and originally used to describe a spiritual and reflective way of life .

During Ancient Greek and Roman times, those at the bottom of the social pyramid took on manual labor, and those held in higher social regard accepted a consecrated life of contemplation.

This hierarchical understanding of labor took on a deeper religious context with the dominance of the Catholic Church in Europe during the Middle Ages. A Christian vocation referred to monks, nuns, and priests, as they were living a Christian life and heeding the divine call of God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.

Back then, those who answered this call were granted salvation. Judaism , Islamic faith , and Hinduism all include prophets answering God's call in some form.

Over time, the definition of vocation has shifted, and people often use it to describe a particular occupation one finds meaningful, so anyone can find and pursue their vocation.

Two vocation types exist: personal and skillful. A personal vocation involves contributing to your community or society without receiving a paycheck, like volunteering at your local church or giving aerobics classes at an assisted living facility.

Often you’ll contribute your professional skills to these vocations, like a lawyer who provides pro-bono work for low-income families or a teacher who tutors at-risk young adults.

A skillful vocation leverages your skill set to build a career that serves a larger purpose. This work brings value to your employer and coworkers, your community, and society at large.

Here are four skillful vocation categories with career examples.

1. Helpers and healers

Helpers and healers calm crises and often put others' needs above their own. They empathize well , easily relating to people with compassion, patience, and care. Some career options for helpers and healers include:

Human rights activist

Hospice worker

Speech pathologist

Social worker

Yoga Instructor

2. Justice seekers

Justice seekers work to eliminate inequality and exclusion in the world, dedicating their energy to creating a better place for everyone. They're critical thinkers and problem solvers who find ways to change problematic social systems. Here are a few examples:

Environmentalist

Labor or community organizer

Diversity and inclusion officer

male-volunteering-in-garden-what-is-a-vocation

3. Storytellers

Storytellers make sense of the world, using human experiences to connect with others and teach important life lessons. Some career options for storytellers are:

Photographer

Content maker

Podcaster or radio host

4. First responders

First responders rush into the fire, sometimes literally. They’re brave and think clearly in difficult and frightening situations, making them uniquely fit to assist during emergencies and disasters. Some career options include:

Police officer

Firefighter

Emergency room doctor

couple-of-doctors-discussing-what-is-a-vocation

As a human, you need to feel your actions — and life more generally — has a purpose. This motivates you to work toward your goals, develop deeper connections , and find belonging .

And your profession isn’t excluded from this — feeling like your work has meaning makes you happier . It’s as simple as that. Unfortunately, while today’s workers seek meaningful jobs with employers that reflect their values , not everyone feels encouraged to find a purposeful vocation. Modern hustle culture often promotes overexertion to obtain income for yourself and your employer, even if this involves sacrificing your mental and physical health .

You can avoid this trap by finding your vocation — or checking whether you already have.

Whether you’re just entering the labor force or are considering a career change , finding work that speaks to you is a healthy and fulfilling approach to work. Here are seven steps for discovering and pursuing your vocation.

1. Take stock of your skills

Figuring out which particular vocation works for you is about being honest about your strengths and weaknesses. Reflect on your life — school, work, personal — and pay attention to areas where you've naturally excelled. Ask yourself the following questions:

What do I most like to do at work?

What do I most dislike doing at work?

What skills or attributes do people compliment me for?

What skills make me feel useful?

What activities put me in a flow state ?

What did I aspire to be when I was a child?

What are the most successful projects I’ve worked on, and how did I contribute?

men-eating-healthy-lunch-what-is-a-vocation

Write down your answers and reflect , either alone or with a trusted friend, family member, or colleague — you might appreciate their fresh perspective. Then, consider the professions that would best use the skills and talents you’ve noted.

2. Visualize your ideal career

Consider how you’d spend your time if you weren’t worried about financial security — this likely showcases what you’d feel purposeful doing.

To find this answer, visualize your future and write down what you see, being mindful regarding your emotions upon finding and pursuing your calling. You should feel excited and passionate when thinking about your vocation.

3. Choose habits that fit your new path

Once you’ve chosen a vocation or two to try, build the habits necessary to excel. If you want to develop your storytelling skills, you could make a habit of reading or writing for an hour a day. And if you want to open a café, you could perfect a new recipe every week.

It takes an average of 66 days to form a new habit , so don’t feel discouraged if you don’t progress right away, and go easy on yourself if you miss a day. And consider downloading a habit app or finding an accountability partner to help you improve faster.

4. Educate yourself

A great way to decide what to pursue is to conduct thorough research. Talk with people in the field, read up on the careers you’re interested in, and consider taking on an internship or externship to ensure you understand what you’re in for.

emotional-stress-therapy-what-is-a-vocation

5. Take it one step at a time

You acquire skills through experience and study, and a career slowly unfolds and develops over time. Don’t feel rushed as you tackle skill acquisition and start a new profession, and keep your overarching objective — finding meaningful work — in your sights at all times to stay motivated .

A great way to take this process one step at a time while remembering your key objective is to break this main goal into smaller, achievable milestones . This gives you a clear roadmap toward success to avoid feeling lost or overwhelmed .

6. Structure your time

Life is full of personal and professional responsibilities. Now that you’re pursuing a new vocation, you’ll need to prioritize your time differently. If you want to volunteer more, you might see one of your friends a little less. And if you need to take online classes to improve your skills, you might adjust your work hours.

Once you understand your availability, organize your time and make adjustments as necessary to ensure your main priority is building a fulfilling life.

7. Find a mentor or vocational counselor

You’ll typically root a calling for a greater good, one outside yourself. It's about teamwork , collaboration , and community.

But you can only help others if you know how to ask for help yourself. Consider reaching out to a mentor, coach, or vocational counselor who can help you find more meaningful work.

Stepping into your vocation takes courage. Your road to success is unique to you — there’s no one-size-fits-all roadmap.

But understanding what your vocation is, means you’ve already taken a giant first step, and the excitement of finding your calling will propel you forward. All that’s left is to ride this contagious passion and energy as you pursue something you care about.

Discover your authentic self

Kickstart your path to self-discovery and self-awareness. Our coaches can guide you to better understand yourself and your potential.

Elizabeth Perry, ACC

Elizabeth Perry is a Coach Community Manager at BetterUp. She uses strategic engagement strategies to cultivate a learning community across a global network of Coaches through in-person and virtual experiences, technology-enabled platforms, and strategic coaching industry partnerships. With over 3 years of coaching experience and a certification in transformative leadership and life coaching from Sofia University, Elizabeth leverages transpersonal psychology expertise to help coaches and clients gain awareness of their behavioral and thought patterns, discover their purpose and passions, and elevate their potential. She is a lifelong student of psychology, personal growth, and human potential as well as an ICF-certified ACC transpersonal life and leadership Coach.

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Getting passed over for a promotion is tough. here's how to handle it, learn what a calling is and how to find yours, work motivation: what it is and why it is important, what are analytical skills examples and how to level up, what is organizational structure and why is it important, how to choose a career: 7 things to consider, what’s my earning potential determining the right salary, a guide on how to find the right mentor for your career, similar articles, what’s vocational training everything you need to know, how to pursue jobs versus careers to achieve different goals, feeling lost: signs, causes, and 4 tips for finding your way, trying to find your calling these 16 tips will get you started, learn how to stop overthinking with these 8 great tips, so you want to be your own boss here's how to do it right, following your dreams is possible here are 10 reasons to do it, vocational skills: what they are and how to develop them, stay connected with betterup, get our newsletter, event invites, plus product insights and research..

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Coram Deo ~

Looking at contemporary culture from a christian worldview.

