what is your vocation essay

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How to Write an Essay on a Vocation

How to Write a Dissertation Summary

Writing an essay on a certain career or vocation is similar to writing essays on other subjects; the only difference is that the subject of this essay will be on a certain type of career or profession. Formulating a research question or thesis statement is an important part of writing an essay of any kind.

Thesis Statement

Before beginning to draft an essay of any kind, it is important to draft a thesis statement that will guide your paper. For example, if you were writing an essay on the benefits of being a doctor, your thesis could read "Medical doctors enjoy many professional perks, but by far the best things about being a doctor are the lives you save, the people you help and the lessons you learn." This thesis statement will help you to organize your thoughts and research the given vocation and its benefits.

Unless you are working in the field you are writing the essay about, you will have to conduct some research. There are several different sources that talk about various vocations so there is no lack of information. Pay particular attention to the validity of your sources. Try to use primary sources as much as possible, perhaps a current career professional or scholarly article about the vocation. Steering clear of less than stellar references, such as personal opinions in an online forum, will make your essay more credible.

Supporting Details

While your thesis statement is the skeleton that provides structure to your essay, the body paragraphs and supporting details are the flesh and sinew. Using the sources from your research, flesh out your paragraphs with relevant facts and evidence. For example, in the thesis example on doctors, the first body paragraph in your essay might be about the lives a doctor saves because this is the first detail mentioned in the thesis. Citing examples and statistics of how many lives an average doctor saves in the course of his career would be an effective supporting detail.

Conclusions

Just because you’ve clearly addressed each point of your thesis and crafted effective body paragraphs doesn’t mean you’re done. Many students skimp on conclusions and leave readers dissatisfied. Use your conclusion to wrap up any loose ends you created in your essay as well as mention any further issues raised as a result of your research.

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Stacy Alleyne is a certified English teacher with a BA in English and graduate work in English, education, journalism and law. She has written numerous articles and her own dining column for the "Gazette."

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The Doctrine of Vocation

Other essays.

The Reformation doctrine of vocation teaches that all Christians are called by God to live faithfully in three arenas, the household, the Church, and the state, in which all Christians are to live out their priesthood as believers by offering up their lives as living sacrifices to God.

The Reformers formulated the doctrine of vocation in response to the Roman Catholic insistence that “vocation” or “calling” was reserved for those entering the service of the church through the priesthood or a monastic order. Those doing so would renounce marriage, secular work, and economic advancement through taking vows of celibacy, obedience, and poverty. In response, the Reformers argued that all Christians are called by God to live faithfully in the three arenas of life: the household, the church, and the state. As a corollary of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, all Christians are called by God to offer up their lives as living sacrifices in all areas of life. This means that all of life, including the most mundane tasks, are worship to God, not only select actions and vocations reserved for those who have renounced involvement in normal institutions of worldly life.

Introduction and Definition

The doctrine of vocation is one of the greatest—though strangely neglected and forgotten—teachings of the Reformation. Contrary to the common assumption, it is much more than a theology of work. Vocation has to do with God’s providence, how He governs and cares for His creation by working through human beings. Vocation shows Christians how to live out their faith, not just in the workplace but in their families, churches, and cultures. Vocation is where faith bears fruit in acts of love, and so it grows out of the Gospel. And vocation is where Christians struggle with trials and temptations, becoming a means of sanctification.

The word “vocation” is simply the Latinate word for “calling.” God calls us—addresses us personally with the language of His Word—and we are brought to faith. He also calls us to arenas of service. “Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him” (1 Cor. 7:17). Thus, the Lord “assigns” us to a “life,” and then He calls us to that life.

The Three Arenas

The immediate context of that verse from the Apostle Paul is a discussion not of the workplace but of marriage. According to Luther, we have callings in each of the three estates that God created for human life:

The household . This refers to the family, including its economic labor by which it supports itself. Marriage, becoming a father or mother, being a son or daughter, are all vocations. In Luther’s late-medieval economy, most work—whether that of peasant farms, middle class crafts, or the nobility’s political rule—were all based in families and usually conducted at home. The very word “economy,” which derives from the Greek words for “house” ( oikos ) and “management” ( nomia ), referred to the concept of the “household.” But our family relationships constitute our most important vocations.
The church. All Christians are called by the Gospel. God also “calls” pastors. Also elders, other church workers, and all other members, each of whom has a part to play in the congregation.
The state. We find ourselves in a certain time and place, under certain political jurisdictions, part of a certain culture. This is part of our “assignment” in which we are to live our Christian lives. Our citizenship is a vocation. We are called to our local communities, our nation, our surrounding culture. Christians are free to participate in the political life of their countries, as well as to hold public offices. We thus have vocations even in the “secular” arena, which is where Christians interact with non-believers and function as salt and light in the world. (Matt. 5:13–16)

The Reformers reacted against the Roman Catholic teaching that reserved “having a vocation” or “receiving a call” for entering a monastery, a convent, or the priesthood. To receive that kind of calling meant entering the “spiritual” life, which was considered far more Christian and meritorious than living a “secular” life in the world. To so devote oneself to the church meant taking vows of celibacy (thus repudiating marriage and parenting), poverty (thus repudiating economic productivity in the society), and obedience (thus being subject only to church law and not to that of earthly authorities). To the Reformers, not only were such vows a manifestation of works righteousness in opposition to the Gospel, they were also blasphemous rejections of the very estates that God ordained for human life.

The Reformers responded by exalting the family—particularly the callings of marriage and parenthood (vs. the vow of celibacy)—as a realm of Christian love and devotion. They exalted the workplace as a realm of Christian service (vs. the vows of poverty). And they exalted not just the state but the society as a whole as realms of God’s creation and sovereignty (vs. the vows of obedience).

The Reformation teachings about vocation are facets of the doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers.” This does not mean that every Christian is a minister leading a congregation or that there is no need for pastors. Rather, it means that one does not need to be a pastor—who himself has a calling to proclaim God’s Word—in order to be a “priest.” Farmers, shoemakers, lawyers, merchants, soldiers, rulers, husbands, wives, mothers, children, etc., are all “priests”— performing “spiritual” work in their ordinary labors, interceding in prayer for everyone they deal with, bringing God’s Word into their everyday lives.

A “priest” is someone, above all, who offers sacrifices, something even pastors do not do (except for Catholic pastors who call themselves priests because they believe they re-sacrifice Christ in the mass). But though Christ has been sacrificed once and for all so that we no longer need any other sacrifice for our sin (Heb. 9:6), we now are called to present our bodies as living sacrifices (Rom. 12:1) and “to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 2:5). This happens in vocation.

The Purpose of Vocation

Every vocation, according to Luther, is to love and serve your neighbors. Your vocation brings specific neighbors into your life: your spouse, your children, your fellow-citizens, the members of your congregation, your customers. God wants us to love and serve them.

Loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves encapsulates “all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37–40). Our love of God is based solely on His love for us in Christ:

“In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). Thus our relationship with Him is based not on our works, our service to him, or our vocations, but upon Christ alone. “God does not need our good works,” observed Luther. “But our neighbor does.” God saves us apart from our works, then calls back into the world, into our distinct callings, to love and serve Him by loving and serving our neighbors.

This love and service, these good works, consist largely not of special “good deeds” but of the ordinary tasks of the vocation. Parents changing their baby’s diaper, which Luther hailed as an act of holiness; farmers plowing their fields; a shopkeeper selling something useful; an engineer designing a useful piece of technology; an artist painting a beautiful picture; a citizen casting a vote—these all can be offered as acts of love and service.

Vocation as the Mask of God

Luther stressed that God himself is living and active in and through vocation. He gives us our daily bread by means of farmers and bakers. He creates new human beings and cares for them by means of mothers and fathers. He protects us by means of lawful magistrates. He proclaims His Word and gives his sacraments through the voice and hands of pastors. Vocation, says Luther, is a “mask” of God: We see only the human face, performing ordinary tasks in everyday life, but behind that calling, through which we are blessed, God himself is hidden, giving his gifts.

God in his providence works even through non-believers. Often the non-Christian is motivated solely by self-interest or self-fulfillment. Christians can experience some of that, but they can also make their work the fruit of their faith—“faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6)—and bear the burdens of their callings as a “daily” cross of service and self-sacrifice (Luke 9:23–24).

To be sure, we often sin in our vocations. Instead of wanting to serve, as Luther observed, we insist on being served. Instead of loving and serving, we harm the neighbor of our vocation. We “lord it over” those under our authority rather than using our authority to serve them, as the “Son of Man” does (Mark 10:42–45). Sin in vocation puts us in conflict with God’s purpose, as we resist God’s love for others and work against Him. Often God still blesses others through our vocation, despite ourselves. But we must be broken to repentance by God’s law, whereupon we can know Christ’s forgiveness again, which restores our vocation.

This is the texture of the Christian life—which plays out in our marriages, parenthood, work, congregation, and cultural life—which, along with the trials and tribulations that also afflict us in these callings, can become occasions for spiritual growth and sanctification.

The doctrine of vocation brings the Gospel into ordinary life. It transfigures the mundane routines of ordinary life, charging them with purpose, spiritual significance, and the very presence of God.

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What’s a vocation?

The 2 types of vocations, why does finding your vocation matter, how to find and pursue your vocation: 7 steps, move forward with courage.

"It's my calling." You’ve probably heard this phrase when someone’s raving about their career. They seem sure about their path forward and speak with pride and enthusiasm about their profession.

When you understand what your vocation is, this temperament is common. People with a robust sense of purpose regarding their professional lives often enjoy better physical health and emotional well-being .

And a life full of meaning and goal-driven personal growth is circular: the positivity your work brings encourages you to make healthy decisions in other aspects of your life, and good physical and mental well-being provides you with energy to pursue your calling . Finding your vocation really can be life-changing.

A vocation is a job or career that does more than pay the bills — it fills you with a higher purpose typically related to helping others and contributing to a greater societal good.

The word “vocation” derives from the Latin words “vocatio” and “vocare,” both meaning to call or summon and originally used to describe a spiritual and reflective way of life .

During Ancient Greek and Roman times, those at the bottom of the social pyramid took on manual labor, and those held in higher social regard accepted a consecrated life of contemplation.

This hierarchical understanding of labor took on a deeper religious context with the dominance of the Catholic Church in Europe during the Middle Ages. A Christian vocation referred to monks, nuns, and priests, as they were living a Christian life and heeding the divine call of God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.

Back then, those who answered this call were granted salvation. Judaism , Islamic faith , and Hinduism all include prophets answering God's call in some form.

Over time, the definition of vocation has shifted, and people often use it to describe a particular occupation one finds meaningful, so anyone can find and pursue their vocation.

Two vocation types exist: personal and skillful. A personal vocation involves contributing to your community or society without receiving a paycheck, like volunteering at your local church or giving aerobics classes at an assisted living facility.

Often you’ll contribute your professional skills to these vocations, like a lawyer who provides pro-bono work for low-income families or a teacher who tutors at-risk young adults.

A skillful vocation leverages your skill set to build a career that serves a larger purpose. This work brings value to your employer and coworkers, your community, and society at large.

Here are four skillful vocation categories with career examples.

1. Helpers and healers

Helpers and healers calm crises and often put others' needs above their own. They empathize well , easily relating to people with compassion, patience, and care. Some career options for helpers and healers include:

Human rights activist

Hospice worker

Speech pathologist

Social worker

Yoga Instructor

2. Justice seekers

Justice seekers work to eliminate inequality and exclusion in the world, dedicating their energy to creating a better place for everyone. They're critical thinkers and problem solvers who find ways to change problematic social systems. Here are a few examples:

Environmentalist

Labor or community organizer

Diversity and inclusion officer

male-volunteering-in-garden-what-is-a-vocation

3. Storytellers

Storytellers make sense of the world, using human experiences to connect with others and teach important life lessons. Some career options for storytellers are:

Photographer

Content maker

Podcaster or radio host

4. First responders

First responders rush into the fire, sometimes literally. They’re brave and think clearly in difficult and frightening situations, making them uniquely fit to assist during emergencies and disasters. Some career options include:

Police officer

Firefighter

Emergency room doctor

couple-of-doctors-discussing-what-is-a-vocation

As a human, you need to feel your actions — and life more generally — has a purpose. This motivates you to work toward your goals, develop deeper connections , and find belonging .

And your profession isn’t excluded from this — feeling like your work has meaning makes you happier . It’s as simple as that. Unfortunately, while today’s workers seek meaningful jobs with employers that reflect their values , not everyone feels encouraged to find a purposeful vocation. Modern hustle culture often promotes overexertion to obtain income for yourself and your employer, even if this involves sacrificing your mental and physical health .

You can avoid this trap by finding your vocation — or checking whether you already have.

