Jeremiah’s call to be a prophet is just the focus I need today to keep from thinking too much about things like my daughter’s graduation from high school. Hard to imagine a man as young as I, don’t you know?!, having a child that old. Well, like the rest of her class she’s been practicing answers to two questions everyone has been asking for nearly a year: where are you going to college, and what are you going to study?

But those are not just questions we ask high school seniors; we ask them of ourselves. A lawyer friend of mine was thinking out loud with me about this recently. He’s hit 50 and he still hasn’t finished answering the questions: Where am I headed? What am I going to do when I grow up?

I think the first thing that would help is to realize that it is your life we are talking about and not someone else’s. A sure fire way to miss your future is to live someone else’s future on their behalf. Parker Palmer is a Quaker writer and teacher. He quotes these lines of William Stafford: Some time when the river is ice ask me/mistakes I have made. Ask me whether/what I have done is my life. “For some,” says Palmer, “those words will be nonsense, nothing more than a poet’s loose way with language and logic. Of course what I have done is my life! For others, and I am one, the poet’s words … remind me of moments when it is clear – if I have eyes to see – that the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me. In those moments I sometimes catch a glimpse of my true life, a life hidden like the river beneath the ice. And in the spirit of the poet I wonder: What am I meant to do? Who am I meant to be?” [Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (Jossey-Bass, 2000), pp. 1-2, emphasis added.)

We are talking about "calling" here, vocation. Vocation comes from the Latin vocare, to call. Now if someone is called, that suggests someone or something is doing the calling. There are lots of voices that call you to do your particular work in the world. It’s your job to sort through those voices to make sure they are not the voice of your mother who wants you be a doctor, your father who wants you to go into the family business, or your Fuehrer who wants you to give up your life for the Fatherland. What we’re after here is to discern the voice of God amidst the voices all round us that have agendas for our lives. God’s agenda for our lives is what we are really after, because we believe that when we find it, we will find our true selves. Perfect submission to God’s call will lead to perfect delight.

But maybe you think the whole idea of calling is only for prophets like Jeremiah or preachers like me, that we can’t generalize the calling stories of the Bible to think that God might also actually call someone to be a stockbroker or a Head Start day school teacher or a banker or a salesman or an architect or a businessman. But all of those callings are only secular renditions of spiritual gifts that God has given to each of us and all of us for the purpose of building up the church and serving the world. You don’t have to be a paid Christian to have a calling.

Sometimes we get off track early on because we haven’t learned to listen to our own life carefully enough, to hear the voice of God calling to us from within the snap, crackle and pop of our hard wiring as it fires off its unique music within us. And that leaves us vulnerable to hearing only the calls of the world.

There’s a teaching shortage right now; isn’t there always. Everywhere you turn you hear appeals for people to go into teaching. Now, that’s good, because teaching is a good and noble calling, and because sometimes the way we hear the voice of God calling to us is through the voice of someone else. Just because we desperately need more and better teachers in our schools doesn’t mean that’s your particular calling. It’s the same with going into a field because you think you can make good money. That makes about as much sense as eating the newspaper every morning because you need a little roughage to make you regular. There are better ways to make a living than just doing something to make you more money. Think about making a life more than making a living.

A friend of mine, Carl Reeves, came to grips with this ten years or so ago. He was a banker and made a good living for himself and his family, but he woke up every morning thinking he was living someone else’s life and not his own. He realized that at heart he is nurturing caregiver. After much prayer and consultation with his family, he and they agreed that he would quit his job and begin nursing school. It was a hard mid-life correction, but today he gets to do a job he believes God made him for. He attends especially to patients in the latter stages of cancer, and he gets to see them through their final journey to God. Carl and his family ended up with less money but they and many others ended up with much more that money can’t buy.

May Sarton begins one of her poems with these lines: Now I become myself. It’s taken/ Time, many years and places;/ I have been dissolved and shaken,/ Worn other people's faces… It’s a lot to ask of 17 and 18 year-old young people to know right off what they are to do with their lives and who they are to be. We all tend to wear other people’s faces until we find our own in the mirror and can say at last, Now I become myself. But it’s never too early or late to begin. [Also quoted by Palmer, p.9.]