God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life by Gene Edward Veith

God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life by Gene Edward Veith Jr. Crossway. 176 pages. 2011 edition. ****

In this helpful book, Gene Veith gives us an exposition of the doctrine of vocation, and then he applies that doctrine in a practical way to life in the twenty-first century. He begins by looking at the nature of vocation – what is the purpose of vocation, how to find one’s vocation, how God calls us to different tasks and how He is present in what we do in our everyday lives. He then addresses specific vocations and specific problems common to them all. His treatment of vocation is drawn mainly from Martin Luther’s understanding of vocation. Veith tells us that God has chosen to work through human beings, who, in their different capacities and according to their different talents, serve each other. This is the doctrine of vocation. The purpose of vocation is to love and serve one’s neighbor. The doctrine of vocation encourages attention to each individual’s uniqueness, talents, and personality. These are valued as gifts of God, who creates and equips each person in a different way for the calling He has in mind for that person’s life. Veith tells us that the Reformation theologians emphasized the equality of vocations before God, and that each Christian has multiple vocations. We have callings in our work, in our families, as citizens in the larger society, and callings in the church. In addition, callings change over time. And whatever our vocation is, and in the very way it changes, our callings are not completely under our control; rather, they come from the Lord’s hand. Despite what our culture leads us to believe, vocation is not self-chosen. We do not choose our vocations, instead, we are called to them. Finding your vocation, has to do, in part, with finding your God-given talents (what you can do) and your God-given personality (what fits the person you are). The doctrine of vocation, though it has to do with human work, is essentially about God’s work and how God works in and through our lives. Our part is to carry out our vocations. The outcome belongs completely to the Lord. Veith tells us that the Christian life is to be lived in vocation, in the seemingly ordinary walks of life that take up nearly all of the hours of our day. The Christian life is to be lived out in our family, our work, our community, and our church. In addition to the doctrine of vocation, topics that the author addresses in the book are the origins of work, evangelism, callings in the family, society and church, rest and retirement. This is an excellent introduction to the topic of the vocations and callings of the Christian. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

Work is a blessing; work is a curse. Work can indeed be satisfying, since it is what we were made for, but it can also be frustrating, pointless, and exhausting. Work is a virtue, but it is tainted by sin.
Christians are engaged in the world by carrying out their vocations. This is how they can be a positive influence in the culture.
It is in vocation that evangelism can most effectively happen.
The family is the foundational vocation. Other earthly authorities grow out of the authority exercised in the family.
Being a citizen of a particular nation is a divine calling.
Being a Christian is itself a calling. That is to say, a person becomes a Christian by being called by God.
Laypeople are especially positioned to reach people outside the church, by virtue of their secular vocations, which put them in contact with people who would never darken the door of a church.
What surprises some Christians is that when all is said and done, the specific responsibilities of vocation are not any different, from the outside, for Christians or non-Christians. A Christian construction worker or a Christian physician does pretty much what a good non-Christian in those fields must do.
We indeed have a calling to serve in our local churches, but it must be emphasized that our so-called “secular” vocations are actually “holy offices” where we are to serve our neighbors and live out our faith.
The Bible tells us to work; it also tells us to rest. We are to pause from our work to worship God on the Sabbath Day. In vocation, we are to rest in Christ even when we are hard at work.
Retirement from a lifelong vocation can be difficult, especially for those with Protestant work ethics. Properly, though, the laying down of a vocation after many years of work is a kind of Sabbath, a kind of reward for service rendered.

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Committee on the Study of Religion

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88722d666dda333b4ab34c05d4e279fa, choosing a vocation: an essay on agency.

There were a couple of things Cristina knew for sure. She did not know which path her life would take, but she knew that either she would get married and establish a family or she would lead a (lay) consecrated life devoted to God:

There is that clarity that I started to have when I had the encounter with Christ. Around me society is full of people who don't have a definite form of life, right? So many people who are not married, for a thousand reasons, who are not married but also not consecrated. [Before,] this wasn't clear to me. I thought yes, everybody could do what they wanted to. But on the contrary: no, it isn't like that. And that made me happy. That is a truth that I have discovered when encountering Christ, and that made me happy, because I said: “So much the better, there are two paths, and so much the better that no other paths exist, that there are no other possibilities.”

Cristina acquired this knowledge through her involvement with the Italian Catholic movement Comunione e Liberazione (CL), or through following the charisma of Father Luigi Guissani, as members of the movement often put it. Father Guissani began his work of “restoring a Christian presence” in 1954, in a high school in Milan, working within the structure of the established Catholic youth movement Azione Catolica, and in particular its female section, Gioventu Studentesca (GS). The movement was reconfigured during the 1960s and began using the name Comunione e Liberazione, first in publications and then at an inaugural conference in 1971. The movement's reconfiguration was in response to critical events of the time, the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and the student revolts of 1968. The reconfiguration also signaled the maturation of the movement, as young followers grew up and sought to pursue the religious, social and cultural experiences of GS in ways that were better suited to their adult lives. This led to the emergence of a (lay) consecrated pattern of life within the movement, known first as the “adult groups” and later as Memores Domini. Memores Domini take a number of vows, including the vow of chastity and obedience, and live together in same-sex houses. This manner of living is characterized by both a contemplative, monastic dimension, including daily hours of silence, and an emphasis on being “in the world,” which is expressed through a strong commitment to work, and hence to a professional life, as the context par excellence for keeping alive “the memory of Christ.”

I first met Cristina in 2000 in Milan, where I was doing ethnographic work on female piety and religious agency. Cristina was a visitor to the CL female student house where I was living at the time, and which resembled very much the house she lived in during her own student years within CL university community structures. Cristina had recently graduated in architecture, and she was approaching the moment when the contours of her life path would become clear. Her attraction to the life of Memores Domini was evident in our conversations, and this was not unusual: I regularly encountered such attraction among students connected to CL, particularly among women, who constituted the majority of Memores Domini.

Memores Domini follow a vocation. Within CL, following either a familial or a consecrated life is considered to be a vocation, yet the vocation of Memores Domini is more readily recognized as a religious vocation, as understood within the Catholic tradition, and includes not only a divine calling but also its subsequent verification with a spiritual counselor. Vocation was on Cristina's mind when we met, and it became an important part of all our conversations, including an in-depth interview. When I later analyzed these interactions, I discerned a subtle but undeniable tension between my reliance on the language of choice when asking about the course of her life, and Cristina's steering away from that language. Her uneasiness with the vocabulary of choice became most explicit when we touched on the question of work-life balance and the ways in which this is a particular challenge for women:

Yesterday I was speaking to a colleague of mine who said that the family is a vocation, just like work is, and that one has to choose: “either family or work.” This horrified me. As if I can choose family as a vocation! Already here the sentence doesn't work: I choose the family as my vocation.

Vocation, Cristina insisted, belongs to a different realm than choice: one does not simply “choose” vocations. One might receive a vocation or discover it, be able to hear it calling or understand it, either slowly or in a split-second, willingly or unwillingly. One might accept it or fight it, but one does not choose it.

A young sociologist at the time, I was not yet specifically trained to account for Cristina's understanding of vocation in a social scientific manner. Or rather, her understanding of vocation stood in sharp contrast to common social scientific approaches that frame vocation as a “personal choice.” The latter, of course, adequately reflects how many people today understand vocation. The Young and Vocation , a recent study on contemporary ideas of vocation among a representative sample of young people (between the ages of 16 and 29) in Italy, shows that the term “vocation” generally evokes the idea of self-realization rather than imposition (79% to 8%, respectively), and a sense of satisfaction rather than renunciation (71% to 13%). 1 Moreover, when Italian youth do connect vocation to its religious dimension, the religious call is interpreted as “a personal option that makes it possible to aim at a satisfactory self-realization.” 2 These results must be understood, Luigi Berzano argues, in the light of postmodern society, where each individual is impelled to create her own biography. 3

Studies like these effectively document significant and indisputable societal tendencies in how individuals conceive of their life course. My concern, however, lies in the way in which the design of such studies is based on assumptions that are part and parcel of the tendencies they seek to document. This becomes clearer when a rational choice perspective—well established within the sociological study of religion—is used. In their study of the decline of religious vocations within Catholicism in six countries during the period 1965 to 1995, Rodney Stark and Roger Finke argue that the costs of Catholic consecrated religious choices have diminished only marginally, while their benefits have diminished significantly. 4 Thus, vocations are in decline as a consequence of modifications in the advantages and opportunities of religious life—modifications that Stark and Finke associate with the Second Vatican Council. Within this framework, they suggest, the “vocation crisis” in the Roman Catholic Church might be addressed in two ways: either by reducing the costly aspects of these religious choices, or by reinstating the benefits. Stark and Finke show the cost-benefit logic at work in religious life, but they assume at the outset of their inquiry the universal nature of this logic.

Cristina's claim that “the sentence doesn't work” stretches beyond the words of her colleague and implies that, from her point of view, the paradigm of “vocation as choice” does not hold. Considering Cristina's claim brings us to the long-standing question of how sociological categories, of both empirical inquiry and analysis, relate to the categories and meanings respondents use to make sense of their world. By taking Cristina's refutation of “vocation as a choice” seriously, I do not mean to suggest that social scientific analyses should be confined to the categorical distinctions that respondents make. Such a conflation of two distinct levels of social reality and analysis would indeed deprive sociology of its own logic, language, and level of theorizing and analysis, and hence its raison d'être. At the same time, it is widely accepted that empirical inquiries, in order to be methodologically sound, should engage categories that are meaningful to respondents and in which respondents might be able to situate themselves. This is where the problem lies: while Cristina did not consider vocation in terms of “self-realization,” as most respondents in The Young and Vocation survey did, the contrasting term used in the survey—”imposition”—also failed to adequately capture what she means. (It should be noted that about 13% of the respondents did not select either of these two terms.) What Cristina and others like her might understand by vocation gets “lost in social scientific translation,” since it does not fit smoothly into the survey questions and categories. This poses problems, not because Cristina represents a majority point of view on the matter; she does not. But it is important to ensure that minority views inform the ways in which empirical inquiries and analyses are set up, for a whole slew of reasons, and there's one reason that stands out in this case. The Young and Vocation study documents the process of secularization, and the concomitant sacralization of personal life choices, given that the respondents seem to extend an idea of the sacred to the search for authentic existence. 5 But its design struggles to adequately incorporate those experiences that are not based on a secular understanding of vocation. The secularization that the survey ends up revealing is, in other words, already at least partially predisposed by the survey's design.