Whether you’re just entering the labor force or are considering a career change , finding work that speaks to you is a healthy and fulfilling approach to work. Here are seven steps for discovering and pursuing your vocation.

1. Take stock of your skills

Figuring out which particular vocation works for you is about being honest about your strengths and weaknesses. Reflect on your life — school, work, personal — and pay attention to areas where you've naturally excelled. Ask yourself the following questions:

What do I most like to do at work?

What do I most dislike doing at work?

What skills or attributes do people compliment me for?

What skills make me feel useful?

What activities put me in a flow state ?

What did I aspire to be when I was a child?

What are the most successful projects I’ve worked on, and how did I contribute?

men-eating-healthy-lunch-what-is-a-vocation

Write down your answers and reflect , either alone or with a trusted friend, family member, or colleague — you might appreciate their fresh perspective. Then, consider the professions that would best use the skills and talents you’ve noted.

2. Visualize your ideal career

Consider how you’d spend your time if you weren’t worried about financial security — this likely showcases what you’d feel purposeful doing.

To find this answer, visualize your future and write down what you see, being mindful regarding your emotions upon finding and pursuing your calling. You should feel excited and passionate when thinking about your vocation.

3. Choose habits that fit your new path

Once you’ve chosen a vocation or two to try, build the habits necessary to excel. If you want to develop your storytelling skills, you could make a habit of reading or writing for an hour a day. And if you want to open a café, you could perfect a new recipe every week.

It takes an average of 66 days to form a new habit , so don’t feel discouraged if you don’t progress right away, and go easy on yourself if you miss a day. And consider downloading a habit app or finding an accountability partner to help you improve faster.

4. Educate yourself

A great way to decide what to pursue is to conduct thorough research. Talk with people in the field, read up on the careers you’re interested in, and consider taking on an internship or externship to ensure you understand what you’re in for.

emotional-stress-therapy-what-is-a-vocation

5. Take it one step at a time

You acquire skills through experience and study, and a career slowly unfolds and develops over time. Don’t feel rushed as you tackle skill acquisition and start a new profession, and keep your overarching objective — finding meaningful work — in your sights at all times to stay motivated .

A great way to take this process one step at a time while remembering your key objective is to break this main goal into smaller, achievable milestones . This gives you a clear roadmap toward success to avoid feeling lost or overwhelmed .

6. Structure your time

Life is full of personal and professional responsibilities. Now that you’re pursuing a new vocation, you’ll need to prioritize your time differently. If you want to volunteer more, you might see one of your friends a little less. And if you need to take online classes to improve your skills, you might adjust your work hours.

Once you understand your availability, organize your time and make adjustments as necessary to ensure your main priority is building a fulfilling life.

7. Find a mentor or vocational counselor

You’ll typically root a calling for a greater good, one outside yourself. It's about teamwork , collaboration , and community.

But you can only help others if you know how to ask for help yourself. Consider reaching out to a mentor, coach, or vocational counselor who can help you find more meaningful work.

Stepping into your vocation takes courage. Your road to success is unique to you — there’s no one-size-fits-all roadmap.

But understanding what your vocation is, means you’ve already taken a giant first step, and the excitement of finding your calling will propel you forward. All that’s left is to ride this contagious passion and energy as you pursue something you care about.

Elizabeth Perry, ACC

Elizabeth Perry is a Coach Community Manager at BetterUp. She uses strategic engagement strategies to cultivate a learning community across a global network of Coaches through in-person and virtual experiences, technology-enabled platforms, and strategic coaching industry partnerships. With over 3 years of coaching experience and a certification in transformative leadership and life coaching from Sofia University, Elizabeth leverages transpersonal psychology expertise to help coaches and clients gain awareness of their behavioral and thought patterns, discover their purpose and passions, and elevate their potential. She is a lifelong student of psychology, personal growth, and human potential as well as an ICF-certified ACC transpersonal life and leadership Coach.

Learn what a calling is and how to find yours

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How to Find Your Vocation in College

From the time you were five years old, someone was always asking you, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Maybe you answered “a cowboy” or “a princess,” but you really didn’t know. As you get older, the pressure intensifies. “A professional baseball player.” “A veterinarian.” Now you are in college, but you still don’t know. You have to pick a major, but how do you know (1) whether you will get a job, and (2) whether you will be satisfied with that job should you even get one.

Vocational Training

These are all struggles about your vocation . That word has become a synonym for “job,” so that colleges debate the extent to which higher education should be primarily vocational training or whether it should have higher goals, such as cultivating the intellect. But vocation is simply the Latinate word for “calling.” It is one of those theological words—like inspiration , revelation , mission , and vision —that has been taken over by the corporate world and drained of its meaning. The idea is that what you do for a living can be a calling. From God. That He has made you in a certain way and given you certain talents, opportunities, and inclinations. He then calls you to certain tasks, relationships, and experiences.

Your job is only a part of that, and sometimes not the most important part. We have vocations in the family (being a child, getting married, becoming a parent) and in the society (being a citizen, being a friend). There are also vocations in the church (pastor, layperson), but even if you don’t believe in religion, the vocations are operative. Not only that, according to Martin Luther, the great theologian of vocation, God works through vocation, including the work of people who do not believe in Him. God gives us our daily bread by means of farmers, millers, bakers, and the person who served you your last meal. God creates new life by means of mothers and fathers. He heals by means of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists. He protects us by means of police officers, judges, and the military callings. He creates works of beauty and meaning by the talents He has given to artists.

The purpose of every vocation—in the workplace, the family, the church, the society—is to love and serve our neighbors. These are the “good works” that we are given to do. That may sound idealistic. Surely in our participation in the economy we are motivated by our enlightened self-interest. And yet it is surely true that if we are not helping someone by the goods or services we provide, we will not stay in business very long. Even our self-interests are taken up into God’s providential workings. In serving ourselves we also find ourselves serving others, whether or not that is our intention. Thus our work, our families, and our citizenship can be charged with moral and even spiritual significance.

It makes a difference if we think of our work as a “job” (meaning a task we perform), an “occupation” (how we spend our time), a “career” (meaning running at great speed on a preset course), a “profession” meaning taking a vow of commitment, or a “vocation” (meaning a calling). Strictly speaking, we do not choose our vocations. Our vocations choose us.

You can’t be anything you want to be

Certain Republican governors , Fox News pundits , libertarian think tankers , and others worried about skyrocketing taxpayer-funded student loans that are often impossible to pay back are arguing that students should stop majoring in liberal arts subjects like philosophy and history. Instead, they should major in something practical like business or “STEM subjects” (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). That way our nation’s young people would get good jobs that would enable them to pay back their student loans and contribute to society.

The assumption is that if students would just choose a profession, any profession, that would make them lots of money, all would be well. Now you would think that Republican governors, Fox News pundits, and libertarian think tankers would realize that free market economics, with its laws of supply and demand, applies in the job market. The reason certain jobs command big salaries is that not many people can do them. Conversely, if all college students were to go into the STEM line, both the salaries and the employment rate in these fields would plummet, since the supply would overwhelm the demand. As it is, business majors , scientists , techies , engineers , and math majors are already complaining that they can’t get jobs either.

Finding a career is not as simple as identifying fields with good employment prospects that pay a lot of money. There may be a growing need for accountants in the year you expect to graduate. But if you are no good in math, hate working at a desk, and fail your accounting classes, that field is not for you. Or, rather, you are not for that field. By the same token, if you are no good at science, technology, engineering, or math, you are not cut out for the STEM professions. If, however, what you do best is philosophize, you may be doomed to be a philosopher.

What you do is related to who you are. That is, to your personality, talents, aptitudes, and interests. Also, to your background, experiences, and opportunities. The factors about you that are “given,” that might be shaped by your choices but not easily changed, are the raw materials for your callings.

Higher Education

College is both a place where you learn things and a phase of your life. For many of those with the opportunity to go to college—and never despise those who don’t—it is a transition between childhood, living with your parents, and independent adulthood. So it is a time for seeking, preparing for, and finding vocations. (Not just in the sense of jobs. College can also lead to other vocations, such as marriage or a heightened awareness of your citizenship.)

Part of the genius of higher education is that its structure usually allows you to try things. Most people come to college with little sense of what fields even exist and have only a slim idea what they are good at. Here the much-maligned liberal arts requirements can be enormously helpful.

I think that part of the recently displayed hostility to the liberal arts on the part of the Republican governors, Fox pundits, and libertarian think tankers might be that these conservatives think the liberal in liberal arts means “liberal,” as in their political nemesis. It actually comes from the Latin word for “freedom,” as in the education needed for a free citizen, as opposed to “servile” education reserved for slaves, who handled most of the tech needs of ancient Greeks and Romans. The liberal arts, properly speaking, are an education for freedom, something conservatives should support.

It is true that most universities have also forgotten what “liberal arts” means. (Four of the seven liberal arts involve mathematics, indeed, STEM-related skills. The other three involve mastery of language and logic.) But the liberal arts requirements, or what is left of them, are designed to cultivate your intellectual powers. Studying history and your cultural heritage can help you in your vocation of citizenship. Learning to read, write, and think deeply can make you better at whatever profession you are eventually called to. And taking courses with so many different methodologies—hard science and social science, literary analysis and quantitative research—can give you a sense of what intellectual activities you find most rewarding, which can help direct you toward a major, perhaps one you never even knew existed.

The liberal arts are often played against “vocational education,” in the sense of job training. It’s true that the liberal arts are concerned with bigger issues than your own personal job prospects—that is, with transmitting our heritage and our civilization, with transcendent values such as truth, goodness, and beauty. But because the liberal arts are, above all, concerned with cultivating all your human powers and helping you to become a free human being, they are vocational education in the theological sense.

Your vocation now

Thinking about your future vocationally should take some of the pressure off. It isn’t that you have to make a career choice that will determine your entire life and ruin it if you get it wrong. Since a calling comes from the outside, vocation lets things happen. Finding one’s vocation takes seriously doors that open and doors that slam in your face.

Also, vocation is in the here and now. College students are often so fixated on what their future vocations may be that they forget that they have vocations right now.

Slinging burgers may be a dull and boring occupation with the sole purpose of earning tuition money. While it won’t be your vocation forever, it is still a calling, a sphere of service to one’s neighbors–customers, the boss, fellow workers—and a meaningful human enterprise.

College students also have a vocation as members of their family, with obligations to their parents, brothers, and sisters. They also have a vocation as citizens of the various communities they inhabit (their hometown, their college community, their state, their country). They also have vocations in their religious communities, if they have one.

Most notably, they have the vocation of being college students. This calling, like all the others, has its proper work—namely, to study, read, go to class, discuss ideas, and write papers.

Who are the neighbors a college student is to love and serve? Professors. Fellow students. Roommates. Also the people, living and dead, whom you are studying. As a student of literature (now a professor), I like to think that I am loving and serving William Shakespeare by appreciating his art and exploring its meaning.

Thus the vocations involved with being at college can themselves prepare you for the vocations that await you after college. This is a matter not only of what you are learning, but also of the kind of person you are becoming. The various and ever-changing vocations that you will experience throughout your life will blossom out of that.

***********************

Gene Edward Veith is Professor of Literature and Provost at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of 18 books, including two on vocation: God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life and Family Vocation: God’s Calling in Marriage, Parenthood, and Childhood .

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J.D. Vance on our Civilizational Crisis

J.D. Vance, venture capitalist and author of Hillbilly Elegy, speaks on the American Dream and our Civilizational Crisis....

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Lori L. Lohman

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So you’ve decided to become a college professor. This means you get to dress up in ancient garb, smiling munificently during graduation at students about to embark on their rewarding careers and lives. And if you are lucky, you get to do this again, and again, and again—in my case, for over 25 years. Most of today’s students were not even roaming the planet when I began teaching, but despite the fact that I’m teaching a new generation wired to its various technological devices, some of the basic principles of what makes a successful professor haven’t changed. Technologies will come and go (anyone remember Betamax? How about reel-to-reel movie projectors?), but the thirst for knowledge will not—and that goes not only for students, but also for those of us trying to teach others what we already know and what we continue to learn. Ideally, people who teach college students do so because they consider it to be their vocation. I’m not referring to “Vocational Education,” which has its own, state-specific definition, but rather the lower case “vocational education,” or as John Dewey envisioned it, one’s life calling. This chapter is about how I found my life calling and how others can as well.

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Lohman, L.L. (2016). Teaching as Vocation: Reflections and Advice. In: Reflections on Life in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137560452_5

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88722d666dda333b4ab34c05d4e279fa, choosing a vocation: an essay on agency.