I think there are two great paradigms of calling that have dominated the soulscape of Western thought. The first is duty and the second love. The first involves God calling to us to something that we have to submit to in obedience, though we probably will not like it or want to do it, but if we really love God and not the world, that’s what we will do. The second is to be guided by love as a gift of God and be obedient to it as it leads us back to the God who is love. Let’s look at them in turn and see if they have to at odds with one another. [I am indebted in what follows to Gilbert Meilaender, “Vocation: Divine Summons,” Christian Ethics Today (Oct 2001): 11-15.]

Perfect Submission

In Virgil’s classic epic story The Aeneid, the hero Aeneas has lost his beloved kingdom. Troy has fallen to the infamous Trojan Horse. Aeneas and his comrades set sail for an uncertain future. After seven years, the gods conspire against him and he ends up shipwrecked after a terrible storm. He and his surviving band wash up on the shores of North Africa where they are welcomed in the city of Carthage by the fair Phoenician queen, Dido. Their chemistry is immediate and their love intense. But the gods have other plans for Aeneas. He is destined for greatness, fated to found the Roman Empire. But to do so he must leave behind his heart. He must love country, and duty to the gods, more than a woman. Brokenhearted, Dido cries to him: Can our love/ Not hold you, can the pledge we gave not hold you,/ Can Dido not, now sure to die in pain? Aeneas, in good hero fashion, fights down the emotion in his heart: Apollo tells me I must make for Italy,/ Named by his oracles, There is my love;/ There is my country. …So please, no more/ Of these appeals that set us both afire./ I sail for Italy not of my own free will. … Then, duty bound … though he sighed his heart out, shaken still/ With love of her,/ yet he took the course heaven gave him/ and went back to the fleet. [The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Vintage, 1990), pp.106-110 passim.]

When we think about this in a Christian context, we are prone to think that submission to the will of God will always involve something we will not want to do if we had our choice. It would always be against our deepest love and desire or it wouldn’t be heaven’s call. But while sacrifice in the service of heaven is always part of any vocation, spiritual duty need not be in conflict with our deepest affection.

That is hardly my own experience. People talk about surrendering to the ministry, as if God is putting a gun to your head. Surrender nothing, I would volunteer. I get to do this. And I don’t know when I feel more alive than when I am standing here before you.

When God called Jeremiah, God formed him the womb for this purpose, he says. He has a sense that he was set up for his calling. Although many times in his life he suffered on account of it, Jeremiah knew in his bones that this is what he was made for; to choose otherwise would go not only against God but also against himself.

Perfect Delight

Which leads to the other view. In his masterpiece allegory, The Divine Comedy, the Florentine poet, Dante, travels in three movements toward heaven. He descends into hell, climbs the mountain of purgatory, and finally rises to heaven. The selfsame Virgil has been his guide through the inferno and the transition world, but he gives way to the lovely Beatrice who carries him straightway to the face of God. Beatrice was the love of Dante’s life, though she belonged to another man. We do not know the extent to which they came together in life, but his heart remained fixed to her after her death. When he considers the journey of his soul to perfection, he believes that the love he has for her is the same love that God has given him to draw him back to God. Following that love is what leads him to the One who is love, who is passion personified. And when Beatrice brings him at last to that pure experience of God, Dante honors her again by calling it the Beatific Vision. He ends his work, Paradiso, with these words: High phantasy lost power and here broke off;/ Yet as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars,/ My will and my desire were turned by love,/ The love that moves the sun and the other stars. [The Divine Comedy 3: Paradise, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (Penguin, 1975), p.133.]

Here Dante claims that God calls us to follow our hearts desires, for when they are in the service of God, it is God who works in us through them. Here is the duty of love, rather than the love of duty. Here is where perfect submission and perfect delight are joined in marital bliss. Here is where surrender to God’s will is surrender to your secret joy.

Frederick Buechner says it this way: The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. So if you love what you do but what you do is push pills to preschoolers on the playground, you can’t claim that is God’s call. Likewise, if you work in a homeless shelter and feel noble yet depressed and grumpy all the time, odds are that isn’t what you’re supposed to do either, and you probably aren’t helping anyone much anyway. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. [Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, revised and expanded (HarperCollins, 1993), pp.118-19.]

One last word: no one ever feels fully qualified to answer God’s calling. Not to worry. Just as God put words into the mouth of the prophet Jeremiah, so God will equip any of us for the work God calls us to. God doesn’t call the qualified; God qualifies the called.

So, do what God calls you to do; duty demands it. But do what your heart commands too, for the love of God compels it. When these two come together, when duty and love meet, you have found your calling.