In sum, Cristina's understanding of vocation cannot be reduced to a biographical choice, and neither is it simply the result of a cost-benefit analysis. This is not to deny that such analytical frameworks can highlight important dimensions of the social reality of vocation. But they do seem to miss, by design, the crux of what vocation entails for people like Cristina. What does it mean to approach vocation as an individual choice, we might ask, when the actor herself insists that her vocation cannot be adequately accounted for in such terms?

Vocation and Sociology

The significance of vocation within sociology greatly exceeds the empirical studies on the matter. 6 Vocation has intrigued sociology, Giuseppe Giordan argues, 7 and this is related to its pivotal role in Max Weber's thinking. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism —Weber's critical engagement with Marx in which he explores the importance of culture and the production of meaning in the formation of society—vocation is a protagonist in two ways. First, it plays a crucial role in accounting for how individual action relates to social transformation. Weber's argument is well known: the Reformation, and in particular Lutheranism, brought about a modern understanding of vocation. Vocation, or calling, continued to be perceived as a divine ordinance, a task set by God, but it also came to include a positive valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs. Thus, everyday activities gained religious significance, as ascetic conduct was highly valued, particularly in the Puritan traditions, and labor became an ascetic technique par excellence. As a result, Puritan communities accumulated material wealth—the fruit of their labors—that in turn created a new social formation favorable to the development of capitalism. In other words, asceticism, “carried out of monastic cells into everyday life,” as Weber's well-known wording puts it, played its part in building the modern economic order. Along the way, however, the meaning of vocation continues to shift.

This brings us to the second role vocation plays in Weber's theory, i.e., as a crucial context in which to elucidate his understanding of secularization. Weber traces the development of an “inner-worldly asceticism,” which is central to both a religious and a secular understanding of vocation. While, for the Puritan, asceticism is born out of a relation with God, the asceticism of the modern secular subject is removed from such a relationship and focuses instead on worldly aims. Vocation became secularized, to refer to a profession, an occupation for which an individual is particularly well suited, trained, or qualified.

What does this semantic shift in meaning of vocation, from divine calling to professional occupation, tell us about secularization? The relocation of vocation, or “calling,” to within the subject—as an inner inclination that might be uncovered and actualized—resonates strongly with Talal Asad's discussion of the secular recrafting of “inspiration.” 8 As the Bible went from “the letter of divine inspiration” to a system of human significance, Asad argues, the methods of the German Higher Biblical Criticism “rendered the materiality of scriptural sounds” and writings into something akin to a spiritual poem. Previously, the divine word was necessarily also material, and the inspired words were objects of reverence, which entailed that pious bodies were taught “to listen, to recite, to move, to be still, to be silent, engaged with the acoustics” of those words. 9 The methods of Higher Biblical Criticism, in contrast, relocated the effect of words inside the subject, thus representing a move toward inner spiritual states independent of the senses. As a result, inspiration was no longer thought of as direct divine communication. This, Asad insists, involved a twofold shift: “all causation from outside the world of material bodies [is brought] entirely into that world,” and at the same time this “inside” was progressively reshaped. 10 Vocation is recrafted in a similar manner, as it becomes an inner inclination or inspiration that might be discovered, and joins the universe of authenticity and the rhetoric of sincerity, in which the idea of being true to oneself is conceived as a moral duty. 11

The Turn to Agency

My interest in vocation stems from my interest in the conceptualization of agency, particularly in relation to gender and religion. Agency, in sociological parlance, is commonly understood in terms of choice, or rather, choice is central to the conceptual architecture of agency. Cristina's refusal to consider vocation in terms of choice does not, however, imply that she is prepared to relinquish her sense of agency. Cristina's notion of vocation is in fact ingrained in an understanding of her own capacity to act, which includes the deliberate attempt to make herself receptive to a divine calling, as well as the effort to prepare herself to respond adequately to what such a call might require of her. This could suggest that Cristina's religious conception of vocation might also point to a different understanding of agency than the common one that hinges on the notion of choice.

Within established sociological reasoning, it might be argued that Cristina lacks agency to some extent. Cristina does not claim to be able to choose between what she considers the two fundamental patterns a life can follow; on the contrary, she refutes that choice. It could be argued that she is relatively alienated from her own agency and thus relates to the unfolding of her life course in a rather passive and docile way. One way of framing her outlook might be in terms of “false consciousness,” which implies that the material conditions and choices in her life remain obscured to her. Instead, she ascribes crucial moments in, and conditions of, her life to a source outside of her own will, consciousness, and power. Such accounts stressing the lack of agency have in fact been influential in the case of pious subjects, and of female pious subjects in particular. In sum, the capacity to act, as Cristina conceives, narrates, and represents it, is likely to be found lacking in agency, according to established sociological understandings of agency—and, this lack of agency is particularly gendered.

Alternatively, it could be argued that Cristina is exercising her free choice. The fact that she might be deliberating and narrating that choice through “vocation” could be seen as a strategy of authorization or justification, particularly in a situation where her social environment or her family might oppose such choice. This way of ascribing agency is related to a foundational impulse of feminist theory and women's studies, which insists on valuing women's voices and perspectives and affirming their agency. Feminist theory has indeed made women's lives central to its analysis and is predicated on validating women's perceptions of their own situation. This leads to a feminist insistence on women's agency, which coincides with a new prominence of “agency” in social theory at large, 12 to the extent that we can speak of a “turn to agency” in the last couple of decades. In many ways, this turn to agency remains vital for countering those accounts that deny (pious) women's capacity to act. Yet this insistence on agency also brings its own set of questions and problems. Amy Hollywood has captured the critical conceptual problem in the following question: “how to take seriously the agency of the other . . . when the other seems intent on ascribing her agency to God?” 13 What does it mean to fall back on an established sociological understanding of agency to make sense of a subject, when the subject herself relies on a very different variety of language to speak of her capacity to act? To keep insisting on her agency, while glossing over the difference she points to, replicates, in an uncanny way, the structure of the “false consciousness” argument: her alienation lies in thinking she is not exercising her choice, while in fact she is. 14 And, both ways of accounting for pious women's agency suffer from the fact that they rely on an already established meaning and sense of agency, fixed in advance, rather than on letting agency emerge through the analysis of the particular concepts that enable specific modes of being and acting. 15

One particularly productive way to approach this conundrum is found in Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety . In exploring some of the conceptual challenges that women's involvement in Islamic piety movements poses to feminist theory in particular, and to secular-liberal thought in general, Mahmood looks carefully at conceptions of the self and moral agency that undergird the practices of this nonliberal movement. 16 The theoretical stakes in this approach lie in unpacking a set of normative liberal assumptions about human nature, notably through making her empirical material speak back to them. These include a conceptual critique of both common social scientific and feminist understandings of agency. Mahmood's ethnography—as she considers the worlds and livelihoods of women involved in the piety movement in Egypt—prompts her to question the assumption that human agency consists primarily of acts that challenge social norms and therefore express some kind of resistance to social norms. Not only those acts that resist norms require agential activity, Mahmood argues; the capacity to act is itself to be found in the ways in which one inhabits norms. In order to theorize this agency in a way that renders visible the capacity of a subject who deliberately seeks to uphold certain norms to act, Mahmood turns to the realm of ethics and ethical self-fashioning, and to embodiment, which she approaches through the work of Michel Foucault and an Aristotelian understanding of habitus.

This provides a more adequate approach to Cristina's understanding of vocation and, relatedly, her sense of agency. The desire that shapes Cristina as a subject is not one of self-realization, but, rather, is a desire to lead a life that pleases God. This desire includes acquiring an understanding of God's will, which leads Cristina not only to study important texts as they are presented within CL (which also serves as an interpretative community for those texts), but also to shape her embodied self in a certain way. In order to receive a vocation, one must make oneself receptive, which Cristina does through prayer and regular moments of keeping silence, and through participation in the spiritual exercises of the movement. After receiving a vocation, moreover, as my current research shows, more complex agential activities take place. A calling can be accepted and embraced but also struggled with intensively. It needs to be “verified” with a spiritual counselor; that is, it is interpreted and bestowed with meaning in a context of social interaction and subsequently acted upon in various ways. Religious vocation, in other words, points to a particular shaping of the body and the senses that differs, we could argue, from what Charles Hirschkind has called the “secular body” 17 and the secular sensory cultures through which it is constituted. In order to receive a vocation, one needs to be able to feel and hear or see in particular ways that are not necessarily recognized as secular. This underscores the point that established understandings of agency mobilize particular, secular understandings of the embodied subject.