There were a couple of things Cristina knew for sure. She did not know which path her life would take, but she knew that either she would get married and establish a family or she would lead a (lay) consecrated life devoted to God:

There is that clarity that I started to have when I had the encounter with Christ. Around me society is full of people who don't have a definite form of life, right? So many people who are not married, for a thousand reasons, who are not married but also not consecrated. [Before,] this wasn't clear to me. I thought yes, everybody could do what they wanted to. But on the contrary: no, it isn't like that. And that made me happy. That is a truth that I have discovered when encountering Christ, and that made me happy, because I said: “So much the better, there are two paths, and so much the better that no other paths exist, that there are no other possibilities.”

Cristina acquired this knowledge through her involvement with the Italian Catholic movement Comunione e Liberazione (CL), or through following the charisma of Father Luigi Guissani, as members of the movement often put it. Father Guissani began his work of “restoring a Christian presence” in 1954, in a high school in Milan, working within the structure of the established Catholic youth movement Azione Catolica, and in particular its female section, Gioventu Studentesca (GS). The movement was reconfigured during the 1960s and began using the name Comunione e Liberazione, first in publications and then at an inaugural conference in 1971. The movement's reconfiguration was in response to critical events of the time, the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and the student revolts of 1968. The reconfiguration also signaled the maturation of the movement, as young followers grew up and sought to pursue the religious, social and cultural experiences of GS in ways that were better suited to their adult lives. This led to the emergence of a (lay) consecrated pattern of life within the movement, known first as the “adult groups” and later as Memores Domini. Memores Domini take a number of vows, including the vow of chastity and obedience, and live together in same-sex houses. This manner of living is characterized by both a contemplative, monastic dimension, including daily hours of silence, and an emphasis on being “in the world,” which is expressed through a strong commitment to work, and hence to a professional life, as the context par excellence for keeping alive “the memory of Christ.”

I first met Cristina in 2000 in Milan, where I was doing ethnographic work on female piety and religious agency. Cristina was a visitor to the CL female student house where I was living at the time, and which resembled very much the house she lived in during her own student years within CL university community structures. Cristina had recently graduated in architecture, and she was approaching the moment when the contours of her life path would become clear. Her attraction to the life of Memores Domini was evident in our conversations, and this was not unusual: I regularly encountered such attraction among students connected to CL, particularly among women, who constituted the majority of Memores Domini.

Memores Domini follow a vocation. Within CL, following either a familial or a consecrated life is considered to be a vocation, yet the vocation of Memores Domini is more readily recognized as a religious vocation, as understood within the Catholic tradition, and includes not only a divine calling but also its subsequent verification with a spiritual counselor. Vocation was on Cristina's mind when we met, and it became an important part of all our conversations, including an in-depth interview. When I later analyzed these interactions, I discerned a subtle but undeniable tension between my reliance on the language of choice when asking about the course of her life, and Cristina's steering away from that language. Her uneasiness with the vocabulary of choice became most explicit when we touched on the question of work-life balance and the ways in which this is a particular challenge for women:

Yesterday I was speaking to a colleague of mine who said that the family is a vocation, just like work is, and that one has to choose: “either family or work.” This horrified me. As if I can choose family as a vocation! Already here the sentence doesn't work: I choose the family as my vocation.

Vocation, Cristina insisted, belongs to a different realm than choice: one does not simply “choose” vocations. One might receive a vocation or discover it, be able to hear it calling or understand it, either slowly or in a split-second, willingly or unwillingly. One might accept it or fight it, but one does not choose it.

A young sociologist at the time, I was not yet specifically trained to account for Cristina's understanding of vocation in a social scientific manner. Or rather, her understanding of vocation stood in sharp contrast to common social scientific approaches that frame vocation as a “personal choice.” The latter, of course, adequately reflects how many people today understand vocation. The Young and Vocation , a recent study on contemporary ideas of vocation among a representative sample of young people (between the ages of 16 and 29) in Italy, shows that the term “vocation” generally evokes the idea of self-realization rather than imposition (79% to 8%, respectively), and a sense of satisfaction rather than renunciation (71% to 13%). 1 Moreover, when Italian youth do connect vocation to its religious dimension, the religious call is interpreted as “a personal option that makes it possible to aim at a satisfactory self-realization.” 2 These results must be understood, Luigi Berzano argues, in the light of postmodern society, where each individual is impelled to create her own biography. 3

Studies like these effectively document significant and indisputable societal tendencies in how individuals conceive of their life course. My concern, however, lies in the way in which the design of such studies is based on assumptions that are part and parcel of the tendencies they seek to document. This becomes clearer when a rational choice perspective—well established within the sociological study of religion—is used. In their study of the decline of religious vocations within Catholicism in six countries during the period 1965 to 1995, Rodney Stark and Roger Finke argue that the costs of Catholic consecrated religious choices have diminished only marginally, while their benefits have diminished significantly. 4 Thus, vocations are in decline as a consequence of modifications in the advantages and opportunities of religious life—modifications that Stark and Finke associate with the Second Vatican Council. Within this framework, they suggest, the “vocation crisis” in the Roman Catholic Church might be addressed in two ways: either by reducing the costly aspects of these religious choices, or by reinstating the benefits. Stark and Finke show the cost-benefit logic at work in religious life, but they assume at the outset of their inquiry the universal nature of this logic.

Cristina's claim that “the sentence doesn't work” stretches beyond the words of her colleague and implies that, from her point of view, the paradigm of “vocation as choice” does not hold. Considering Cristina's claim brings us to the long-standing question of how sociological categories, of both empirical inquiry and analysis, relate to the categories and meanings respondents use to make sense of their world. By taking Cristina's refutation of “vocation as a choice” seriously, I do not mean to suggest that social scientific analyses should be confined to the categorical distinctions that respondents make. Such a conflation of two distinct levels of social reality and analysis would indeed deprive sociology of its own logic, language, and level of theorizing and analysis, and hence its raison d'être. At the same time, it is widely accepted that empirical inquiries, in order to be methodologically sound, should engage categories that are meaningful to respondents and in which respondents might be able to situate themselves. This is where the problem lies: while Cristina did not consider vocation in terms of “self-realization,” as most respondents in The Young and Vocation survey did, the contrasting term used in the survey—”imposition”—also failed to adequately capture what she means. (It should be noted that about 13% of the respondents did not select either of these two terms.) What Cristina and others like her might understand by vocation gets “lost in social scientific translation,” since it does not fit smoothly into the survey questions and categories. This poses problems, not because Cristina represents a majority point of view on the matter; she does not. But it is important to ensure that minority views inform the ways in which empirical inquiries and analyses are set up, for a whole slew of reasons, and there's one reason that stands out in this case. The Young and Vocation study documents the process of secularization, and the concomitant sacralization of personal life choices, given that the respondents seem to extend an idea of the sacred to the search for authentic existence. 5 But its design struggles to adequately incorporate those experiences that are not based on a secular understanding of vocation. The secularization that the survey ends up revealing is, in other words, already at least partially predisposed by the survey's design.

In sum, Cristina's understanding of vocation cannot be reduced to a biographical choice, and neither is it simply the result of a cost-benefit analysis. This is not to deny that such analytical frameworks can highlight important dimensions of the social reality of vocation. But they do seem to miss, by design, the crux of what vocation entails for people like Cristina. What does it mean to approach vocation as an individual choice, we might ask, when the actor herself insists that her vocation cannot be adequately accounted for in such terms?

Vocation and Sociology

The significance of vocation within sociology greatly exceeds the empirical studies on the matter. 6 Vocation has intrigued sociology, Giuseppe Giordan argues, 7 and this is related to its pivotal role in Max Weber's thinking. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism —Weber's critical engagement with Marx in which he explores the importance of culture and the production of meaning in the formation of society—vocation is a protagonist in two ways. First, it plays a crucial role in accounting for how individual action relates to social transformation. Weber's argument is well known: the Reformation, and in particular Lutheranism, brought about a modern understanding of vocation. Vocation, or calling, continued to be perceived as a divine ordinance, a task set by God, but it also came to include a positive valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs. Thus, everyday activities gained religious significance, as ascetic conduct was highly valued, particularly in the Puritan traditions, and labor became an ascetic technique par excellence. As a result, Puritan communities accumulated material wealth—the fruit of their labors—that in turn created a new social formation favorable to the development of capitalism. In other words, asceticism, “carried out of monastic cells into everyday life,” as Weber's well-known wording puts it, played its part in building the modern economic order. Along the way, however, the meaning of vocation continues to shift.

This brings us to the second role vocation plays in Weber's theory, i.e., as a crucial context in which to elucidate his understanding of secularization. Weber traces the development of an “inner-worldly asceticism,” which is central to both a religious and a secular understanding of vocation. While, for the Puritan, asceticism is born out of a relation with God, the asceticism of the modern secular subject is removed from such a relationship and focuses instead on worldly aims. Vocation became secularized, to refer to a profession, an occupation for which an individual is particularly well suited, trained, or qualified.

What does this semantic shift in meaning of vocation, from divine calling to professional occupation, tell us about secularization? The relocation of vocation, or “calling,” to within the subject—as an inner inclination that might be uncovered and actualized—resonates strongly with Talal Asad's discussion of the secular recrafting of “inspiration.” 8 As the Bible went from “the letter of divine inspiration” to a system of human significance, Asad argues, the methods of the German Higher Biblical Criticism “rendered the materiality of scriptural sounds” and writings into something akin to a spiritual poem. Previously, the divine word was necessarily also material, and the inspired words were objects of reverence, which entailed that pious bodies were taught “to listen, to recite, to move, to be still, to be silent, engaged with the acoustics” of those words. 9 The methods of Higher Biblical Criticism, in contrast, relocated the effect of words inside the subject, thus representing a move toward inner spiritual states independent of the senses. As a result, inspiration was no longer thought of as direct divine communication. This, Asad insists, involved a twofold shift: “all causation from outside the world of material bodies [is brought] entirely into that world,” and at the same time this “inside” was progressively reshaped. 10 Vocation is recrafted in a similar manner, as it becomes an inner inclination or inspiration that might be discovered, and joins the universe of authenticity and the rhetoric of sincerity, in which the idea of being true to oneself is conceived as a moral duty. 11

The Turn to Agency

My interest in vocation stems from my interest in the conceptualization of agency, particularly in relation to gender and religion. Agency, in sociological parlance, is commonly understood in terms of choice, or rather, choice is central to the conceptual architecture of agency. Cristina's refusal to consider vocation in terms of choice does not, however, imply that she is prepared to relinquish her sense of agency. Cristina's notion of vocation is in fact ingrained in an understanding of her own capacity to act, which includes the deliberate attempt to make herself receptive to a divine calling, as well as the effort to prepare herself to respond adequately to what such a call might require of her. This could suggest that Cristina's religious conception of vocation might also point to a different understanding of agency than the common one that hinges on the notion of choice.

Within established sociological reasoning, it might be argued that Cristina lacks agency to some extent. Cristina does not claim to be able to choose between what she considers the two fundamental patterns a life can follow; on the contrary, she refutes that choice. It could be argued that she is relatively alienated from her own agency and thus relates to the unfolding of her life course in a rather passive and docile way. One way of framing her outlook might be in terms of “false consciousness,” which implies that the material conditions and choices in her life remain obscured to her. Instead, she ascribes crucial moments in, and conditions of, her life to a source outside of her own will, consciousness, and power. Such accounts stressing the lack of agency have in fact been influential in the case of pious subjects, and of female pious subjects in particular. In sum, the capacity to act, as Cristina conceives, narrates, and represents it, is likely to be found lacking in agency, according to established sociological understandings of agency—and, this lack of agency is particularly gendered.

Alternatively, it could be argued that Cristina is exercising her free choice. The fact that she might be deliberating and narrating that choice through “vocation” could be seen as a strategy of authorization or justification, particularly in a situation where her social environment or her family might oppose such choice. This way of ascribing agency is related to a foundational impulse of feminist theory and women's studies, which insists on valuing women's voices and perspectives and affirming their agency. Feminist theory has indeed made women's lives central to its analysis and is predicated on validating women's perceptions of their own situation. This leads to a feminist insistence on women's agency, which coincides with a new prominence of “agency” in social theory at large, 12 to the extent that we can speak of a “turn to agency” in the last couple of decades. In many ways, this turn to agency remains vital for countering those accounts that deny (pious) women's capacity to act. Yet this insistence on agency also brings its own set of questions and problems. Amy Hollywood has captured the critical conceptual problem in the following question: “how to take seriously the agency of the other . . . when the other seems intent on ascribing her agency to God?” 13 What does it mean to fall back on an established sociological understanding of agency to make sense of a subject, when the subject herself relies on a very different variety of language to speak of her capacity to act? To keep insisting on her agency, while glossing over the difference she points to, replicates, in an uncanny way, the structure of the “false consciousness” argument: her alienation lies in thinking she is not exercising her choice, while in fact she is. 14 And, both ways of accounting for pious women's agency suffer from the fact that they rely on an already established meaning and sense of agency, fixed in advance, rather than on letting agency emerge through the analysis of the particular concepts that enable specific modes of being and acting. 15

One particularly productive way to approach this conundrum is found in Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety . In exploring some of the conceptual challenges that women's involvement in Islamic piety movements poses to feminist theory in particular, and to secular-liberal thought in general, Mahmood looks carefully at conceptions of the self and moral agency that undergird the practices of this nonliberal movement. 16 The theoretical stakes in this approach lie in unpacking a set of normative liberal assumptions about human nature, notably through making her empirical material speak back to them. These include a conceptual critique of both common social scientific and feminist understandings of agency. Mahmood's ethnography—as she considers the worlds and livelihoods of women involved in the piety movement in Egypt—prompts her to question the assumption that human agency consists primarily of acts that challenge social norms and therefore express some kind of resistance to social norms. Not only those acts that resist norms require agential activity, Mahmood argues; the capacity to act is itself to be found in the ways in which one inhabits norms. In order to theorize this agency in a way that renders visible the capacity of a subject who deliberately seeks to uphold certain norms to act, Mahmood turns to the realm of ethics and ethical self-fashioning, and to embodiment, which she approaches through the work of Michel Foucault and an Aristotelian understanding of habitus.

