Vocation
Vocation
“Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” —Frederick Buechner
When I was growing up, that word—vocation—had one meaning and one meaning only. When someone said, “He has found his vocation,” it meant a call to serve the church. Nothing else qualified.
I never thought of other kinds of work as vocation. After all, I grew up with a father who frequently said, “The reason they call it work is because you don’t like to do it. If you liked doing it, no one would pay you.” (He had graduated from college into the teeth of the Great Depression and, after years of struggle, had settled on a job much beneath his capacities, but one which he was certain would provide security. He also said, “When the next depression comes, I won’t be one of the ones laid off. I’ll have seniority.”)Even without a specific word to apply to what I was seeking, though, I entered adulthood determined to find work that I loved. That was, at least in part, a gift gleaned from my father’s cynicism. I would not let his truth be mine. In the late 1950’s I had a much easier road than he. Not only were times better, but once I had been employed long enough for my husband to complete his graduate degree, I could settle into being a mother and wife and do the work I loved without having to weigh its economic viability.And it was gladness that kept drawing me back to the writing, the gladness it filled me with every time I turned to it. I let the gladness lead me without ever naming it. I simply knew I wanted to write, that writing was my job, the work I went to every day, security be damned. And security was damned. It never even peeked over the horizon. For the first fifteen years and the publication of seven novels and lots of time spent lecturing here and there and always teaching several evening classes on the side, I never came close to earning enough money to live on. But the work itself sustained me even if I contributed little to the family coffers.When the day came for me to leap out of the burning building of a twenty-eight-year marriage, I was terrified, as I should have been. I had $2,000 in my pocket, not a clue where the next penny would come from and a career I was committed to wholly that seemed unlikely ever to support me. But I knew my life depended on that leap . . . literally. I also knew that my writing was one gift I had to carry into my new life and that, if I was to survive, I must figure out ways for this work I loved to be able to give the world what it truly needed.I was—and am—certain that the world does, indeed, need stories. It needs information, artfully gathered and presented. It needs poetry. It needs words shaped and refined and sorted for meaning. And it needs the deep gladness that rises in your heart and mine every time we do this good work.Because the gladness shines through.My father’s choice, made solely for the sake of security, proved to be a false one. When he was in his fifties and the economy was going strong, the Lehigh Portland Cement Company for which he had worked diligently, if joylessly, for so many years, decided three of their plants were outmoded and closed them. My dad was out of work.It was serendipity, something I’m sure my father didn’t believe in, that he soon found another job in the small community where he and my mother lived. It was a job more suited to his abilities, and I never heard him complain of it. But watching from the sidelines, I learned an important lesson.Do the work you love, whatever else you must do to make that possible. Do it with gladness, and the rest will fall into place.