To conclude: I have used the story of Cristina, who, more than ten years ago, was a young graduate at an important point in her life, to pose an epistemological question about the gap between established sociological concepts, such as agency, and a spectrum of pious livelihoods. During my time as a research associate in the Women's Studies in Religion Program and as a resident of the Center for the Study of World Religions, I have been investigating this question further. In concrete terms, this means I have returned to doing fieldwork within CL, focusing this time on the lives of Memores Domini who took their vows. In theoretical terms, my work explores further the conflicted relationship of sociology to religion and piety, as well as to gender, and makes use of Mahmood's rethinking of agency in terms of ethics and embodiment to unpack some of these tensions and to offer an alternative account of female pious livelihoods. It is not so much that such livelihoods need their own sociological accounts, I believe, but rather that sociology is in need of analytical tools and concepts, in addition to the sociological imagination, that are able to account adequately for more subjects and social realities than it currently does, especially when it comes to gender and religion.

—by Sarah Bracke

This article appears in the Spring 2014 edition of CSWR Today .

Franco Garelli, 'Italian Youth and Ideas of Vocation,' in Vocation and Social Context , ed. Giuseppe Giordan (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 38.
Luigi Berzana, 'Vocation as Personal Choice,' in Vocation and Social Context , ed. Giuseppe Giordan (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, 'Catholic Religious Vocations: Decline and Revival,' Review of Religious Research 42, no. 2 (2000): 125–45.
Garelli, 'Italian Youth and Ideas of Vocation.'
See, e.g., Albert Dilanni, 'Vocations and the Laicization of Religion Life,' America 14 (1987): 207–11; M. Marcelinne Falk, 'Vocations: Identity and Commitment,' Review for Religious 39 (1980): 357–65; Chiamata a scegliere: I giovani italiani di fronte alla vocazione , ed. Franco Garelli (Milano: San Paola, 2006); Roger Finke, 'An Orderly Return to Tradition: Explaining Membership Recruitment to Catholic Religious Orders,' Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36, no. 2 (1997): 218–30; Helen Rose Ebaugh, Jon Lorence, and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, 'The Growth and Decline of the Population of Catholic Nuns Cross-Nationally, 1960–1990: A Case of Secularization as Social Structural Change,' Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35, no. 2 (1996): 171–83.
Vocation and Social Context , ed. Giuseppe Giordan (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 37–56.
See, e.g., Lois McNay, Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
Amy Hollywood, 'Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historiography,' The Journal of Religion 84, no. 4 (2004): 524.
Sarah Bracke, 'Conjugating the Modern/Religious, Conceptualizing Female Religious Agency: Contours of a 'Post-Secular' Conjuncture,' Theory, Culture and Society 25, no. 6 (2008): 51–67.
Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Charles Hirschkind, 'Is There a Secular Body?' Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 633–47.

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Bracke, Sarah. 'Conjugating the Modern/Religious, Conceptualizing Female Religious Agency: Contours of a 'Post-Secular' Conjuncture.' Theory, Culture and Society 25, no. 6 (2008): 51–67.

Berzano, Luigi. 'Vocation as Personal Choice.' In Vocation and Social Context , edited by Giuseppe Giordan. Leiden: Brill, 2007.

Garelli, Franco. 'Italian Youth and Ideas of Vocation.' In Vocation and Social Context , edited by Giuseppe Giordan. Leiden: Brill, 2007.

Giordan, Giuseppe, ed. Vocation and Social Context . Leiden: Brill, 2007.

Hirschkind, Charles. 'Is There a Secular Body?' Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 633–47.

Hollywood, Amy. 'Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historiography.' The Journal of Religion 84, no. 4 (2004): 514–25.

Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

McNay, Lois. Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory . Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.

Stark, Rodney, and Roger Finke. 'Catholic Religious Vocations: Decline and Revival.' Review of Religious Research 42, no. 2 (2000): 125–45.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . London: Routledge, 2001.

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The Unexpected Vocation

The following essay is adapted from a commencement address given at Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, Florida, on May 12, 2024.

I have attended many law school commencements: My own in 1980, my wife’s two years later, those of four of our children. I have spent forty-one years as a law professor. But I was never asked to speak at a law school commencement until today.

I have been thinking of those forty-seven speeches I didn’t give, hoping to find in them some inspiration for this talk, or at least a few good jokes. It didn’t work. Routine platitudes and plaudits just won’t do. For one thing, this is the Silver Anniversary of a unique place. It is twenty-five years since, on the last weekend of March 1999, Tom Monaghan called to Ann Arbor a couple dozen Catholic lawyers and professors to fill out his vision of Ave Maria Law School. Tom already had a dean—Bernard Dobranski, who had been running Catholic University Law School. Tom recruited the initial core faculty, a superb group comprised of Joe Falvey, Steve Sefranek, Laura Hirshfeld, and two people who have faithfully served you and all of your predecessors: Professors Mollie Murphy and Rich Myers.

The conversations that weekend were exhilarating and fruitful. The most notable attendee was Justice Antonin Scalia. He brought along one of his law clerks, a young woman who has since made something of herself in the legal world, too. She would soon marry her law school beau, a man named Jesse Barrett. She was then just Amy Coney.

One thing I learned from forty-seven ceremonies is that no commencement speech is too short. The same is true of homilies, I think. So, here are just three pieces of advice—challenges, in fact—as you go forth.

The first challenge: You have big shoes to fill. I was a visiting professor at Ave in the fall of 2001. I taught the first graduating class when they were 2Ls. Some of them stick in my memory for the odd reason. Chad Doran married the daughter of my late, cherished Notre Dame Law colleague, Professor Charlie Rice. Another I will identify by first name only. Patrick was a Thomas Aquinas College grad, smart and affable in his way. He signed up for my seminar on religious liberty, came the first day, and never showed up again. I asked him why he dropped my class. His answer, in full: “I could tell from that first day that your class was going to be a lot of work. And I don’t do . . . work.”

Patrick was atypical. Top to bottom, that class was the best group of students I have ever taught. It included so many able lawyers, including several with whom I am in contact still. Matt Bowman is senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, doing some of the most important appellant litigation in America on culture war issues. John Manos is VP and general counsel at EWTN. Monica Secord occupies the office right below mine at Notre Dame Law School. She is program director of International and Graduate programs.

Monica’s classmate Erika Hiester clerked for Judge William Pryor of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Last week he wrote to me about Erika. Chief Judge Pryor said that she “was one of the best law clerks ever to grace my chambers. She worked alongside clerks who had graduated from Ivy League law schools, three of whom are now judges (a federal circuit judge, a state supreme court justice, and a federal district judge) and another who clerked for a Supreme Court justice. Erika was as good or better of a lawyer as any of them.”

Now for the second challenge. The shoes you are stepping into are made bigger by the gift you received here—a Catholic legal education. It is a pearl of great price. Yes, you worked for it, you paid for it, you earned your degree. But the education that Ave Maria provided you is nonetheless a gift. And, like all gifts—starting with the gift of life itself—you are obliged to use it for the good of others. Consider the Parable of the Talents.

These days almost all law professors in America shun Catholic legal education because they think it is blinkered: narrow, parochial, sectarian. They are all wrong. It is they who have blinders on. They see only bits and pieces of the truth, and those more by accident than by design. They “see through a glass, darkly,” to use St. Paul’s expression from 1 Corinthians.

Only a radically defective legal education—or insanity—could lead smart lawyers to hold that a twelve-year-old who is not allowed to choose his own bedtime must be allowed to choose his sex. Or to call for abolishing police forces and replacing them with an army of social workers. Or explain prosecutors who do not believe in prosecuting. In many big cities, paying at Target or CVS has become optional; shoplifting is no longer a crime. It is a hobby.

But I am still in the weeds here. Tall weeds, maybe, but weeds nonetheless. For behind all of this craziness is a rejection of God and his moral law. Our Supreme Court says that the “heart of liberty is the right of each person to define his own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

In other words, God is not the source of meaning and value for our actions. We are. It is an old temptation. Just ask Adam and Eve.

Only a Catholic legal education teaches you to see law whole and entire. You were taught about law’s deep foundations in the natural moral law and about how God’s transcendent justice is the measure of all things. You were taught to cherish all of life from conception to natural death, and every life, every human being, because each one is made in the image and likeness of God. Per Corinthians: “You see as if face to face.” Everyone else sees shadows and fragments.

Yes, we live in a post-Christian culture. Any lawyer educated at Ave will face headwinds, difficulty, conflict. That is so often the lot of those with integrity. Living in the truth is never easy.

Voices from Middle Earth supply some consolation, and courage. “‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.'”

Third and last challenge: Now that you know what you are going to be when you grow up it is time to ask the really important question, what is God asking of me? In what particular way am I to use my gifts in service to others? This is the matter of personal vocation .