This provides a more adequate approach to Cristina's understanding of vocation and, relatedly, her sense of agency. The desire that shapes Cristina as a subject is not one of self-realization, but, rather, is a desire to lead a life that pleases God. This desire includes acquiring an understanding of God's will, which leads Cristina not only to study important texts as they are presented within CL (which also serves as an interpretative community for those texts), but also to shape her embodied self in a certain way. In order to receive a vocation, one must make oneself receptive, which Cristina does through prayer and regular moments of keeping silence, and through participation in the spiritual exercises of the movement. After receiving a vocation, moreover, as my current research shows, more complex agential activities take place. A calling can be accepted and embraced but also struggled with intensively. It needs to be “verified” with a spiritual counselor; that is, it is interpreted and bestowed with meaning in a context of social interaction and subsequently acted upon in various ways. Religious vocation, in other words, points to a particular shaping of the body and the senses that differs, we could argue, from what Charles Hirschkind has called the “secular body” 17 and the secular sensory cultures through which it is constituted. In order to receive a vocation, one needs to be able to feel and hear or see in particular ways that are not necessarily recognized as secular. This underscores the point that established understandings of agency mobilize particular, secular understandings of the embodied subject.

To conclude: I have used the story of Cristina, who, more than ten years ago, was a young graduate at an important point in her life, to pose an epistemological question about the gap between established sociological concepts, such as agency, and a spectrum of pious livelihoods. During my time as a research associate in the Women's Studies in Religion Program and as a resident of the Center for the Study of World Religions, I have been investigating this question further. In concrete terms, this means I have returned to doing fieldwork within CL, focusing this time on the lives of Memores Domini who took their vows. In theoretical terms, my work explores further the conflicted relationship of sociology to religion and piety, as well as to gender, and makes use of Mahmood's rethinking of agency in terms of ethics and embodiment to unpack some of these tensions and to offer an alternative account of female pious livelihoods. It is not so much that such livelihoods need their own sociological accounts, I believe, but rather that sociology is in need of analytical tools and concepts, in addition to the sociological imagination, that are able to account adequately for more subjects and social realities than it currently does, especially when it comes to gender and religion.

—by Sarah Bracke

This article appears in the Spring 2014 edition of CSWR Today .

Franco Garelli, 'Italian Youth and Ideas of Vocation,' in Vocation and Social Context , ed. Giuseppe Giordan (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 38.
Luigi Berzana, 'Vocation as Personal Choice,' in Vocation and Social Context , ed. Giuseppe Giordan (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, 'Catholic Religious Vocations: Decline and Revival,' Review of Religious Research 42, no. 2 (2000): 125–45.
Garelli, 'Italian Youth and Ideas of Vocation.'
See, e.g., Albert Dilanni, 'Vocations and the Laicization of Religion Life,' America 14 (1987): 207–11; M. Marcelinne Falk, 'Vocations: Identity and Commitment,' Review for Religious 39 (1980): 357–65; Chiamata a scegliere: I giovani italiani di fronte alla vocazione , ed. Franco Garelli (Milano: San Paola, 2006); Roger Finke, 'An Orderly Return to Tradition: Explaining Membership Recruitment to Catholic Religious Orders,' Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36, no. 2 (1997): 218–30; Helen Rose Ebaugh, Jon Lorence, and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, 'The Growth and Decline of the Population of Catholic Nuns Cross-Nationally, 1960–1990: A Case of Secularization as Social Structural Change,' Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35, no. 2 (1996): 171–83.
Vocation and Social Context , ed. Giuseppe Giordan (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 37–56.
See, e.g., Lois McNay, Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
Amy Hollywood, 'Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historiography,' The Journal of Religion 84, no. 4 (2004): 524.
Sarah Bracke, 'Conjugating the Modern/Religious, Conceptualizing Female Religious Agency: Contours of a 'Post-Secular' Conjuncture,' Theory, Culture and Society 25, no. 6 (2008): 51–67.
Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Charles Hirschkind, 'Is There a Secular Body?' Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 633–47.

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Bracke, Sarah. 'Conjugating the Modern/Religious, Conceptualizing Female Religious Agency: Contours of a 'Post-Secular' Conjuncture.' Theory, Culture and Society 25, no. 6 (2008): 51–67.

Berzano, Luigi. 'Vocation as Personal Choice.' In Vocation and Social Context , edited by Giuseppe Giordan. Leiden: Brill, 2007.

Garelli, Franco. 'Italian Youth and Ideas of Vocation.' In Vocation and Social Context , edited by Giuseppe Giordan. Leiden: Brill, 2007.

Giordan, Giuseppe, ed. Vocation and Social Context . Leiden: Brill, 2007.

Hirschkind, Charles. 'Is There a Secular Body?' Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 633–47.

Hollywood, Amy. 'Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historiography.' The Journal of Religion 84, no. 4 (2004): 514–25.

Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

McNay, Lois. Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory . Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.

Stark, Rodney, and Roger Finke. 'Catholic Religious Vocations: Decline and Revival.' Review of Religious Research 42, no. 2 (2000): 125–45.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . London: Routledge, 2001.

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vocation matters

Insights and Conversations from the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE)

Vocation Virtually: Telling Your Story

Understanding this dimension of vocation offers an invitation to become the author of your own story. To do that, students must first discover they have a story to tell. Authoring one’s own story creates agency.

Part 5 of a series describing an electronic “vPortfolio” (vocation portfolio) developed at Augsburg University and centered on five metaphors for vocation: place, path, perspective, people, and story.

A fifth metaphor of vocation is story, which underscores the sense that everyone has a story to tell. There is a narrative arc to each life, and that story has a beginning, middle, and end. This dimension of vocation invites students to author their own stories and, in the telling, claim agency. “In the beginning, I/we….” or “Once upon a time, I/we….”

In The Gates of the Forest , Elie Wiesel relates an old Hasidic tale about the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov. When the rabbi saw misfortune threatening the Jews, he would go to a certain part of the forest, light a fire, and say a special prayer. The crisis would be averted. Subsequent rabbis confronted similar crises, but one forgot the prayer, another forgot how to light the fire, another forgot the location of the special place in the forest. The rabbis did whatever they could remember, and the misfortune was overcome. Finally, crisis came to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn. He sat in his armchair, head in his hands, and lamented, “I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient.” And it was. Wiesel concludes: “God made man because he loves stories.”

“The gates of the forest”

John MacWhirter (1839-1911)

Public domain

An Afghani Muslim student was so moved by Wiesel’s example of the power of telling stories that she began to craft her own narrative of a community under threat. Her family had fled Afghanistan only a few years before, leaving behind family, friends, and a region wracked by war. In her portfolio, she told the stories of the country she’d left behind, illustrating them with photos she’d taken herself, and using her tagline, “Between Two Worlds” as a title. She discovered that she loved to write; she discovered something else as well–she had a story to tell.

Many religious traditions highlight stories, myths, and creation narratives. The Hebrew bible begins with a story of creation, “In the beginning, God….” The Torah goes on to narrate the covenants between God and God’s people, covenants with Noah, Abraham, and Moses. Alongside laws governing relationships to God and humans ( halakah), Jews have stories ( haggadah). In absence of a stable homeland, Jews located themselves in stories. The story of the exodus from Egypt is re-told and re-enacted every year at Passover around a meal. Remembering this story of liberation, Jews are literally re-membered into a community of promise.

The gospel of John draws on the first words of Genesis to narrate another creation story, this one about the creation of “the beloved community”. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) The echo is intentional.

In a real way, all of the metaphors of calling come together in that narrative.

Exercise: Crafting a Public Leadership Narrative

Activist, organizer, and teacher Marshall Ganz locates his own vocation at the intersection of three overlapping stories: the story of self, the story of us, and, the story of “now.” Read his brief essay, “Why Stories Matter,” with particular attention to how he crafts those stories into a public leadership narrative.

Story of self

Everyone has a story of self. That story can be told differently at different points in our lives, depending on circumstance or audience or insight. Ganz talks about growing up as the son of a rabbi. Words from the Passover seder deeply affected him, “You were once a slave in Egypt.” He had to leave his childhood home in California, but those words never left him.

You likely told a story in your “This I Believe” statement. Go back and review it.

For your story, think of one major challenge you faced and describe how you coped with it. Introduce your story with a summary: “Here’s how I learned the importance of ….” Then, narrate the challenge and how you handled it. Conclude with a return to what you learned, how it marks you as a person of faith and public leader, and why it’s important to share.

Story of us

We are all part of communities or groups that claim us, communities that we claim. It could be a family, a faith tradition, a sports team or choral group. Belonging to a particular community orients people toward certain values, which telegraph to its members a reason or purpose for being in the world. As the son of a rabbi, Ganz lived inside the story of the exodus from Egypt, a land of slavery and house of bondage. Not surprisingly, he found himself in the civil rights movement in the Sixties, part of another exodus from slavery.

You named some of your communities in the “Name your ‘peeps’/people” exercise. Go back and review that list. Identify one value you learned being in this community, tell the story of how you learned it and made it your own.

Story of “now”

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of “the fierce urgency of now,” his way of identifying the gap between the way things are in the world and the way they should be. Philosophers formulate this as the difference between what is and what ought to be .

Identify one of those gaps that you are particularly concerned with: climate change, racism, poverty, the achievement gap. How did you become aware of this problem (story of self)? Now, tell a story of how your core commitments (story of self) and community values (story of us) help you address “the fierce urgency of now.” Go back to your tagline from the original exercise on vocation as perspective . You already have the title for your story!

In this series of posts on metaphors, I’ve identified some metaphors for vocation that have been helpful to me, as I work in religiously diverse classrooms with students who hunger to make sense of a broken world. What metaphors have you used? Rebecca Schlatter Liberty proposes the metaphors of puzzle, river, and “treasure hunt.” Kathleen Cahalan finds nouns too static to capture the spirit of vocation, using prepositions instead. In her book, The Stories We Live, she argues that people are called by God, as they are, from some people, places, and things and to other people, places, and things, for service, etc.

What language would you offer? Are there other metaphors that you have used in thinking about vocation?

V-PORTFOLIO SERIES: Click here to see the entire series of posts describing the v-portfolio and each of the five metaphors.

Martha (Marty) Stortz is the Bernhard M. Christensen Professor of Religion and Vocation at Augsburg University . Prior to joining the community at Augsburg in 2010, she taught at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in The Graduate Theological Union for 29 years. She wonders why it took her so long to get into higher education. She is an avid swimmer and writer, and she is a life-long pilgrim. For other blog posts by Marty, click here .

Vocation Essay Examples

Many students are faced with the problem of finding ideas for writing their essays. This website contains a database with more than 50 000 essay examples, using which you can easily find inspiration for creating your own essay on Vocation.

Here you will find many different essay topics on Vocation. You will be able to confidently write your own paper on the influence of Vocation on various aspects of life, reflect on the importance of Vocation, and much more. Keep on reading!

