One day a few summers ago I got home from work and sat down outside on the deck. I was reading The Hungering Dark by Frederick Buechner, specifically the third chapter, “The Calling of Voices,” in which he discusses vocation.
I took notes.
- A vocation chooses the person.
- There is a voice that speaks specifically to you out of the specific events of your life.
- Many wake up too late and realize that they are doing work they do not love.
- “We must be careful with our lives…What we do with them matters enormously.”
- Listen to the voice of your own gladness.
- “If we keep our lives open, the right place will find us.”
You, like me, may ask yourself, What makes me glad? Good question.
No one ever told me how to pursue a vocation; or, being inordinately noncommittal, maybe it’s not in my nature. Whatever the case, my family hardly pushed or encouraged me to go to college or find a career; neither did my general social and spiritual environment. The likes of higher education or academia or white-collar jobs were not the waters in which I swam.
I’ve rarely pushed myself, in a strictly professional or career sense. Most of my enjoyment, or “gladness,” is private, outside of a job and on my own time. To be transparent for a moment, for some reason I’ve never believed, deep down, that I can do what I love for my work. At one point, a few years ago, I thought I had found it when I worked for a church in my ski town, only to realize I was mistaken. Instead of a dream job, it became a gateway to deconstruction. I tell myself, still, that it can’t be done—I can’t find or do what I love for my work; my work can’t be a vocation. What makes me glad will always be something else, apart from a career or profession. I don’t allow myself to pursue a line of work that would really make me glad—a vocation, as it were. I accept what means less to me, what I’m mostly indifferent towards, as my lot. I sell myself short. This path is safe, practical, and non-committal. Or do I simply value freedom above all else? “Freedom” in this sense, I might add, is not as fulfilling as its promise, and can become its own kind of bondage. I’m one to know.
“So, what are you going to do?” I asked myself that day. “The right place will find you,” I was reminded.
In conclusion, it’s worth quoting Beuchner’s words more at length:
We can speak of a man’s choosing his own vocation, but perhaps it is at least as accurate to speak of a vocation’s choosing the man, of a call’s being given and a man’s hearing it, or not hearing it. And maybe that is the place to start: the business of listening and hearing.
The danger is that you will not listen to the voice that speaks…specifically to you out of the specific events of your life, but that instead you listen to the great blaring, boring, banal voice of our mass culture, which threatens to deafen us all by blasting forth that the only thing that really matters about your work is how much it will get you in the way of salary and status, and that if it is gladness you are after, you can save that for the weekends.
Where we most need to go…means that the voice we should listen to most as we choose a vocation is the voice that we might think we should listen to least, and that is the voice of our own gladness (italics mine).
In a world where there is so much drudgery, so much grief, so much emptiness and fear and pain, our gladness in our work is as much needed as we ourselves need to be glad.
