Once a week, I’d like to challenge you all with a Quaker-inspired query that should be applicable to any person leading an alternately introspective yet socially-engaged life. Here’s the query for this week. I’ll do my best to answer it for myself, and encourage you to share your response.
Have you found your vocation?
I love the Christian/Quaker/Catholic concept of vocation. I think the secular usage, denoting a career or profession, prevails, but here’s the first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary:
The action on the part of God of calling a person to exercise some special function, especially of a spiritual nature, or to fill a certain position; divine influence or guidance towards a definite (esp. religious) career; the fact of being so called or directed towards a special work in life; natural tendency to, or fitness for, such work.
In spite of my atheism, I find that calling and vocation still apply to me. Throughout my transition from agnosticism to Mormonism to atheistic Quakerism, I have always felt driven to a life of service (though I did spend one hateful year in an MBA program before I dropped out). I thrive when I’m empowering and enlightening others, and I sink into malaise and depression when I’m engaged in merely making ends meet as a cog in the great corporate machine.
It’s taken me years to realize to think of myself foremost as a teacher and writer. Looking back, I see the ebullience I felt when: training new missionaries in Japan or programmers in my IT department; lecturing undergrads on comparative politics at the University of Utah; leading discussion in Elder’s Quorum for years (LDS men’s Sunday school); teaching religion, ritual and feminism in class, at Sunstone or on this blog; sharing insights about space, the environment, or animal behavior with my children. I’ve placed in all three of the contests I’ve submitted essays and stories to, and every piece has been about religion. I feel compelled to learn, to talk, to teach and to write about religion.
So have I found my vocation in life? I believe that I have. I am called to teach and write about religion. I’m still not sure how this will ultimately manifest itself–as a professor in a religious studies department? As a religion journalist? As an author a la Chaim Potok or Karen Armstrong? All of the above? I can tell you this much for certain: My gifts are with words, and my obsession is religion. I am doing all that I can to prepare myself to best use these for the benefit of humanity. And I feel completely alive–on fire–when I am following my vocation.
