By Bill Leonard
In 1836 a free black woman paid $38 to print 1,000 copies of her autobiography titled The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, A Coloured Lady. It is the first autobiography of an African-American woman to be published in America.
Lee tells of her spiritual pilgrimage, including her 1804 conversion and later “sanctification” influenced by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and “between four and five years” later hearing a voice calling her to preach.
“Go and preach the Gospel!” she heard. She replied: “No one will believe me.” Again she heard: “Preach the Gospel; I will put words in your mouth, and will turn your enemies to become your friends.”
Amid much criticism, she followed her call, noting that in her “wanderings” many came to faith because of “this poor coloured female instrument.” Lee discovered the power of vocation as a Christian preacher and free woman.
Questions of vocation deserve serious attention these days as new groups of graduates enter the marketplace. Vocation incorporates, informs and goes beyond choosing a profession or finding a job. It involves one’s deepest identity, a sense of self that shapes who we are and what we must do in the world.
A sense of vocation need not be faith-based, or job-related. In The Sacred Journey Fredrick Buechner says we all search “for a self to be,” “for other selves to love,” and “for work to do,” pursuits that shape the vocational quest. Buechner adds: “We search for that unfound thing too, even though we do not know its name or where it is to be found or even if it is to be found at all.” Vocation is both formed and re-forming.
Defining vocation is as diverse and divided as the church itself. For Catholics, vocation is inseparable from the church’s sacramental calling lived out in marriage or holy orders, both outward signs of inward grace. Marriage is the vocation of family, nurturing new life; those who choose holy orders offer consecrated service to God and church.
Dorothy Day’s sense of vocation began in part with the first pangs of morning sickness and the realization that she was to have a baby. She recalled in her autobiography published in 1952:
“When I wrote the story of my conversion 12 years ago, I left out all my sins but told of all the things which brought me to God, all the beautiful things, all the remembrances of God that had haunted me, pursued me over the years so that when my daughter was born, in grateful joy I turned to God and became a Catholic. I could worship, adore, praise and thank him in the company of others. It is difficult to do that without a ritual, without a body with which to love and move, love and praise. I found faith, I became a member of the Mystical Body of Christ.
Her lover, Foster Batterham, agnostic and anarchist, deserted her. Day raised their daughter, Tamara, and founded the Catholic Worker Movement, one of the most important social movements of the 20th century. Vocation took her into the streets.
Martin Luther insisted that vocation is required of all Christians whatever their specific “work.” He declared that the mother washing dirty diapers had as important a vocation as the priest consecrating the Eucharist. Luther distinguished vocation — the identity all Christians cultivate in the world — from calling, the specific function of individuals in society.
John Calvin described two callings, “a universal calling by which God, through the external preaching of the word, invites all” who are in the elect, and “a special calling which … God bestows on believers only, when the internal illumination of the Spirit causes the word preached to take deep root in their hearts.”
Calvin adds: “Sometimes, however, [God] communicates it also to those whom he enlightens only for a time, and whom afterwards, in just punishment for their ingratitude, he abandons and smites with greater blindness.” Scary!
Seventeenth century Baptists and Quakers added another dimension, anticipating modernity and promoting egalitarianism.
For Baptists, faith in Christ was the doorway to vocation, breaking down economic class, education, and clergy/laity distinctions. Some Baptists symbolized that equality by offering the laying on of hands twice, once to the newly baptized, and a second time to those set aside for “peculiar” service in the ministry.
For Quakers, the Inner Light was the great equalizer, the ever present, often unrecognized, source of everyone’s true identity. Vocation “centered” persons no matter what their social roles.
What might this mean today?
Vocation is a sense of self grounded in conscience, individual and communal commitments, formative ideas and personal challenge.
These days, Protestant struggles with vocation seem torn between the pragmatism of Calvin and the spirituality of Dorothy Day, attempts to organize the mystical body of Christ to “beat the devil” in a world of exploding technologies and unbridled religious disaffection.
At its best, churches should cultivate a context, a “safe place,” for exploring multiple approaches to the nature of vocation.
Perhaps vocation is at its best when it has an edge to it, shaping identity in the world alongside and beyond one’s specific employment.
Dorothy Day’s sense of vocation led her to the edginess radical involvement with the poor, organized in a movement that endures to this day. “All my life I have been haunted by God,” Day said.
You too?