Today I was invited to speak to our church's Adult Forum, whose theme for the Epiphany season is vocation. For reasons of availability, I was the second of what will be six speakers. The first, last week, was an inspiring narrative of being lost and found, addiction and recovery and then work helping others rebuild and reconnect, most recently at Rikers Island. "That was amazing," people said, deeply moved, "I feel sorry for whoever's coming next!" I waved sheepishly. So I had a week to figure out how to come next, though I'd been gathering thoughts for a few weeks. How my faith has shaped my vocation - our prompt - isn't a topic that I really know how to talk about. It was good to have a chance to try, or at least to explain why I wasn't sure how to do it! So what did I do?
I started with the logo of our series (above), which uses an image common to college and other career and vocational advising contexts. Having identified myself as an undergraduate teacher of liberal arts I said you could see folks like me in the picture: the pole in the middle! Then I quipped about designing courses, how the best way to start is with a strong example of what you're teaching about and why it matters. Only then, in the second session perhaps, do you bring in complications, definitions and ... theory. That's what I do. So Charlie last week and me this week might even make sense. Here goes!
My theory came from my old pash Max Weber, who's helpful not just once but twice for thinking about vocation, once in a broad way, once in a way more specific to my work as an undergraduate teacher. The broad way involves the role the idea of vocation plays in the argument of Weber's famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In the middle ages, only dedicated religious had vocations. Luther's idea of a priesthood of all believers meant that everyone now had a vocation - though he was a traditionalist: this didn't mean your vocation wasn't still that of your family, your guild, your class. Only with Calvin does the question of finding your vocation really get going, and for deadly earnest reasons. Most people are predestined to hell, so folks seek desperately for some sign they are among the elect predestined for the other place. Every life choice gets sucked into a quest for visible success, and the question of how to make the best use of your life undermines every relationship with others or with tradition: hello capitalism. Even if Weber was wrong to think that this attempt to make everything religiously meaningful wound up disenchanting the world, the idea of vocation is one we need to be careful about. It can be part of the "unprecedented inner loneliness of the individual" Weber espies in Calvinism and its capitalist successors. And, anyway, it's just not helpful to suggest that there is a single right answer to the question how a person should spend their life, especially in our own rapidly changing times.
So much for Weber and the question of vocation in general. Important and influential for my particular trajectory have been his ideas about the vocation of the scholar and teacher, articulated in "Wissenschaft als Beruf." Like every vocation, Weber thought, this involved a kind of asceticism in service of an ideal. (He thought these spheres incompatible in a "polytheism of values" - you couldn't serve the god of knowledge and the god of politics or art or profit, too, claims perhaps worth reconsidering.) The vocation of the scholar was to be superseded - to be another brick in the wall of knowledge, their contribution so useful nobody remembered who made it. The vocation of the university teacher involves a sort of disappearing, too - it is an abuse of academic authority to preach, so one should never reveal one's own convictions, just offer "inconvenient facts" for every party. If you're going to do/believe this, then you can't also do/believe that, though you will also have to do/believe this, etc. We help others be thoughtful and consistent by making the insights and sacrifices involved in every view clear without ever taking a side.
This prohibition on taking a stand is especially important in religious studies, where we need to convince students and colleagues alike that we are servants of the project of knowledge, not proselytizers for some variety of faith. I described how very good I've become over the years in concealing my own views, serially inhabiting many different positions as worth taking seriously over the course of a semester, leaving students frustrated at questions which seem unanswered because we've entertained too many possible answers to them - but also how in recent years I've started to wonder about this ideal. (I didn't get into the reasons, from the Marxist, postmodern, pragmatist, Buddhist and Daoist critiques of the very possibility of value-neutrality to more recent misgivings at the whiteness of presuming to be the pole.)
The setting demanded I say something about my faith at this point, so I said that this vocational history helped explain, perhaps, why I'm so inexpert at doing that. (Wisely, I decided not to use the technical term "déformation professionelle," or to dilate on the disconcerting reality that I find it impossible to occupy a first-person view without also hearing the third-person.) In recent years, I told them, I've stopped dodging the question when students ask "are you religious." Being of the "they will know we are Christians by our love" school, I hope they become appreciative of Christian (and more generally religious) possibilities because of the respect with which I engage other views, the seriousness with which I take all their questions. If that sounds wimpy, it's nevertheless true. The faith of a Christian liberal.
Plenty of other things came up in the Q&A which I won't bore you with, from "essential workers" to how to reach those who felt it was their vocation to attack the U. S. Capitol last week to why I didn't like Pixar's newest, "Soul." But I have to say: this was a great opportunity and I'm glad I took it. I guess I do have a sense of vocation, one which makes sense beyond the rarified air of a privileged American liberal arts college. And... it was nice to have a chance to spell out my debts to Weber. I didn't realize until today how ascetic the snarky-seeming "inconvenient facts" beat really is. Or how its performance of service to the importance of things yet unknown and unthought aspires to forge a student's relationship with a real and unfolding truth, a truth which can set you free to reconnect to the world of care, complexity and relation.