A Reflection Paper: Vocation of a Business Leader Many people doing business became obsessed with just earning money and forgot the ultimate purpose of it. They did not take into account the society as a whole, and just kept on achieving wealth just for themselves. They forgot that the true meaning of it is to […]

Today, society looks at teaching as just a temporary vocation. Teachers no longer regard their profession as a job for life. What was once regarded as a career for life is now a career which lasts several years.A TV recruitment campaign claimed “Those who can, teach. Well they might teach, but they will not do […]

Politicians are roundly derided by the media for their use of equivocation. In some instances, it can become a defining characteristic of their rhetoric – giving them a reputation for deceitful doublespeak that can shadow them for their whole political career. For those not in the political spotlight however, equivocation can be viewed merely as […]

The main courses offered by the universities today are more often related to theoretical education and learning. However, some educators and even job employers see that the knowledge given through the universities is not sufficient enough to equip the students with the necessary skills needed for becoming a reliable worker after they attend school. Why […]

Associated with high costs and frequent absenteeism in the workplace, traumatic amputation is a devastating occupational injury. Anxiety reactions, posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, grief, body image disturbances, and excessive pain are common after such an injury. It is important to understand each of these forms in order to address the resulting psychological effects appropriately. Experiencing […]

As Ediger (2005) reports, a quarter of young people are leaving the Amish community, creating a need for vocational transitions to cope with the challenges facing the community. The Amish community is experiencing change due to various factors, both internal and external, that are often beyond the control of community leaders. The pressures inducing change […]

Introduction For decennaries. Germany and France have been contrasted as holding rather different accomplishment formation systems. ensuing from differences in institutional constructions. educational values. the grade of centralisation of educational administration. and flights of industrialisation. Numerous surveies have compared these two states. developing typologies of vocational instruction and preparation ( VET ) every bit good […]

Everyone thinks they know what personality means, but not many can confidently define it. In this context, personality is referred to particular traits that are key in prospering in professional business services. The concentration is on the critical levels of technical expertise, intellectual capacity, and relational attributes that propel individuals towards triumph in marketing/sales within […]

In 1978, Hungarian poet George Faludy (pictured here) gave the convocation address at the University of Toronto. He described his experiences in a communist concentration camp (after the Soviet invasion of 1956) and made several profound and intriguing observations about the significance of a liberal arts education. As part of his attempts to survive the […]

The researcher’s wishes to express their deepest gratitude to the special people who have extended their assistance for the success of this study; The Almighty God, who is the source of life and strength of knowledge and wisdom. To the fellow classmates, for sharing their knowledge and idea in helping the researchers in the construction […]

Abstract Evaluation in education involves the collection of data and the use of such data to assess the effectiveness or quality of a program or performance. Program in education is established for some purpose and it is the function of program evaluation to determine the extent to which the purpose of this program is achieved. […]

It is difficult to define vocational education because it differs in each educational setting. According to Medcalf (2010), vocational education requires clarification, as it involves a blend of practical and theoretical knowledge that applies to the job market. According to Medcalf (2010), the benefits of this form of learning include advancement in employment and further […]

Reflections

You are here, job and vocation: discerning the difference.

Some time ago, I had an experience that startled me into a new awareness of the increasing divide that many in the church are experiencing between their jobs on the one hand and any sense of Christian calling on the other. While serving on the staff of a large New York City church, I attended a weekly gathering of young adults where the topic was the meaning of Christian vocation. What followed was revelatory.

The facilitator asked the fifty adults to get up out of their chairs and position themselves across the room in response to particular statements about work and our relationship to it.

The first statement was: “I feel completely fulfilled and satisfied in my job.” In response, a few people went to one side of the room, indicating great satisfaction with their jobs. A few people went to the opposite side of the room – some amidst audible groans – signaling their complete dissatisfaction with their work. The majority positioned themselves somewhere on a continuum across the room, suggesting relative happiness or unhappiness with their employment.

The second statement was: “The job I have now is close to what I feel is my ultimate vocation – my dream job.” Again, responses varied. Some indicated “yes,” they were in their dream jobs. Some declared “no,” they absolutely were not. Quite a few remained in the middle.

Then came the third statement: “I feel close to God in my job; my daily work fulfills me spiritually.” When all the movement finally ceased, I realized there was only one person in the entire room who was standing on the side that indicated complete agreement with that statement. And that one person was me!

Sadly, the vast majority of those young adults located themselves somewhere on the opposite side of the room. Some commented that the question itself had caught them off guard: work and spirituality were not something they ordinarily thought of putting together.

Historic Shift

Most troubling about that experience is how it illustrates the enormous shift I have witnessed in my own lifetime between how people in the church think about work and vocation, and the relationship between the two.

When I was in high school and college in the late 1960s and early 70s, there was a strong sense – in the Presbyterian Church at least – that “job” and “vocation” were almost synonymous terms, and part of the church’s mission was helping young people discern their life’s calling under God. Indeed, the Presbyterian Church had a number of vocational testing centers, often located at Presbyterian colleges, where young adults could meet with a counselor to discern what vocations would be most fitting with the gifts and interests God had given them. The vital assumption was that a person’s job should have some connection with serving God, and a part of Christian discipleship was finding a job that engaged one’s God-given talents. There was an underlying assumption that once you discerned your vocation you pretty much stayed with it the rest of your life.

Three Trends

But a lot about the workplace has changed since then. These changes have caused people of all ages – and not just young adults – to question whether their jobs have much, if anything, to do with God anymore. The struggles triggered by this historic recession have only intensified that sense of alienation or divide. Three trends, well underway before the 2008 financial crisis, come to mind that by now define the workplace horizon:

• The work place has become a far more competitive and less kind place than it used to be, and old-fashioned values such as honesty, hard work, and dependability are no longer widely rewarded as they once were. Pursuit of the highest possible profit, in many instances, is the sole criteria for success. This ethic is celebrated on a TV show such as The Apprentice, where winners and losers are judged each week solely on the basis of which team produces more profit for the company, and where traditional loyalty, compassion, and a generous spirit are often Trumped (literally) by aggressiveness, backstabbing, and the press toward the bottom line.

Not only do such work environments usually bring out the worst in human nature; they also fuel the pressure on those in management positions to do anything and everything they can to make it look like the bottom line is better even if it’s not. Such work climates take their toll on individual workers: too many hours spent away from home and family, illnesses caused by work-related stress, and for some older workers, job loss – not because they failed to work hard and do well, but because it is cheaper to replace them with younger, less experienced people.

• The traditional notion that a person will work in the same job all her or his life sounds almost ludicrous today. Partly this is due to the pattern of corporate takeovers that has become routine in our economic culture, causing job layoffs and uncertainty even in prosperous times. A relative of mine, who works in the insurance industry, found himself working for four different companies in four differ ent jobs in the space of two years – with none of the changes initiated by him. “So far,” he told me at one point, “I’m one of the lucky ones, and have managed to land on my feet each time a turnover happens. But I figure my days are numbered. I’m trying to save up now for the tough times that are sure to come.”

• Finally,we need to acknowledge that for a large number of people in our land, holding out for a job that gives them great personal meaning and fulfillment is not a luxury they can afford. Necessity forces many people to take whatever work they can and be grateful for the paycheck. I spent several years volunteering at an outreach program of the church my husband pastored in New Jersey, doing in-take interviews with minimum-wage workers who came to us for scholarships and child-care assistance. When I asked them about their jobs, it quickly became apparent that for them the goal at work was not fulfillment; it was survival, a way of putting bread on the table and keeping a roof over their heads. These days their name is legion.

Callings from Scripture

In the face of these relentless pressures and patterns, I find two Biblical stories about calling helpful – the call of Samuel and the call of Jesus’ disciples. They don’t address all the messy issues raised about the workplace in our time, but they do speak to some basic Gospel truths we dare not forget as we ponder the relationship between work and vocation.

For starters, these two Biblical narratives remind us that while some of us may have jobs, all of us have a vocation: namely, to love, serve, and follow God. One reason I have always loved the story of the call of Samuel is because God’s call, God’s “vocation,” comes not to some older and wiser adult, but to a young boy who isn’t expecting God to talk to him at all.

The setting is the temple in Jerusalem, where the boy Samuel is sleeping before the Holy of Holies – that place behind the temple curtain where the Ark of the Covenant containing the Ten Commandments rests. Samuel is in the temple because his parents, Hannah and Elkanah, decided to dedicate him to God at an early age. They have sent him there to live and train for the priesthood under Eli, who is old and almost blind.

A lamp is burning low in the temple as Samuel sleeps, and suddenly he is awakened when he hears a voice calling, “Samuel, Samuel.” Thinking it must be old Eli calling him, Samuel rushes to where Eli is sleeping and says, “Here I am for you called me.” But Eli says, “Son, I didn’t call you. Go back and lie down again.”

Three times during the night this voice awakens Samuel, three times he mistakenly thinks it is Eli calling and rushes to his bedside, until finally – after the third call – Eli wisely discerns that perhaps it is God who is calling the young man. He tells Samuel, “The next time you hear the voice, you are to respond: ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ ” When Samuel hears the voice calling a fourth time, he replies as Eli had told him to do. It is then that God tells Samuel of the plans God has for his life, of the words God wants him to speak, of the things God wants him to do.

This story is a powerful reminder that no matter how young or old we are, or how important or unimportant we may feel, God has a vocation for us. Our real worth lies in the fact that God knows us, loves us, calls us by name.

A similar dynamic is at work in the way Jesus begins calling his disciples. Who does Jesus call first to follow him? The wealthy and well-employed? Those most talented at turning a financial profit? No. He calls ordinary day laborers. A couple of brothers – Peter and Andrew – guys who fish with their dad for a living. To these he entrusts a vocation, a calling, saying, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people.” Follow me, and I will teach you to use those same God-given gifts and abilities you have been using in your daily work for even greater purposes – God’s purposes.

Vocation After Hours

There are a lot of people today who, like those fishermen of old, live out the heart of their Christian vocations not primarily through their jobs, but by following Jesus in spheres of service outside the workplace:

• A man I know, a Wall Street trader, finds deep meaning and joy as a junior high youth advisor on the weekends.

• A retiree I know, who spent many years in the business world, now uses his considerable gifts in finance and organizational management to help churches provide low-income housing.

• A young woman I know – a singer by profession – says her true passion comes through her volunteer work on behalf of environmental concerns.

• A relative who lost his own job in the recession and who currently delivers newspapers and pizzas to pay his bills recently told me that the past year has been one of the most meaningful of his life because of the joy he finds in his volunteer work for a nonprofit that provides transitional housing for recovering alcoholics.

Nevertheless, this primary vocation – the calling to love and serve and follow Christ – can also transform how we see our everyday jobs. Sometimes even the most boring and repetitive jobs can become an arena for Christian service if we are open to hearing the voice of God guiding and showing us how to use our gifts right where we are.

I think, for instance, of that young woman I know who turned her bartending job – a job she got in order to pay the bills when she moved to New Orleans soon after Hurricane Katrina – into a ministry for Christ as she simply listened, in an empathetic and compassionate way, to the painful stories people poured out to her.

I think of that business manager I know in New Jersey, who, despite the many thorny issues she must handle on a daily basis, has told me that her heart’s greatest desire is to be the “Lydia” of her workplace – extending the grace of hospitality to all who enter there much like the remarkable woman in Acts 16.

A Clarifying Voice

To me one of the great gifts of the Christian life can be summed up this way: no matter where we find ourselves, we have a vocation that has been given to us by God, and confirmed for us in our baptisms. We are called to be disciples of Jesus Christ. And because that vocation is God-given, there is nothing this world – with all of its injustice, unfairness, and inequality – can do to take it away.

The stories of Samuel and the disciples offer another lesson: since God is the initiator of vocation, our primary responsibility is often simply to listen intently for God’s call, and faithfully respond when it comes.

In his wonderful book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (Wiley, 2000), Parker Palmer writes: “Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about – quite apart from what I would like it to be about – or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions. That insight is hidden in the word vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin for ‘voice.’ Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear.” (p. 4)

Palmer writes honestly about the fact that listening for and hearing God’s voice is not always easy. During a dark and jobless period in his own life when, as he puts it, “I was approaching middle age at warp speed and had yet to find a vocational path that felt right,” he spent a number of months praying and trying to listen to God – yet with no audible voice like that of Samuel coming in the night to guide him.

Finally in frustration he took his troubles to an older Quaker woman, well known for her thoughtfulness and candor. “Ruth,” he said, “People keep telling me that ‘way will open.’ Well, I sit in the silence, I pray, I listen for my calling, but way is not opening. I’ve been trying to find my vocation for a long time, and I still don’t have the foggiest idea of what I’m meant to do.”

Ruth’s reply, he writes, was a model of Quaker plain-speaking. “I’m a birthright Friend,” she said somberly, “and in sixty-plus years of living, way has never opened in front of me.” But then she spoke again – this time with a grin. “But a lot of way has closed behind me, and that’s had the same guiding effect.”

Discerning God’s voice might not come with the clarity that it came to Samuel in the night. But it’s often possible to look back and see that God sometimes uses even those situations that are the most devastating in our lives – disappointing jobs, disillusioning jobs, lost jobs – to open new vistas of vocation we had not yet even imagined.

No Guarantees

Finally, these Scripture passages remind a Christian that the vocation to follow Christ is the first and primary calling, and demands our highest allegiance – even if it sometimes means putting a job in jeopardy.