Cardinal Newman talked about this, in words quoted by Pope Benedict during the Newman Beatification ceremonies. “God has created me to do him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission” [emphasis added]. “My mission” is a distinct and unrepeatable assignment. In his book Love and Responsibility John Paul II wrote: “What is my vocation means in what direction should my personality develop, considering what I have in me, what I have to offer, and what others—other people and God—expect of me. ”

These are all unmistakable references to an individualized way of following Jesus, in season and out of season. Pope John Paul II wrote in 1992 that “each one of the faithful must be helped to embrace the gift entrusted to him or her as a completely unique person, and to hear the words which the Spirit of God personally addresses to him or her.”

The path with our name on it is not necessarily the one we expect or even have prepared for.

Judge Pryor added in his e-mail to me last week that Erika Hiester, one of his best clerks ever, “was foremost grounded in her faith, which is why she now delights in raising her seven children as her vocation.” On this Mother’s Day I salute my wife Pam, an honor’s graduate of Cornell Law School. She took the New York Bar Exam while eight months pregnant and never practiced law after all. She found her calling raising our children—and putting up with me.

We are talking about being called , having work set before us, being chosen . Tolkien got this just right, too. Frodo asks Gandalf: “‘Why was I chosen for this perilous quest?’ ‘Such questions cannot be answered,’ said Gandalf. ‘You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess: not for power or wisdom, at any rate. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.'”

Gandalf added: “That may be an encouraging thought.”

Gerard V. Bradley is professor of law at the University of Notre Dame and trustee of the James Wilson Institute.

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Purpose, Service, Leadership

Reflection #1: Essay on Vocation
Reflection #2
Reflection #3
Reflection #4
Reflection #5
Reflection #6
Reflection #7
Reflection #8
Reflection #9
Reflection #10 Final Course Reflections
II. Statement of Purpose & Annotated Bibliography
III. Group Portfolio LINK
IV. Mini-Grant Proposal

REFLECTION PAPER #1: ESSAY ON VOCATION

Please write a brief reaction to Gary Selby's essay on vocation, Finding Your Heart's True Calling , after reading this introductory assignment .

Consider the following when you answer :

What is a vocation?
What is the relationship between vocation and career?
What are your key considerations when charting your academic course at Pepperdine?

“Finding Your Heart’s True Calling” Reflection

As college started approaching, I felt as though I was constantly asking myself, “What is it that I aspire to become in life?” It is common to answer this question by focusing on careers that have high earning potential and I myself was answering this question similarly to how any other incoming college student might answer it. Before I read “Finding Your Heart’s True Calling” by Gary Selby, I was almost embarrassed to tell people that I wanted to go into advertising because I was afraid of them judging that the career path I want to go into may not be the best financially. However, Ii was gifted by God with a voice that I express through drawing. Through my art, I am able to captivate others and share my thoughts through my drawings without verbally having to express them. I looked into the eyes of the questioner who expected me to tell them I wanted to be a doctor or lawyer. Yet that wasn’t what I wanted to be nor do I believe to be my vocation.

When reading the quote from Fredrick Buechner about the sense of vocation I became aware that the kind of work God calls you to do is, “ ‘work that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done’ ” (Selby 4). I had always thought that the career I wanted to go into was something I loved to do but something that would make me financially wealthy. When reading the quote of Fredrick’s, I began to realize that the way I am thinking is deterring me from the path that God has created for me to follow. Like Moses and Paul, they began on a path that they saw fit for their lives and didn’t see what their calling was until God had called them to their specific roles in the world.

I realize that, “ ‘the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet’ ” (Selby 4). I had always thought that the career I wanted to go into would first bring joy to myself and others but also be a beacon for the voices of others. Before I set on pursuing advertising as a career, I thought that I wanted to be an architect. Yet as I got older I let judgment from other sources tell me that this would not be a beneficial move. Now I sit and think if architecture was my ideas of wealth clouding my thoughts or God speaking through others to tell me that this was not a career I would have appreciated. Like Shelby says, “Often, the journey includes as many wrong turns as breakthroughs, times when you’re trudging in the fog, alongside times when the view is spectacular” (Selby 5). I hope to one day reach that spectacular view and I know that it won’t be as fast as I want it to be, but it will be a blessing when I get there. I know that God has gifted me with art. It has helped me discover myself and has also helped me reach my ideas and others to a broader audience. I know that this in some way is my vocation.

In a society enamored with the gain and worship of money and luxury, vocation is often lost in our result. Even though money is a necessity in life, I want my occupation to be a tool to express myself as a person, as well as to signify my beliefs. I learned by reading the essay of Gary Selby’s that a preoccupation for money makes your career no longer enjoyable and a job that gives a person their passion in life and something that makes them fully enjoy it is essential. Although I used to believe that my career was merely a way for money to support myself, having a job I feel called to and enjoy is a need. A career based solely on gain makes my mindset wrong and the quality of my work will be hindered. Though money is a very important commodity in life, the true career is a means of fulfillment not with riches, but a means of bringing satisfaction to an individual and giving back to others.

Living on Scan Time: My life after a cancer diagnosis

Ever since the murky hour when, through an ethereal fog, I made out the silhouette of my surgeon beside the bed where I lay tethered to tubes, ever since I heard him utter the words, “Turns out it was cancer; I was really surprised,” and I pressed my hand to where half my lung used to be, I have been living in Scan Time. Scan Time is time reordered, narrowed, heightened. Scan Time is time abbreviated, shrunken to digestible, perceptible segments. It comes in the immediate wake of finding out you have cancer—in my case, lung cancer. Now that my tumor and a good chunk of lung have been removed, watchkeeping—scans every three to six months, for at least five years—is my first line of defense against its return. Appointments are made a half year out; the date on the calendar becomes your benchmark, the point as far in the distance as you will let yourself see. The screens in the waiting rooms at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center flash with a digital message: Scanxiety? We understand that waiting for scans can be hard. Call our social work team now. Everyone grasps that whatever the future is, it hinges on what they find when the all-seeing machine—a Goliathan O-ring that swallows you whole—peers deep inside your body. You are told not to move once you climb onto the hard plastic bed that makes me think sarcophagus , especially as it glides eerily into the shadowed encasement. And then comes this contender for the world’s most redundant instruction: “Hold your breath,” the disembodied words piped in from what seems an otherworldly station. In lieu of breathing, you pray mightily that no new ghostly suspicions emerge. And then you wait. And wait. Should the all-clear be granted, you are etch-a-sketched back to a clean slate. Scan Time: the lease on your life, meted out in six-month installments. Turns out, it’s something of a blessing, one that sharpens the focus on the miracle of each moment, peels away the anesthetization to time that, for most of us, is default mode. We live, most of us, thinking ours is a timeline that extends into the far-off far off. And that dulls the noticing of each never-again day. But when you’re told you’ve got cancer, when you feel the iron weight of that sentence fall with a thunk on your every breath, the bracketed finiteness of time—of life itself—now doled out in measures of half a year per dose, it amplifies everything. Each pulsebeat of living is magnified, glorified. It’s time distilled to its most sacred concentration. And it draws out a knowing that’s deep and profound, one that’s not too dissimilar to an ancient spiritual practice that understands the holiness in contemplating our death. Or, in my case, contemplating the reduction of time, the days I count on my half-year watch. At first glance, that might sound morbid. But it’s emphatically the opposite. Memento mori is the age-old practice of remembering that you will die. It’s an ancient philosophical thread, a spiritual practice woven across time and traditions (be they moral or religious traditions) from early Stoicism to medieval Christianity, from ancient Judaism to the central teachings of Buddhism.

St. Benedict of Nursia, in his sixth-century book of precepts known simply as the Rule, exhorted his monks to “keep death daily” before their eyes. It’s an awareness that winds its way through most world religions, although barely so in the West, where we do all we can to push away any whiff of dying or death. To understand that our days are not infinite, not a bottomless pour, spilling one after another so dizzyingly that we are numb to each dawn’s awakening, is to tight-squeeze our focus on how precious this time of ours is. Pope Francis, in his apostolic exhortation “Laudate Deum,” posed three critical questions: “What is the meaning of my life? What is the meaning of my time on this earth? And what is the ultimate meaning of all my work and effort?” Those questions take on an inescapable edge when held up in six-month increments. We’re a simpler people than we sometimes pretend. We’re keener at grasping hard truths when they’re pressed up against us. Cancer presses hard truths. Scan Time sharpens focus, propels us deep into seizing the day. Seizing each blessed day. Once upon a time, I was a nurse who took care of kids with all sorts of cancers. Back in the days before scanners were part of every oncologist’s medical tool kit, I remember more than anything how those kids somehow eclipsed the cancer in their lives. They shoved it out of the viewfinder, didn’t let it intrude on however many days were counted in their too-short lives. Theirs was an innate genius—not a day dithered away—that echoes across the decades. I remember how kids with an amputated leg and a hospital-issued pair of crutches clocked how swiftly they could race down the hall, without crashing into medicine carts—or their nurses. Or how, as soon as the retching from chemo ended, they’d order up midnight pizzas and hunker down in the supply closet for a tête-à-tête with their IV poles and their bald co-conspirators. Or how, one Halloween, one of my favorites, a 12-year-old with a tumor lodged in her spine that left her paralyzed from the waist down, didn’t let that stop her from slopping papier-mâché all over her bedsheets, as she crafted me a green, tempera-painted pumpkin head and crowned me her Irish Pumpkin Queen. Those children made time count. And they didn’t need scans to prompt it. All these years later, I draw on their wisdom, though I lean on the scanner—a machine that might see what is inside me but not what lies down the road. Scan Time, I’ve realized, propels me to live sacramentally, to hold time to the light, to behold its shimmering brilliance, the facets of my life I consider most indispensably sacred. And to enfold myself in each anointed hour.

