The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [157]
The root meaning of the word points to this. It has little to do with ordination or religious orders. It comes from the Latin vocare, “to call.” A vocation is something you’re called to.
Vocation is different from work or a job or even a career. You could say that work is the labor required to do a task. A job is the situation in which you do it. A career is the long-term trajectory or pattern of many jobs. But vocation is deeper than each of those concepts.
Recently I spoke with Chris Lowney about this. He is the author of Heroic Leadership, a book that uses the insights of Ignatius and applies them to organizations. Lowney is a former Jesuit who worked in the corporate world and so brings a wealth of experience to these topics. How did he see those terms?
“Work, career, vocation,” he said, considering the question. “There are some problematic ideas attached to those terms. Work tends to be construed as work for pay, but work is any purposeful activity, so it’s helpful to have a broader concept of work. Career tends to mean that you study for a profession that you do for the rest of your life. But for many people that’s not true any longer. In the modern sense, a career is less about a workplace, or even a specific profession, and more about how you develop your skills and talents.”
What about vocation?
“People tend to associate vocation with a specific work, job or career,“ he said. ”The Protestant reformers talked about a general calling to become holy people, and a specific calling to different kinds of ministries and work, which is more accurate.”
Vocation overarches our work, jobs, and career and extends to the kind of person we hope to become. It is what we are called to do, and who we are called to be. But how do we discover our vocations?
In the past few chapters I spoke briefly about my own vocation, which was jumpstarted when I saw a television documentary about the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. That led me to read his book The Seven Storey Mountain, which led me to contact the Jesuits, which led me to read more about their training program, which led me to consider entering, which led me to apply, and which ultimately led the Jesuits to accept me.
But how did this happen? Through desire. At each juncture I was drawn by a desire, an attraction or interest to that life. This is one primary way that we discover what we are meant to do and who we are: desire.
The easiest way to think about this is to use a familiar example: marriage. Most believers would readily agree that God calls a married couple together. Even if they don’t understand marriage as a sacrament, as Catholics do, most people would say that God has, in some way, drawn the two together. This happens in part through a wide variety of desires. A man and woman are drawn together in desire—physical, emotional, spiritual—and discover their vocations as a married couple. This is one way God draws these people together, and how the call to marriage manifests itself.
Desire works in a similar way in the lives of those drawn to specific professions. Accountants, writers, physicians, artists, lawyers, and teachers, among others, discover an attraction for their work, perhaps by hearing about those careers at an early age, meeting people in those lines of work, or reading about people in those professions. They find their vocations through their natural longings. Desire works the same in the lives of the saints, drawing each of them to different types of service in the church.
Let me give you an example outside of the seminary, novitiate, or convent. When I was working at General Electric, one of my peers loved reading business journals in his spare time. Where for me the job was something I did to support myself, he liked nothing better at the end of a long day than settling down with the Wall Street Journal. “How can you read that after work?” I once asked.
“Are you kidding?” he said.