I have always loved that quotation of Frederick Buechner’s: “Vocation is the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” Yet the story of Samuel’s call is a sobering reminder that vocation is not necessarily something that brings immediate joy and gladness to the heart or to the workplace. The call to Samuel was difficult and hard. God basically told this young boy to go to his mentor, his friend, his superior – the beloved priest Eli with whom he had lived since he was very small – and tell Eli that the days of his priesthood were coming to an end because of the evil of his sons. No wonder Samuel lay awake all night pondering this word he had received in the darkness from God. No wonder he was afraid to go and tell Eli about his vision the next morning.

Ultimately, Samuel was faithful. He spoke the truth he had received from God – the whole truth – to Eli. Because Eli himself was a man of prayer, a man of God, he received it as a word from God. But there were no guarantees for Samuel. Just as there are no guarantees for any of us who would speak God’s truth and risk allowing our vocations to subvert our jobs.

Prophet Irene

One of my vocational heroes is a woman named Irene Jenkins, whom I first met when I was on the faculty of Union Seminary in Virginia (now Union Presbyterian Seminary) and she was one of the custodians who cleaned my office. A middle-aged African American woman, Irene had had her share of troubles in life. Her husband had left her early on, and she had been the sole financial support of her two children, one of whom – a mentally disabled adult son – still lived with her.

Irene’s job was, by the world’s standards, menial labor. But with Irene, there was nothing menial about it. She often came into my office to empty trash cans and dust bookcases with a headset on, humming hymns as she worked. She frequently paused to tell me about a Bible passage she’d been reading, about the latest instance of God’s goodness in her life, or about news at her Pentecostal church. Irene walked closely with God, and it showed.

When I got ready to leave Union for another teaching position, Irene arrived at my office door one day. “Sit down,” she said in a voice I’d never heard her use before, “I have a word from the Lord for you.” Irene proceeded to speak to me words she had received from God – difficult, challenging words, words I didn’t altogether want to hear – but which proved over time to be absolutely true, and which I firmly believe were given to her, a prophet, just as surely as the words that were given to Samuel in the dark of night.

Knowing in her heart that she was a beloved child of God, a disciple of Jesus Christ, Irene was able to take an ordinary, unglamorous job and infuse it with all the joy, purpose, and dedication of a vocation. But knowing also that her ultimate allegiance belonged to the God who had called her, Irene did not shy away from speaking truth, even tough truths, that God gave her to speak.

All of us have a vocation in Jesus Christ. And there’s absolutely no promise that following it will earn us a life free of pain or difficulty. Yet I love the words that conclude the story of Samuel: “As Samuel grew up, the Lord was with him, and let none of his words fall to the ground. And all Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, knew that Samuel was a trustworthy prophet of the Lord.”

I’m guessing that for Samuel, the approbation of God, and the trust and respect of his people, were enough fulfillment to last a lifetime – and even beyond.

Nora Tubbs Tisdale is Clement-Muehl Professor of Homiletics at YDS. Her books include Prophetic Preaching: A Pastoral Approach (Westminster John Knox, 2010) and Preaching as Local Theology and Folk Art (Augsburg Fortress, 1997).

Five Habits of Cross-Cultural Lawyering and More

Clinical law teaching materials from sue bryant and jean koh peters, brief description.

In choosing a career or path in life, many of us have struggled to find balance between what we want to do and what we think we should do. When we let go of arbitrary and external expectations and reach for joy and fulfillment, we can begin to explore our vocation. Theologian Frederick Buechner defines vocation as the place where “your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” 1 Your deep gladness is the call of one’s true, enduring and authentic self, the pursuits that engender, not necessarily always happiness, but profound joy. The world’s deep hunger includes all the ills of the world that require justice or healing. Vocation is where we find joy in the pursuit of addressing the world’s deep hunger. Exploring and developing one’s vocation can free one from the competitive, career-focused life and towards a deeply meaningful, integrated daily life and legacy.

Clinical teachers working intensely with students one-on-one develop many insights into the vocations of their students. In this work, many teachers pursue their own vocations—of service, education, and solidarity to name a few—through the great joy of daily engagement with students and clients. For teachers, students and lawyers seeking to discern their vocations, Jean offers these thoughts. She and Mark Weisberg explored these ideas for teachers specifically in their chapter on The Teacher and Vocation in The Teacher’s Reflection Book . This post draws heavily from that chapter. 2

Understanding Vocation

What if you had nothing to prove? What if you undertook every class, every article, every meeting, every student and collegial interaction, with no concern about proving anything to anyone? Would you be living your professional life as you now do? Would you work as you now work? Maintain the same relationship between your professional and personal lives? To answer these questions would be to express what for you would be a life lived in vocation, a life unburdened by trying to fulfill the external expectations imposed, or that we imagine to be imposed, by others.

Yet many of us do find ourselves being governed from the outside, by fear of failing, disappointing others, or looking foolish. We try hard to please others; we measure our success by external standards. For many of us, these barriers to living in vocation persist throughout our lives.

What does it mean to lead a life in vocation? Buechner believes vocation to be that “place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Your Deep Gladness: The Call of the True Self

For each of us, our deep gladness, that which gives us abiding, profound joy, is the call of our true self, where our history, our enduring loves and values, and our both established and evolving identity can be explored and celebrated. The call of our deep gladness invites us to look beyond the quick fix, peer pressure, or the urgent agendas of others to a truth deep within ourselves. To look within ourselves, to our identity, or core, suggests that when we find our deep gladness, it will sustain us in both good times and bad. In that way it differs from happiness. The joy of deep gladness does not depend on us enjoying good luck, good times or smooth sailing. This is the joy that keeps us grounded, content, at peace with ourselves, even in turbulent times.

Embracing our joy isn’t always simple. Many of us are accustomed to putting our desires and ambitions on the backburner because of our responsibilities and obligations to others. Vocation does not require us to abdicate those responsibilities, but to make informed choices that prioritize our joy. Vocation does not require that we all work in the public interest sector or work without sufficient financial support. Instead, vocation puts a focus on personal joy while still making the decisions that are holistically right for us.

Lawyers who begin their careers with substantial obligations to family as well as their own debt often ask whether they are truly free to pursue their vocation. In talks with first-generation professional students and students of color at Yale, Jean often shared her own experience of abruptly quitting her planned job at a New York corporate litigation firm and instead pursuing her deep gladness (representing children) leading to great financial problems (deferring her maxed out student loans at 100% interest for a year). In addition, she was deemed ineligible for her law school’s low income protection program, a blow that started her career on very shaky financial footing. In the end, she and her husband paid off every penny of the debt while working deeply within their vocations. Throughout the process, Jean has attested to her students, she became convinced that she was not only actively seeking and pursuing her vocation; in fact, she became sure, her vocation was actively seeking and pursuing her, consistently rewarding leaps of faith with the wherewithal to live comfortably despite the financial challenges.

Joy is self-validating. Joy also can be mystifying. We may not know why we find it so enjoyable to play tennis, put together a jigsaw puzzle, or bake a loaf of bread, or why the sight of a beautiful painting in a museum, or the sound of our favorite music on the radio lightens our heart, even on the most difficult day. But these examples suggest the joy Buechner is describing and inviting you to identify. The joy that is not located in any single moment or particular context, but the joy that motivates you today as it did ten years ago, and as you have reason to believe, will continue to do so ten years from now.

The World’s Deep Hunger: Which Call? Whose Call?

The call of the world’s deep hunger is vast and multi-vocal. For each of us to try to answer its many voices is impossible. So, as vocation invites you to identify what that call is for you, it also invites you to give yourself permission not to answer all the calls that you hear.

How would you encapsulate what for you is the call of the world’s deep hunger? For lawyers, we might think of it as the call of justice. For doctors, would it be the call of healing? For artists, the call of beauty?

Teachers hear many calls—calls from their subject matter, calls from their educational mission. What speaks to you: the call of understanding, or discovery? The call of learning? The call of your discipline? The call of creativity? Take a moment to consider how you would summarize, in a word or phrase, the call(s) that most compel you.

In addition to finding your call, vocation may compel you to identify those calls of the world’s deep hunger that you cannot answer, and to forgive yourself for not trying to answer them. In our media-saturated times, doing this can be difficult. What are the calls you constantly hear that tear at your heart but cannot be answered now? For many of us who have revered the medical profession but lacked all the skills required for this call, we must let go of the aspiration of being a great surgeon or of curing breast cancer. Or those of us who loved writing stories when we were young may not be able to become the next J.K. Rowling. Sorting through the calls of the world’s deep hunger is a constant challenge, but no challenge is greater than that of daring to hear the sounds of the world’s calls as you search for the ones you can authentically answer. (One major consolation: we may find it part of our vocation to support enthusiastically our friends, students, and colleagues who find joy and serve deep hunger that we cannot address.)

In fact, your gladness may help you hear the call more clearly. In this information age, we worry less that the call of the world’s deepest hunger will reach you, and more that the cacophony of anguish will overwhelm or numb you. Joy’s ear may help you tune in to the cries you can hear and answer best.

Where Your Deep Gladness and the World’s Deep Hunger Meet

Vocation is where your deep gladness intersects with the world’s deep hunger. In your vocation, you can undertake a joyful daily life that addresses the calls that you can answer.

The path of vocation requires you to recover and experience your deepest joy daily, and to offer it in service of the calls that move you most—justice, healing, understanding, beauty, learning—whatever you designate. And delighting in the service of the most compelling will certainly evolve for you, perhaps looking vastly different in one season of life than the next.

Implications of a Life Lived in Vocation

Vocation implicates our deepest beliefs, our relationships, and our spirit. When we speak of our professional life, we tend to frame that conversation in terms of a career. By contrast, theologian James Fowler suggests that framing our life in terms of vocation would radically reorient our self-understanding. 3 Fowler offers seven liberating implications of living a life in vocation instead of a life in career. The following chart juxtaposes Fowler’s views on a life in vocation to a life focused on career:

In universities and courthouses, for example, we tend to measure our successes comparatively. Our differential salaries reflect judgments of our “merit.” We compete against each other for a fixed pool of financial resources. We measure ourselves by our success at winning cases or being published in the most prestigious journals. And we pass that competitiveness on to our students and successors.

In vocation, since we have nothing to prove, and since each vocation is unique, we aren’t competing with each other. Everyone is following their own path, a path they have no need to justify. Consequently, rather than ranking ourselves and others, we’re free to recognize, enjoy, root for and feel enriched by each person’s gifts.

In a world of infinite gifts, we “are freed from the sense of having to be all things to all people.” 4 Instead, we can welcome, even embrace, our limits, as well as our own gifts. Our vocation is dynamic. As we grow and develop, so will our vocation. While remaining a constant calling, its shape and texture may change, reflecting the changing patterns in our lives.

Sample Vocation Lesson Plan

Before class .

Critical Incidents: Six Things That I Am Confident that I Do Well, and Enjoy Doing (ideally from both Inside and Outside Law) (e.g., baking an apple pie, reading to a child, one-on-one basketball, gardening, speaking with clients, solving problems etc.) write the first things that come to mind:

Now circle the one (if there is one) that stands out from the others as highest in enjoyment, confidence or both; the thing you feel most clearly and unambivalently is one of your standout talents.

Five Challenges facing our World that Deeply Trouble Me

(e.g., global warming, ongoing race bias, gridlock in Washington, etc.)

If you think of too many, preference the ones that you find yourself returning to again and again.

Now circle the one that most troubles you at this moment.

Critical Incidents: Three Things That I Am Sure to Do in My Life as a Lawyer or Law Student Which I Currently Dread And/Or Fear Doing

write the first things that come to mind:

Now circle the one (if there is one) which clearly stands out: the one you fear or dread the most or the one which, if resolved, would be the biggest breakthrough for you.

Introduction to Vocation

Introduce exercise and explain your vocation story.
Example: This exercise forced me to acknowledge things that I am good at. It also opened up the space to think about whether what I fear in the law is something I may actually want to do. I considered whether the things I fear are actually scary or just something that I didn’t want to try. What does vocation mean for me now? Vocation helps me think about whether I am challenging myself in ways that also brings me joy, as opposed taking on challenges that make me miserable.

Exercise Debrief

Spend 15 minutes discussing the exercise with about 5 minutes in each part
Encourage participants to share anything they want to share – the things they are good at, what they fear, etc.
Remind participants that there is also no pressure to share if they are uncomfortable.

Things We Are Good At

Was this challenging?
Anything that came easy?
Any trends that came up for you?

Problems in the World

Was this what you expected it to be?
Did there feel like there were too many problems?
Was it easy to focus on which one bothers you the most?

Fears Anything you found challenging?

Were you surprised by what you circled?
What did you notice about where you went with this exercise?

Can The things you’re good at help you resolve your fear?