I might be mesmerized by a butterfly. Might sit down to pen that long-overdue confession. Might devote my perishable days to those few souls I cannot bear to leave behind, revel in the litany of whimsies we’ve long promised we’d get to, indulge with abandon. Or maybe I’ll travel to pockets of the world where my heart and my hands—and my long-expired nursing license—might be put to good use. Scan Time is palliative, too; it offers something of a balm. Where the arithmetic of five-year-survival rates sets me to trembling as I weigh cold, hard probabilities, I’m washed in some iteration of calm when I set my sights on half a year at a time. Like a mountain climber trekking past mile marker after mile marker, I keep my eyes on the immediate path and don’t try to peek around circuitous, unseeable bends. Yet underpinning each round is the knowing this might be the last, the one with expiration. One of these rounds, you suppose, the call won’t be so freeing. And time then will shift again. Day after day the distilling comes, until each last minute holds all that you love, all that desperately matters.

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Nuns at Benedictine College respond to Harrison Butker’s controversial speech

A group of nuns associated with Benedictine College is weighing in on Harrison Butker's controversial graduation speech .

The sisters of Mount St. Scholastica, who describe their group as a founding institution and sponsor of Benedictine College, just shared a statement about the professional football player's speech, saying his comments don't “represent the Catholic, Benedictine, liberal arts college that our founders envisioned and in which we have been so invested."

The statement, which was posted on the group's official website, critique Butker’s speech, which has drawn criticism for its strong emphasis on women's roles in the home.

“Instead of promoting unity in our church, our nation, and the world, his comments seem to have fostered division. One of our concerns was the assertion that being a homemaker is the highest calling for a woman,” the statement reads.

The sisters went on to describe how they have devoted their lives to God and have educated many women over the past 160 years.

"These women have made a tremendous difference in the world in their roles as wives and mothers and through their God-given gifts in leadership, scholarship, and their careers,” the statement reads.

On May 11, the NFL kicker delivered a 20-minute speech that addressed his views on a variety of additional topics, including reproductive issues, Pride month and more. The athlete also asserted that his wife's life “really started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.”

The sisters of Mount St. Scholastica noted that their group has taught both women and men "not just how to be 'homemakers' in a limited sense." Instead, their teachings have focused on "how to make a Gospel-centered, compassionate home within themselves where they can welcome others as Christ, empowering them to be the best versions of themselves."

Later on in the statement, the nuns said they "reject a narrow definition of what it means to be Catholic" and want to be known as "an inclusive, welcoming community."

During his speech, Butker directly addressed female students in comments that later sparked controversy.

“Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world,” he said. “But I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world. I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabel would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. I’m on the stage today, and able to be the man I am, because I have a wife who leans into her vocation.”

In response to Butker's speech, the NFL issued a statement , saying, “His views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.”

TODAY's Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager also weighed in on the debate while on air this week, and expressed their disappointment in what they saw as a narrow-minded view of women's potential.

“Well, I’m where I am today because I have a husband who leans into his vocation, which is being an equal partner. And I tell him that all the time,” Jenna said.

“Don’t speak for us,” Hoda said. “Stop speaking for women out there.”

“We have all these people that try to divide us by labels,” Jenna added. “People that stay at home are amazing . The work they do is incredible. And let’s not compare one to the other.”

Chrissy Callahan covers a range of topics for TODAY.com, including fashion, beauty, pop culture and food. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, watching bad reality TV and consuming copious amounts of cookie dough.

The lesson of Harrison Butker: Take words seriously, not kickers

The Chiefs specialist is entitled to the views expressed in his graduation speech, but misusing our language undermines its value

I’m sure I should be more upset about Harrison Butker , but he’s just a kicker. He’s not even a very influential member of his own team. He deserves a merely proportional response. The best reply to Butker is to make fun of him; kickers hate that. Turn his name into a verb. When you “butker” something, it means to botch an intellectual argument with clumsy hyperbole to the point of obnoxiousness. To get “butkered” means to be preached to by a dude with a zealot’s beard that looks like it was combed with a harrow.

A change.org petition is demanding the Kansas City Chiefs “dismiss Harrison Butker for discriminatory remarks” that he made at the Benedictine College commencement. It had garnered 126,000 signatures by Thursday. That’s exactly the wrong response — again, he’s just a kicker. It’s not like he’s the Bishop of Kansas City, he’s just a Kansas City Chief. You don’t fire a kicker for demeaning Taylor Swift as “my teammate’s girlfriend.” The right response is to sing Swift lyrics at him, preferably from “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.”

Butker has every right to speak his faith and his mind and should be able to do so without fear of professional reprisal; he was representing only himself at a personal engagement at Benedictine. We’re always asking athletes to be role models, and it’s more than a little hypocritical to praise football players when they protest cops but to stifle one for being religious or conservative. Enough with the outrage over his beliefs. Who cares whether a kicker thinks a woman’s proper role is in the home, so long as you don’t have to live as a handmaiden in his household? I’m more concerned with his scaremonger, doomwatcher language. It’s his symptomatic inflationary alarmism that’s worth worrying about.

The cheapening of words by public speakers across the spectrum has begun to rob us all of perspective — and of the art of proper contextual retort. Inflate the word “trauma” with enough overuse, and there’s no meaning left in it. Every experience is equated at the same cheap, low level: What should be merely mildly upsetting becomes equated with actual torture — which denies actual sufferers recognition of their legitimate pain. Butker’s a victim of that: He’s just a kicker. But he’s guilty of it, too. The personal conduct of anyone who does not comport with his faith is “degenerate.”

Inflated words are throughout his speech. Butker drops calumnies like nickels. President Biden is “delusional” for the way he practices his faith. Pride Month is a “deadly sin.” Those who quest for diversity are engaged in “tyranny.” He is fighting against “the cultural emasculation of men.”

In Butker’s view, women are too encouraged to define success as attainable only through professional rewards, rather than through family. A fair enough point. But here is the inflationary way that Butker phrased it to the young women in the audience that rendered it idiotic. “I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you.”

Actually, here is a more appropriate use of “diabolical”: It describes the thousand-year persistence of teaching that young women are such dumb defenseless prey they cannot discern lies on their own and need a man with medieval monastic face hair to guide their morality and define their happiness. Even if he’s just an NFL kicker.

Inflationary language is, of course, inherently lazy. It’s the recourse of people who are trying to take shortcuts to power and influence. Butker is clearly over-striving for both, and, thanks to NFL hagiography, no doubt believes he’s equipped to lead. Sprinkled throughout his speech are grievances about government, and rather unnerving references to “the pervasiveness of disorder,” as if he’s the only man who can put us straight — forcibly. “If we are going to be men and women for this time in history, we need to stop pretending that the ‘Church of Nice’ is a winning proposition,” he says.

It was too bad that such an unrefined speech was delivered at Benedictine. The Association of Benedictine Colleges and Universities takes some pains to stress the thoughtfulness and nuance of their rich educational tradition and to avoid categorical certainties and hyperbole. Its website says that to be rightly shaped by the Catholic intellectual tradition means to be “unafraid of ambiguity or the unknown,” and it gives “special attention to Christ’s unexpected arrival from outside in the person of the guest.” It urges students to put aside their preoccupations “in order to let the unexpected person in.”

Sounds like a commitment to the “tyranny” of inclusiveness.

St. Benedict himself cautioned against “the wicked zeal of bitterness which separates from God.” Now there is an articulate statement that sums up the reductive harm of inflationary language. In a recent essay on St. Benedict, the Catholic abbot Marion Nguyen expanded on this thought, describing it as a “kind of false fervor” that emanates from those who believe in the perfection of their own worship, and think they have more rigor than you or I. Butker’s inflationary language smacks of that false fervor.

It’s important not to overreact to Butker with the same false outrage and overstatement. His personal belief about women’s true vocation is not threatening in the least, and neither is the sidelong dumbellism he showed in statements such as, “Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail.”

There is enough off-with-their-heads censoriousness in public life without recruiting a kicker into it. Keep Butker in his proper context, and scale. It’s the best way to fight inflation.

To the moms all alone on Mother's Day, I see you and you are enough.

Most of my 14 years of motherhood felt like Mother’s Day was spent alone, including some of the years I was married.

Every May, when the second Sunday in May comes around, I think of the women who are where I was in multiple places of my mother journey: scared, alone and envious of the moms with a supportive partner at home.

This year, I've written a letter to every single mother struggling to celebrate herself today, who feels inferior to the other families she sees.

When the flowers don't come, when there are no "thank yous," when there is no one posting our picture, I want us to remember where our gift truly lies.

To our kids, this is the life and this love is enough. So, we can raise our glass.

Dear, single mom on Mother's Day

Maybe you woke up a little early today to give yourself the gift of solitude. There is no one to tag in at the end of the day. It’s exhausting.

You might get a few minutes before feelings of inadequacy come flooding in. You are reminded of all the things you can't do, never seeing all that you have. You wonder how a single-parent home is affecting your kids, who will be down in a matter of moments.

Then, the day will begin just like any other day.

Maybe there were once flowers waiting for you. Maybe there were never flowers at all. You may find crumpled up Mother's Day art in your kids' backpack today, but they may not recognize that there should be anything to celebrate.

You will prepare every meal, answer every request, create every moment, wipe every tear and calm every fear. But your requests will be left unmet, your moments 60 seconds at a time, your tears wiped by your own hand and your fears, ever ponding.

Yet every day you show up and you do it, maybe with a little envy for the two-parent home down the street, because it's hard to be a full-time parent and a full-time provider. You can't possibly do either perfectly well.

If you're feeling discouraged today, seeing only your lack, look inside.

You are the creator of all the good that you see.

Tonight, when you tuck in your kids, witness your gifts.

There may have not been anything on the table this morning, you may have cleaned up the house and cooked every meal, but there is peace in the room. There is joy on their faces. There is a tangible love providing security like the blanket wrapped around their feet.

Your family is not inferior.

You are enough. Your kids know it, and some day someone else will too.

But it has to start with you.

My son was feeling left behind: What kids with autistic siblings want you to know.

Your married friend may be struggling, too

Single mothers should know that married mothers aren't necessarily better supported. Sure, they may have flowers, but just like you, they have learned how to water themselves.

There were Mother's Days when all I felt was hollow. There were flowers, photos, dinners and lots of hugs, but it obscured a darker reality. Presence doesn't equal support. Lonely doesn't equal alone.

Knowing my "enoughness" led me back into singleness and back to the mother I've always been. So, cherish where you are and never trade your peace for support. Recognize yourself and celebrate this day.

Last year, I bought myself a bouquet of wildflowers, and this year, I bought myself a few.

My gift is this home I've created and the peace I feel at night. Sure, it may be a little messy, but it is far from inferior.

When I release my kids into the world, they will take this love that they've been given and begin planting it in places of their own, definitely better than if they had grown up in our broken two-parent home.

Yet I know that you, like me, may have a desire to share your life with someone. Just make sure that they are a seer too, a seer of your worth and your "enoughness," on more than just this special day.

At home, abroad, working, interning? Wherever you are this summer, contact OCS or make an appointment for a virtual advising session. We are available all summer!

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Research Assistant positions with American Enterprise Institute

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The American Enterprise Institute is a public policy think tank dedicated to defending human dignity, expanding human potential, and building a freer and safer world. The work of our scholars and staff advances ideas rooted in our belief in democracy, free enterprise, American strength and global leadership, solidarity with those at the periphery of our society, and a pluralistic, entrepreneurial culture.

Entry Level Roles at AEI

AEI typically hires graduating students with 0-1 years of professional experience with Research Assistant roles. Click here to customize job matches with AEI. Two are listed currently and brief summaries are provided.

Research Assistant, Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility Washington, DC AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility (COSM) seeks a full time, in-person research assistant to work with scholar Howard Husock and other members of the COSM team. The Research Assistant will support research by retrieving, analyzing, and manipulating data, edit and contribute to scholarly papers, articles for a general audience, op-eds, and books and create and format charts, graphic displays, and tables and more.

Research Assistant, Vocation, Career, and Work Washington, DC AEI seeks a full-time, in-person research assistant to work with Senior Fellow Brent Orrell. The research assistant will study a wide variety of issues related to workforce development policy, including the skills needed for success in the modern workforce, worker attitudes and workplace culture, AI and the future of work, work as a pathway to economic mobility, and more. This employee in this position will also support Senior Fellow Sally Satel. The anticipated start date for this position is Summer 2024.

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N.F.L. Player Draws Rebukes (and Trolling) for Graduation Speech

Kansas City’s Harrison Butker quoted Taylor Swift lyrics while telling men to be “unapologetic in your masculinity” and women to focus on being homemakers.

A man with brown hair and a beard speaks into a small microphone.

By Scott Cacciola and Benjamin Hoffman

Harrison Butker of the Kansas City Chiefs is one of the best place-kickers in the N.F.L. That is enough to make him somewhat famous in the football world, but players of his position aren’t typically known by more casual observers — unless they do something especially great or terrible on the field.

Last weekend, with the N.F.L. solidly in its off-season, Mr. Butker found himself at the center of a great deal of vitriol on social media, and it had nothing to do with his job.

On Saturday, Mr. Butker delivered a 20-minute commencement address to the graduates of Benedictine College, a conservative Catholic school in Atchison, Kan., about 50 miles northwest of Kansas City. He packed his speech full of conservative political discourse, railing against “degenerative cultural values and media.” He rebuked President Biden for his stance as a Catholic who supports abortion rights, and urged women to forgo careers so that they could support their husbands.

“I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother,” Mr. Butker said. “I’m on this stage today and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation.”

He added: “It cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.”

Mr. Butker, who appeared to be choking up, was greeted by a round of applause that lasted for nearly 20 seconds before he was able to continue. At the end of his speech, the crowd gave him a standing ovation.

The reaction online, however, was not nearly as receptive, with his comments being picked apart by posters on TikTok, Instagram and X.

Team officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the views Mr. Butker expressed prompted the N.F.L. to issue a statement saying the speech did not match the league’s values, and resulted in a rival team, the Los Angeles Chargers, trolling Mr. Butker on social media. More than 125,000 people, as of Thursday afternoon, had signed a petition on Change.org calling for Kansas City to cut ties with its star kicker.

Mr. Butker, 28, who describes himself as a devout Catholic, has won three Super Bowls with Kansas City since joining the team as a rookie in 2017. He converted all 11 of his field-goal attempts in the team’s most recent playoff run, and set a record for the longest field goal in Super Bowl history (57 yards) in the team’s championship-clinching victory over the San Francisco 49ers in February.

But on a team full of stars — Patrick Mahomes is widely considered the best quarterback in the N.F.L., and the team’s tight end, Travis Kelce, is among the best to ever play his position and is dating Taylor Swift — Mr. Butker had never really stood out. His speech on Saturday may have changed all that.

In the speech, Mr. Butker encouraged men to be “unapologetic in your masculinity,” referenced “the deadly sins” of homosexuality, and criticized Catholic priests for deriving “their happiness from the adulation they receive from their parishioners.” In attempting to drive home his point, Mr. Butker invoked lyrics from Ms. Swift’s song “ Bejeweled ” without mentioning her or Mr. Kelce by name.

“This undue familiarity will prove to be problematic every time,” Mr. Butker said, “because as my teammate’s girlfriend says, ‘familiarity breeds contempt.’”

Quoting Ms. Swift’s lyrics in such a speech was unusual, considering her status as an entertainment mogul who speaks frequently of empowering women and is believed to have a net worth of more than $1 billion .

Mr. Butker had also weighed in on Ms. Swift earlier this year, in an interview with the Eternal Word Television Network, describing her as “so humble and so gracious.” He added, in a nod to the values he discussed in Saturday’s speech, that he hoped that she and Mr. Kelce would “get married and start a family.”

The views expressed during Mr. Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine drew swift condemnation. Justice Horn, a former Kansas City commissioner, wrote : “Harrison Butker doesn’t represent Kansas City nor has he ever. Kansas City has always been a place that welcomes, affirms and embraces our LGBTQ+ community members.”

Jessica Valenti, a feminist author, addressed the speech in her “Abortion, Every Day” newsletter , saying “So let’s be very clear about this commencement speech: Butker’s remarks weren’t ‘fringe’ or radical — they’re the law. He was simply saying out loud what Republicans have already codified: that women’s role in this country is to bear children and support men, who are the actual stars of the show.” She said bans on abortion, like the ones Mr. Butker is advocating, are “the embodiment of the smallest men’s biggest wishes.”

The N.F.L.’s response was to issue a statement from Jonathan Beane, the league’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, in which he said that Mr. Butker’s “views are not those of the N.F.L. as an organization. The N.F.L. is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.”