For instance, I am good at making an apple pie. I clean my work area, I make sure I have all my ingredients handy, I put on quiet music, I work methodically on one thing at a time.
For instance, I fear writing. But now that I think of it, I often work in a messy area, I don’t have my sources around me, my door is open and I hear a lot of hallway noise, and I often flit from thought to thought and task to task. So what if I try writing the way I make an apple pie: clean my desk; gather my sources first; play quiet music; and try to focus on one task at a time.
So: try applying the method of the item you circled in 1 to the fear you circled in 3.
The goal here is to identify what is challenging and use what we know we are good at as a potential source of strength when facing challenges and making vocational choices. In addition, our confidence in the items that bring us joy can give us a critical incident to explore: how can the minutiae of the things that I love and am confident in instruct me as I face my fears in my professional life?

Additional Vocation Exercises

We encourage lawyers, teachers, and students to utilize the following exercises when exploring their vocations. They can help with identifying, understanding, and possibly, more thoroughly embracing vocation.

Write Your Obituary or Eulogy

One way to discover your path might be to begin at the end and explore what you’d want said about you at the end of your life. Jean remembers first doing this exercise as a teenager at her family camp, and the huge impact it made on her perspectives at the time. Take some time with your journal and compose either your obituary or a eulogy for your funeral. If they help, use the following guidelines:

Don’t fret about any detail (which newspaper, what length, the identity of the author, the date of the article or speech) unless it sparks your creativity. If a choice of detail blocks you, choose the least anxiety-provoking alternative and keep writing;
Beyond grounding the basic facts in reality, feel free at any point to reach into imagination or fantasy;
If you get stuck, observe what stimulates your writing and also what impeded it, and go back to step a.;
Hang in there. When you’re finished, explore whether you’ve found some meaning in your life independent of the need to have proven yourself to the world.

Find and Explore a Governing Metaphor

As a way into “the mystery of our selfhood,” Parker Palmer invites us to fill in the blank in the following sentence: “When I am teaching at my best, I am like a _______.” 5 He suggests you “accept the image that arises, resisting the temptation to censor or edit it.” 6 Palmer writes:

When I am teaching at my best, I am like a sheep dog—not the large, shaggy, lovable kind, but the all-business Border Collies one sees working the flocks in sheep country. . . My task in the classroom, I came to see, parallels this imaginative rendering of the sheepdog’s task. My students must feed themselves—that is called active learning. If they are to do so, I must take them to a place where food is available: a good text, a well-planned exercise, a generative question, a disciplined conversation. 7

Try writing a governing metaphor for yourself.

Compose a Job Description

Compose a job description that reflects your clearest sense of your task. Not the task that someone or some institution has imposed on you, but the one you’d choose if you had nothing to prove, no debts to repay, and no obligations to others. Consider the questions: What are you doing? What are you really doing? What is your deepest sense of call? What is your true vocation?

How does it compare to what your institution or employer would write? If they differ, can you imagine doing your job as you’ve described it for yourself? What would change from how you now work? What would remain?

Write or visit Your Future Self

We can benefit from writing letters to ourselves, written in a lucid moment or a moment of transition to yourself as a fixed point in the future. Have a friend or colleague keep it and send it to you. It can remind you of deep commitments and insights over time. You can also expand this exercise to your students, by collecting their letters to their future selves at the beginning of a school year and sending them back at a midpoint.

Karen Saakvitne and Laurie Pearlman, in the context of managing vicarious trauma , have created a remarkable Future Self Visualization 8 that facilitates a visit with your future professional self. Jean has recorded a slightly modified homemade version (recording forthcoming).

Summary Points

Find vocation at the intersection of your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger.
In vocation, since we have nothing to prove, and since each vocation is unique, we aren’t competing with each other.
Vocation is dynamic. As we grow and develop, so will our vocation. While remaining a constant calling, its shape and texture may change, reflecting the changing patterns in our lives.
Keeping your vocation in focus brings meaning to our daily life and strength and clarity, even joy, to difficult times. Use exercises to explore and evolve your vocation as an ongoing practice.
Clinical teachers are uniquely equipped to reflect with law students on their vocations and the role of law in their lives.
Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: The Seeker’s ABCs 119 (1993). ↩
This webpage draws substantially from a chapter in Jean’s book on teaching. See Jean Koh Peters and Mark Weisberg, A Teacher’s Reflection Book: Stories, Exercises, Invitations (2011). ↩
James W. Fowler, Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian: Adult Development & Christian Faith 83-85 (2000). ↩
Id. at 130, n. 4. ↩
Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life 148 (1998). ↩
Id. ↩
Karen W. Saakvitne and Laurie Anne Pearlman, Transforming the Pain: A Workbook on Vicarious Traumatization (1996) ↩

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W. P. Bennett

Your vocation: a personal calling from god.

Living the Faith , Spiritual Development

“There was a strong and violent wind rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the Lord—but the Lord was not in the wind; after the wind, an earthquake—but the Lord was not in the earthquake; after the earthquake, fire—but the Lord was not in the fire; after the fire, a light silent sound.” This passage from First Kings is what I often think about the process of trying to discern a vocation. The Lord comes in silence, not in the loudness of the wind or earthquake or fire but rather in silence. But cultivating this silence, discovering the voice of God speaking in our lives, and then mustering the courage to follow the call are all difficult in and of themselves. Here I hope to give you a path, some hope, and a little guide to discerning your vocation.

To Be Called

First off, a vocation cannot be chosen. It is a call from God and thus the initiative begins with Him. We find this in the very word vocation, which comes from the Latin word “vocare” which means ‘to call’. God makes the call, it is up to us to discern this call and answer it. Discerning or discernment is also a word that needs a little explanation. It is not simply making a decision but rather it is a word used to describe the entire process of figuring out what we should do and then doing exactly that.

Often we speak of discernment only in terms of the priesthood or religious life (monks, friars, sisters, nuns, etc.) but discernment is used to describe one considering marriage and even married men considering a possible call to serve as a permanent deacon. All of these require proper discernment. Here are some steps to discernment that will help you discover the will of God for your life and have the courage to begin to follow it.

Steps for Discernment

First, if you are serious about this get a spiritual director. A spiritual director is like a personal trainer but for the spiritual life. Somebody who listens to us, prays with us, and has the maturity and spiritual development to help us figure out what movements of our heart were placed there by God and which were not. If you have somebody in mind, ask them. If you have no idea where to begin to find a spiritual director call your local parish and ask a priest there for their suggestion. Many people think that every priest is a good spiritual director. This is not the case. Spiritual direction is a gift given by God and one that not every priest has and one that is not limited to the priests alone. Be open to having a spiritual director that is not a priest. If you have a particular vocation that you think you may be called to that you are considering, possibly find somebody already living that vocation. So if you think you may be called to the priesthood, ask for a priest. If you are a woman and think you may be called to join religious life, consider a religious sister for your spiritual director.

Secondly, make sure your relationship with God is strong. This should go without saying, but I want to make sure it is said. Personal prayer and frequent celebration of the sacraments are the bare minimum.

Begin to develop a habit of time spent in personal prayer, especially prayer in front of the Blessed Sacrament if you have the opportunity near you. This will involve silence. Silence is vital as we read in the passage from First Kings. And silence does not just mean absence of sound. There are a lot of things in our life that make a lot of noise without making a sound. Cell phones are one. Anxiousness about things is another. Worry is one. If we can begin to carve out time away from these things we can begin to enter into the silence that is required to begin to properly discern. Try turning your cell phone off Saturday evening as you go to bed and not turning it on until after Mass on Sunday, or even better, all day on Sunday. Give Sunday to God and to the Mass. The emails, social media notifications, and phone messages will be there Monday morning. But remove the cell phone for a while, remove the source of a lot of noise in our life that gives God the silence he needs in order to speak so we can begin to recognize his voice. Try other ways to give yourself some silence. Fast from TV for a dedicated period of time or find some other activity that you often fill empty time with and decide that you will not do that activity and instead you will offer that time to God.

Make sure you are taking advantage of frequent celebrations of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and confession. Every two weeks or even more frequently is not too often to go to confession. And, if you can, daily Mass. If your job or other responsibilities don’t allow daily Mass try to make it at least once or twice IN ADDITION to Sunday and Holy Days of Obligation. Receiving the Body and Blood of Our Lord will put you more in union with him and allow you to more easily hear his voice.

Be open to the ways that God might speak to you. A recent study of priests being ordained in the spring and summer of 2018 indicated that those being ordained were highly encouraged by somebody to consider the priesthood. Almost 90% of them reported that either a parish priest, teacher, friend or family member, or somebody else encouraged them to at least consider the priesthood. God uses other people in our discernment. Take some time to consider what others have been telling you. This certainly is not a be all and end all, but it is certainly worth something and is something to talk to your spiritual director about.

Go and check out what your vocation would entail. If you are considering joining religious life ask various orders if they have "come and see" days or overnight or weekend retreats so you can at least experience a little bit of what the life might be like. Or if you are considering the priesthood ask if you can shadow a priest for a weekend or if you can visit the seminary for a few days. You’d be surprised at how much a short little visit like this can help make clear if God is calling you to pursue this life or not.

Finally, act! Saint Pope John Paul II was fond of saying “Be not afraid.” This piece of advice applies in spades to discerning a vocation. Don’t be afraid of making a mistake. If, after meeting with a spiritual director and deep, intense prayer begin to pursue what you think God may be calling you to do. Some people think that if they enter the doors of the seminary that first day they have signed on the dotted line for ordination. No way. Just like you don’t buy a wedding ring on the first date over coffee so to when you enter a seminary or novitiate. There is no failure in taking a leap into what you think God might be calling you to do and discovering that you are not called to it. Don’t let the thought that you might be disappointing others leave you paralyzed either. This is between you, God, and the Church.

Prayer, the sacraments, a spiritual director, silence and the courage to leap and give it a try. These are the keys to properly discerning a vocation, be it marriage or religious life or the priesthood. May God bless you as you pursue your vocation or if you are living your vocation now, that you may live it in such a way to give glory to God!

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Reflection #1: Essay on Vocation
Reflection #2
Reflection #3
Reflection #4
Reflection #5
Reflection #6
Reflection #7
Reflection #8
Reflection #9
Reflection #10 Final Course Reflections
II. Statement of Purpose & Annotated Bibliography
III. Group Portfolio LINK
IV. Mini-Grant Proposal

REFLECTION PAPER #1: ESSAY ON VOCATION

Please write a brief reaction to Gary Selby's essay on vocation, Finding Your Heart's True Calling , after reading this introductory assignment .

Consider the following when you answer :

What is a vocation?
What is the relationship between vocation and career?
What are your key considerations when charting your academic course at Pepperdine?

“Finding Your Heart’s True Calling” Reflection

As college started approaching, I felt as though I was constantly asking myself, “What is it that I aspire to become in life?” It is common to answer this question by focusing on careers that have high earning potential and I myself was answering this question similarly to how any other incoming college student might answer it. Before I read “Finding Your Heart’s True Calling” by Gary Selby, I was almost embarrassed to tell people that I wanted to go into advertising because I was afraid of them judging that the career path I want to go into may not be the best financially. However, Ii was gifted by God with a voice that I express through drawing. Through my art, I am able to captivate others and share my thoughts through my drawings without verbally having to express them. I looked into the eyes of the questioner who expected me to tell them I wanted to be a doctor or lawyer. Yet that wasn’t what I wanted to be nor do I believe to be my vocation.

When reading the quote from Fredrick Buechner about the sense of vocation I became aware that the kind of work God calls you to do is, “ ‘work that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done’ ” (Selby 4). I had always thought that the career I wanted to go into was something I loved to do but something that would make me financially wealthy. When reading the quote of Fredrick’s, I began to realize that the way I am thinking is deterring me from the path that God has created for me to follow. Like Moses and Paul, they began on a path that they saw fit for their lives and didn’t see what their calling was until God had called them to their specific roles in the world.

I realize that, “ ‘the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet’ ” (Selby 4). I had always thought that the career I wanted to go into would first bring joy to myself and others but also be a beacon for the voices of others. Before I set on pursuing advertising as a career, I thought that I wanted to be an architect. Yet as I got older I let judgment from other sources tell me that this would not be a beneficial move. Now I sit and think if architecture was my ideas of wealth clouding my thoughts or God speaking through others to tell me that this was not a career I would have appreciated. Like Shelby says, “Often, the journey includes as many wrong turns as breakthroughs, times when you’re trudging in the fog, alongside times when the view is spectacular” (Selby 5). I hope to one day reach that spectacular view and I know that it won’t be as fast as I want it to be, but it will be a blessing when I get there. I know that God has gifted me with art. It has helped me discover myself and has also helped me reach my ideas and others to a broader audience. I know that this in some way is my vocation.