The Chargers, a rival team of the Chiefs, went a step beyond that, poking fun at Mr. Butker during a video announcing the team’s 2024 schedule. In the video, a Sims character with a striking resemblance to Mr. Butker was shown working in the kitchen.

As the week has unfolded, the discussion of Mr. Butker has expanded to looking into other aspects of his life. Among the details discussed by many on social media: Despite his stance on women in the workplace, his mother, Elizabeth Keller Butker, has a distinguished career. She is a medical physicist in the department of radiation oncology at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.

Scott Cacciola writes features and profiles of people in the worlds of sports and entertainment for the Styles section of The Times. More about Scott Cacciola

Benjamin Hoffman is a senior editor who writes, assigns and edits stories primarily on the intersection between sports, lifestyle and culture. More about Benjamin Hoffman

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Testing the W.N.B.A.’s TV Limits: The docuseries “Full Court Press” closely tracked college stars like Caitlin Clark and Kamilla Cardoso. Fans who want to follow elite W.N.B.A. rookies could have a tougher time .

Competing for Olympic Spots: Two friends had run side by side for more than 10,000 miles. Both vied for a place in the marathon at the Paris Games .

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Essay On Vocation
Essay On Vocation. 1020 Words5 Pages. "The purpose of life is to discover your gift; the work of life is to develop it; and the meaning of life is to give your gift away.". Purpose, life, and meaning. These key words in the previous quote have something to do with the concept of vocation.
Finding Your Calling in Life: What is Your Vocation?
In Let Your Life Speak, Parker J. Palmer argues: "Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about-quite apart from what I would like it to be about-or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions…..Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I ...
Calling & Vocation (Overview)
Schuurman, Douglas J. Vocation: Discerning Our Calling in Life. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004. Schuster, John P. Answering Your Call: A Guide for Living Your Deepest Purpose. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2002. Calling in Christian Thought and Practice. Guinness, Os. The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life.
The Doctrine of Vocation
The word "vocation" is simply the Latinate word for "calling.". God calls us—addresses us personally with the language of His Word—and we are brought to faith. He also calls us to arenas of service. "Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him" (1 Cor. 7:17).
PDF Called to Life: Reflecting on Vocation Participant Guide
We hope that this Guide will help you to share and explore your own story of vocation. As your eyes are opened to God's presence around you, may the "ear of your heart" turn to hear God speaking in your life—the call of vocation. "Listen with the ear of your heart." Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue 1
PDF Exploring VocationExploring Vocation Finding Your Heart's True
have to do with your purpose for living, your gifts and passions, your place in the world, the meaning of your life, the kind of person you are becoming. These questions lie at the heart of an ancient concept that you will hear a great deal about at Pepperdine, the idea of "vocation" or "calling." Finding your call-
6 Ways to Discover Your Vocation And a Meaningful Life
You can have an easy life or a meaningful one, but you can't have both. You can have an easy life or a meaningful one, but you can't have both. 3. Your vocation always moves the world forward ...
5 steps to finding your vocation
Are you looking for your vocation in the Catholic Church? Do you want to discover how to live a fulfilling and meaningful life? If so, you might want to check out this article from vocationnetwork.org, where you will find five steps to finding your vocation, based on prayer, discernment, research, dialogue, and action. You will also learn about the different forms of religious life and ...
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Hannah's Winning Vocation Essay. Many people think a vocation is a calling to the priesthood or maybe to be a brother or a sister, but a vocation is actually a calling from God to a Christian lifestyle. Certainly some are called to a vocation as a priest or brother or a sister; however, one could also be called to a vocation of married life ...
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You need to be happy in order to be good, and you need to be good to succeed. And when you succeed, there's a good chance you'll get paid.". Freedom and Frugality. For a man who has found his true vocation, the line between work and joy/life is completely erased. His work is his play and his play is his work.
Discerning One's Vocation: Some Personal Reflections
However, when we remember that at the heart of our vocation isn't "theologian" but "Christian" - a beautiful but challenging unity emerges in the recognition that embracing one's vocation is to respond to a call from God. Once one recognizes this the stark distinctions between a vocation to be a nurse and a vocation as a ...
Your Vocation: A Personal Calling From God
To Be Called. First off, a vocation cannot be chosen. It is a call from God and thus the initiative begins with Him. We find this in the very word vocation, which comes from the Latin word "vocare" which means 'to call'. God makes the call, it is up to us to discern this call and answer it. Discerning or discernment is also a word that ...
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Using the sources from your research, flesh out your paragraphs with relevant facts and evidence. For example, in the thesis example on doctors, the first body paragraph in your essay might be about the lives a doctor saves because this is the first detail mentioned in the thesis. Citing examples and statistics of how many lives an average ...
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Narrative Essay On Vocation. Vocation is a calling in life, a purpose to what you're meant to do in life. I believe that vocation can consist of many different experiences that form your calling in life. For me, there has never been just one experience that has formed my vocation. My vocation always continues to expand with all the different ...
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The word "vocation" derives from the Latin words "vocatio" and "vocare," both meaning to call or summon and originally used to describe a spiritual and reflective way of life. During Ancient Greek and Roman times, those at the bottom of the social pyramid took on manual labor, and those held in higher social regard accepted a ...
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Theological Implications For Christian Life. Therefore, we could say that vocation is a movement of living in the glory of God and for the glory of God. Rather than viewing it as stagnant and determinative, vocation or calling is best understood as a dynamic process. At the time of the Reformation Luther's teaching on "calling" was liberating ...
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My vocation story is simple; it began with a thought from God that my life was meant for something more. This thought resounded "priesthood" not only in my head, but also in my day-to-day life. Very carefully, through the influence of my parents, through the desire to attend Holy Mass more regularly throughout the week, and through my ...
God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life by Gene Edward
The doctrine of vocation, though it has to do with human work, is essentially about God's work and how God works in and through our lives. Our part is to carry out our vocations. The outcome belongs completely to the Lord. Veith tells us that the Christian life is to be lived in vocation, in the seemingly ordinary walks of life that take up ...
Choosing a Vocation: An Essay on Agency
The Young and Vocation study documents the process of secularization, and the concomitant sacralization of personal life choices, given that the respondents seem to extend an idea of the sacred to the search for authentic existence. 5 But its design struggles to adequately incorporate those experiences that are not based on a secular ...
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REFLECTION PAPER #1: ESSAY ON VOCATION Please write a brief reaction to Gary Selby's essay on vocation, Finding Your Heart's True Calling, after reading this introductory assignment. ... The article gave me new insight on how I should tackle my major and my life at Pepperdine. Before reading the article, I saw myself as someone who has one ...
Noble Calling: Teaching as Vocation, Mission, and Profession
Teaching is not merely a profession but a vocation that infuses life with profound meaning. As the noblest profession, teaching allows individuals to lead purpose-driven lives. The impact of a teacher extends beyond the classroom, contributing to the betterment of society as a whole. By immersing oneself passionately in teaching, one can find ...
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It is a pearl of great price. Yes, you worked for it, you paid for it, you earned your degree. But the education that Ave Maria provided you is nonetheless a gift. And, like all gifts—starting with the gift of life itself—you are obliged to use it for the good of others. Consider the Parable of the Talents.
Knowing Your Aspirants
What are some tested practices and questions a vocation promoter might use when speaking with people who are interested in religious life? In this essay, Br. Tom Kearney, CFC reflects on his years of experience as a vocation promoter and shares some of his best practices for ensuring that vocation promoters use their best human.
Reflection Paper #1: Essay on Vocation
Please write a brief reaction to Gary Selby's essay on vocation, Finding Your Heart's True Calling, after reading this introductory assignment. ... Though money is a very important commodity in life, the true career is a means of fulfillment not with riches, but a means of bringing satisfaction to an individual and giving back to others. ...
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Ever since the murky hour when, through an ethereal fog, I made out the silhouette of my surgeon beside the bed where I lay tethered to tubes, ever since I heard him utter the words, "Turns out ...
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A group of nuns associated with Benedictine College is weighing in on Harrison Butker's controversial graduation speech.. The sisters of Mount St. Scholastica, who describe their group as a ...
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Butker has every right to speak his faith and his mind and should be able to do so without fear of professional reprisal; he was representing only himself at a personal engagement at Benedictine.
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To our kids, this is the life and this love is enough. So, we can raise our glass. Dear, single mom on Mother's Day. Maybe you woke up a little early today to give yourself the gift of solitude ...
Research Assistant positions with American Enterprise Institute
About AEI. The American Enterprise Institute is a public policy think tank dedicated to defending human dignity, expanding human potential, and building a freer and safer world. The work of our scholars and staff advances ideas rooted in our belief in democracy, free enterprise, American strength and global leadership, solidarity with those at the periphery of our society, and a pluralistic ...
NFL Player Harrison Butker Draws Rebukes for Commencement Speech
Harrison Butker, who is a place-kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, drew criticism online for comments he made during a speech at Benedictine College.