In a society enamored with the gain and worship of money and luxury, vocation is often lost in our result. Even though money is a necessity in life, I want my occupation to be a tool to express myself as a person, as well as to signify my beliefs. I learned by reading the essay of Gary Selby’s that a preoccupation for money makes your career no longer enjoyable and a job that gives a person their passion in life and something that makes them fully enjoy it is essential. Although I used to believe that my career was merely a way for money to support myself, having a job I feel called to and enjoy is a need. A career based solely on gain makes my mindset wrong and the quality of my work will be hindered. Though money is a very important commodity in life, the true career is a means of fulfillment not with riches, but a means of bringing satisfaction to an individual and giving back to others.

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The History Behind Arizona’s 160-Year-Old Abortion Ban

The state’s Supreme Court ruled that the 1864 law is enforceable today. Here is what led to its enactment.

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Four women standing outside. Two of them are holding signs.

By Pam Belluck

Pam Belluck has covered reproductive health for more than a decade.

The 160-year-old Arizona abortion ban that was upheld on Tuesday by the state’s highest court was among a wave of anti-abortion laws propelled by some historical twists and turns that might seem surprising.

For decades after the United States became a nation, abortion was legal until fetal movement could be felt, usually well into the second trimester. Movement, known as quickening, was the threshold because, in a time before pregnancy tests or ultrasounds, it was the clearest sign that a woman was pregnant.

Before that point, “women could try to obtain an abortion without having to fear that it was illegal,” said Johanna Schoen, a professor of history at Rutgers University. After quickening, abortion providers could be charged with a misdemeanor.

“I don’t think it was particularly stigmatized,” Dr. Schoen said. “I think what was stigmatized was maybe this idea that you were having sex outside of marriage, but of course, married women also ended their pregnancies.”

Women would terminate pregnancies in several different ways, such as ingesting herbs or medicinal potions that were thought to induce a miscarriage, Dr. Schoen said. The herbs commonly used included pennyroyal and tansy. Another method involved inserting an object in the cervix to try to interrupt a pregnancy or terminate it by causing an infection, Dr. Schoen said.

Since tools to determine early pregnancy did not yet exist, many women could honestly say that they were not sure if they were pregnant and were simply taking herbs to restore their menstrual period.

Abortion providers described their services in discreet but widely understood terms.

“It was open, but sort of in code words,” said Mary Fissell, a professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Abortion medications or herbs were called “female lunar pills” or “French renovating pills,” she said.

Newspaper advertisements made clear these abortion services were available.

“Abortion is commercializing in the mid-19th century, up to the Civil War,” Dr. Fissell said. “You couldn’t pretend that abortion wasn’t happening.”

In the 1820s, some states began to pass laws restricting abortion and establishing some penalties for providers, according to historians.

By the 1840s, there were some high-profile trials in cases where women who had or sought abortions became very ill or died. Some cases involved a British-born midwife, Ann Trow Summers Lohman, known as Madame Restell, who provided herbal pills and other abortion services in New York , which passed a law under which providers could be charged with manslaughter for abortions after quickening and providers and patients could be charged with misdemeanors for abortions before quickening.

But strikingly, a major catalyst of abortion bans being enacted across the country was the emergence of organized and professionalized medicine, historians say.

After the American Medical Association, which would eventually become the largest doctors’ organization in the country, formed in 1847, its members — all male and white at that time — sought to curtail medical activities by midwives and other nondoctors, most of whom were women. Pregnancy termination methods were often provided by people in those vocations, and historians say that was one reason for the association’s desire to ban abortion.

A campaign that became known as the Physicians’ Crusade Against Abortion began in 1857 to urge states to pass anti-abortion laws. Its leader, Dr. Horatio Robinson Storer , wrote a paper against abortion that was officially adopted by the A.M.A. and later published as a book titled “ On Criminal Abortion in America. ”

Later, the association published “ Why Not? A Book for Every Woman ,” also written by Dr. Storer, which said that abortion was immoral and criminal and argued that married women had a moral and societal obligation to have children.

Dr. Storer promoted an argument that life began at conception.

“He creates a kind of moral high ground bandwagon, and he does that for a bunch of reasons that make it appealing,” Dr. Fissell said. In one sense, the argument coincided with the emerging medical understanding of embryology that characterized pregnancy as a continuum of development and did not consider quickening to be its defining stage.

There were also social and cultural forces and prejudices at play. Women were beginning to press for more independence, and the male-dominated medical establishment believed “women need to be home having babies,” Dr. Fissell said.

Racism and anti-immigrant attitudes in the second half of the 19th century began fueling support of eugenics. Several historians have said that these undercurrents were partially behind the anti-abortion campaign that Dr. Storer led.

“People like Storer were very worried that the wrong Americans were reproducing, and that the nice white Anglo-Saxon ones were having abortions and not having enough children,” Dr. Fissell said.

A moralistic streak was also gaining prominence, including with the passage of the Comstock Act in 1873, which outlawed the mailing of pornographic materials and anything related to contraception or abortion.

By 1880, about 40 states had banned abortion. Arizona enacted its ban in 1864 as part of a legal code it adopted soon after it became a territory.

The law, ARS 13-3603, states: “A person who provides, supplies or administers to a pregnant woman, or procures such woman to take any medicine, drugs or substance, or uses or employs any instrument or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such woman, unless it is necessary to save her life, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than two years nor more than five years.”

“It was an early one,” Dr. Schoen said, “but it is part of that whole wave of legislation that gets passed between the 1860s and the 1880s.”

Pam Belluck is a health and science reporter, covering a range of subjects, including reproductive health, long Covid, brain science, neurological disorders, mental health and genetics. More about Pam Belluck

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COMMENTS

My Vocation Essay Example
Download. Well, this story is a long one, as are most of my stories, but here it goes…. My vocation story is simple; it began with a thought from God that my life was meant for something more. This thought resounded "priesthood" not only in my head, but also in my day-to-day life. Very carefully, through the influence of my parents ...
How to Write an Essay on a Vocation
Using the sources from your research, flesh out your paragraphs with relevant facts and evidence. For example, in the thesis example on doctors, the first body paragraph in your essay might be about the lives a doctor saves because this is the first detail mentioned in the thesis. Citing examples and statistics of how many lives an average ...
PDF Exploring VocationExploring Vocation Finding Your Heart's True
stand that person to be God, so that one's "vocation" is ultimately a call from God. Histori-cally, Christian thinkers have understood this sense of God's calling in two different ways. One way, which they often called a "particular voca-tion," sees God calling us to a specific kind of work.
Essay On Vocation
Essay On Vocation. 1020 Words5 Pages. "The purpose of life is to discover your gift; the work of life is to develop it; and the meaning of life is to give your gift away.". Purpose, life, and meaning. These key words in the previous quote have something to do with the concept of vocation.
The Doctrine of Vocation
The Reformers formulated the doctrine of vocation in response to the Roman Catholic insistence that "vocation" or "calling" was reserved for those entering the service of the church through the priesthood or a monastic order. Those doing so would renounce marriage, secular work, and economic advancement through taking vows of celibacy ...
What's a Vocation? Find Certainty in Your Professional Life
The word "vocation" derives from the Latin words "vocatio" and "vocare," both meaning to call or summon and originally used to describe a spiritual and reflective way of life. During Ancient Greek and Roman times, those at the bottom of the social pyramid took on manual labor, and those held in higher social regard accepted a ...
How to Find Your Vocation in College
But vocation is simply the Latinate word for "calling.". It is one of those theological words—like inspiration, revelation, mission, and vision —that has been taken over by the corporate world and drained of its meaning. The idea is that what you do for a living can be a calling. From God.
PDF Teaching as Vocation: Reflections and Advice
so because they consider it to be their vocation. I'm not referring to "Vocational Education," which has its own, state- specific definition, but rather the lower case "vocational education," or as John Dewey envisioned it, one's life calling. This chapter is about how I found my life calling and how others can as well.
Choosing a Vocation: An Essay on Agency
The Young and Vocation, a recent study on contemporary ideas of vocation among a representative sample of young people (between the ages of 16 and 29) in Italy, shows that the term "vocation" generally evokes the idea of self-realization rather than imposition (79% to 8%, respectively), and a sense of satisfaction rather than renunciation ...
Journal of College and Character
Discover "Vocation": An Essay on the Concept of Vocation The concept of "vocation" is one that is constantly evolving. Members of the Alma College community are using the term "vocation" to prompt discussion of meaning, purpose, and calling in life. Discover "Vocation" An Essay on the Concept of Vocation Carol M. Gregg Alma College
Vocation Virtually: Telling Your Story
Activist, organizer, and teacher Marshall Ganz locates his own vocation at the intersection of three overlapping stories: the story of self, the story of us, and, the story of "now.". Read his brief essay, "Why Stories Matter," with particular attention to how he crafts those stories into a public leadership narrative.
Noble Calling: Teaching as Vocation, Mission, and Profession
This essay explores the vocation, mission, and professional aspects of teaching, emphasizing its critical role in national development. The Vocation of Teaching. Derived from the Latin word "vocare," meaning to call, vocation is a term deeply resonant with the essence of teaching. It suggests that teachers are called, perhaps by a higher force ...
Get Access To Vocation College Essay Examples
Here you will find many different essay topics on Vocation. You will be able to confidently write your own paper on the influence of Vocation on various aspects of life, reflect on the importance of Vocation, and much more. Keep on reading! Vocation of a Business Leader - Reflection Essay Example. 328 words 2 pages.
Job and Vocation: Discerning the Difference
The vital assumption was that a person's job should have some connection with serving God, and a part of Christian discipleship was finding a job that engaged one's God-given talents. There was an underlying assumption that once you discerned your vocation you pretty much stayed with it the rest of your life. Three Trends.
PDF Called to Life: Reflecting on Vocation Participant Guide
this Guide to add to your story over time as it continues to unfold. We hope that this Guide will help you to share and explore your own story of vocation. As your eyes are opened to God's presence around you, may the "ear of your heart" turn to hear God speaking in your life—the call of vocation. "Listen with the ear of your heart."
Hannah's Winning Vocation Essay
Hannah's Winning Vocation Essay. Many people think a vocation is a calling to the priesthood or maybe to be a brother or a sister, but a vocation is actually a calling from God to a Christian lifestyle. Certainly some are called to a vocation as a priest or brother or a sister; however, one could also be called to a vocation of married life ...
Jun 20 What is a Christian vocation (and how to discern it)?
Christian vocation is the particular Christian life one is called to live. Christian vocation is commensurate with one's talents and interests, but also one's backgrounds and identities. Christian vocation is forthe Church and world, and with others. Christian vocation is discerned in community, not alone.
Vocation
Work and home are separate; work comes first. Maximize billable hours. 5. Freed to seek a responsible balance in the investment of our time and energy. Vocation is the opposite of workaholism (vocation encompasses career and home, and daily life). Time is our enemy—too much work, too little time. 6.
Your Vocation: A Personal Calling From God
To Be Called. First off, a vocation cannot be chosen. It is a call from God and thus the initiative begins with Him. We find this in the very word vocation, which comes from the Latin word "vocare" which means 'to call'. God makes the call, it is up to us to discern this call and answer it. Discerning or discernment is also a word that ...
Narrative Essay On Vocation
Narrative Essay On Vocation. Vocation is a calling in life, a purpose to what you're meant to do in life. I believe that vocation can consist of many different experiences that form your calling in life. For me, there has never been just one experience that has formed my vocation. My vocation always continues to expand with all the different ...
Digication ePortfolio :: Kristopher Harper :: Reflection #1: Essay on
Digication ePortfolio :: Kristopher Harper by Ellen Caldwell,Kris Harper at Pepperdine University. REFLECTION PAPER #1: ESSAY ON VOCATION Please write a brief reaction to Gary Selby's essay on vocation, Finding Your Heart's True Calling, after reading this introductory assignment. Consider the following when you answer:What is a vocation?What is the relationship between vocation and career ...
Chapter 1 Lesson 4 Teaching as Your Vocation Mission and ...
Teaching as your vocation. Vocation comes from the Latin word "vocare" which means to call. Based on the etymology of the word, vocation, therefore, means a call. If there is a call, there must be a caller and someone who is called. There must also be a response. Teaching is a vocation. For theists, it is a calling from God worthy of our ...
My Vocation Of Being a Teacher Free Essay Example
4. In this teaching is a vocation essay my target audience is students, the youth group, and educational staff. This is because as a teacher I'll be surrounded by students most of the time and they are included in the youth group which will be part of the next generation in the society, also educational staff because I can educate my co ...
The History Behind Arizona's 160-Year-Old Abortion Ban
Pam Belluck has covered reproductive health for more than a decade. April 10, 2024, 10:55 a.m. ET. The 160-year-old Arizona abortion ban that was upheld on Tuesday by the state's highest court ...