An old word for “good work” is vocation, and another way to say this is to say that our fundamental responsibility, as colleges and universities, is to inspire our students to seek, and help them to discern, their vocations. The NetVUE project has done a lot to revive and expand the concept of vocation beyond both its older narrow sense of religious calling and its equally narrow contemporary sense of manual as opposed to cognitive labor, without shedding the theological weight of vocation understood as “calling.”
Properly understood, “calling” is the vital ballast. Without it, talk of vocation easily floats off into “follow your bliss” territory, or turns into justificatory window dressing for the current division of labor. Frederick Beuchner’s classic formulation – vocation is “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” – describes not just “what I want to do” plus “what others want me to do” but “what God calls me to do.” The “gladness” in question is not exactly what we want to do. And the “hunger” is not necessarily what the world thinks it needs. A “calling” comes from a Caller that is neither one’s self nor one’s society. Thus, the concept of vocation remains fundamentally theological. Only on the surface is it a question about what we ought to do with our lives. Underneath that “practical” concern is a deeper question about the human relationship with God. Not for nothing do some theologians prefer to emphasize not the particular vocations of this or that human, but “the human vocation” – “an understanding of the human as called, in its very nature, to unity with the divine.”
But this deeper question raises its own very practical concern. What does it look like to listen to the Caller? I’m not qualified to talk about the art of spiritual discernment, but there’s something to say here that is important for my point. Many people, when they think about “vocation” in scripture, will think first about the parable of the talents. I think it’s much better to think about the parable of the good Samaritan, because that parable tells us much more about what “listening to the Caller” really looks like. And what it tells us, crucially, runs strikingly counter to the way we usually think about it, even and especially in the institutions – Christian colleges and universities – that are supposed to help us “listen.”
I should say that it is better to think not just about the parable of the good Samaritan, but to think with Ivan Illich about it because it is very much Illich’s reading I have in mind. As David Cayley puts it in his book on Illich, the latter’s view is that the Samaritan does what he does “but not . . . because he is fulfilling a duty or applying a rule. He answers a personal call. . . . A call is a unique occurrence, something obtaining here, now, between these two.” A call is a kind of “surprise,” and Illich thinks that “to hope for surprises . . . is subversive; to cultivate the capacity to receive and welcome them is even more so. Surprise is simply not compatible with the punctual and predictable order that modern institutions produce and reinforce. We want a ‘school system’ and not the myriad, unforeseen paths that curiosity might follow . . .”
This objection to the “school system” brings us full circle. Talking about vocation is not only a way of motivating students to get serious about their futures. A robust (and subversive) theological concept of vocation can help to re-orient our institutions in ways that make them more coherent – and less of a “system” for making things “punctual and predictable.” It can inform not only the efforts of our students to figure out what they want to do when they grow up, but also our efforts as professors to figure out what our institution is supposed to be doing to help them. Colleges and universities that understand their three aims as aspects of an overarching determination to clear the way for serendipitous encounters with callings that can lead to particular vocations will have come closer to inhabiting their own institutional vocation, and the work done in such institutions will be more reflective of both our own “deep gladness” as professors of various disciplines, and more responsive to the “deep hunger” of the world we live in.
For that is, in my view, our present world’s deepest hunger: the hunger for good work that is good precisely because it cannot be easily “predicted” from our own desires or our society’s demands. Much could be gained in clarity and energy for reform if we understood our various social problems as symptomatic of our total paralysis in the face of Wendell Berry’s incisive question: What are people for? Berry’s own answer, in brief, is that we are here to do good work. And when we have no good work to do, or when we are confused by our culture’s stories about what work is good and what is bad, or when we are taught by our experience to be indifferent to the distinction, or when we are forced by “the economy” to do work that bad because it requires us to think as little as possible about what we are doing, or prevented by the same economy from doing work that needs doing, then we ought to expect terrible damage to the natural world, social relationships, and individual personalities. Which is, of course, what we see.
The reason why the liberal arts have to be the primary aim that orders the other two is that this question – what are people for? – is one that must be answered clearly, but it is also one that cannot be answered didactically by inculcating students in the correct theory of social justice or referring them to the objective needs of “the economy.” It is too complex and open-ended. It is also too personal, since the questioner is herself a person. When I ask, “What are people for?” I am also asking, “What am I for?” I am not made to fill a job or serve a cause that could just as well be filled or served by someone else. I am made to do work that is good in no small part because it is fitted to me as an individual. But we do not easily discover what we are fit for; we do not easily discover our vocation, despite the promises made by personality tests. And we cannot discover it by being informed by a textbook about “what the world needs,” whether the world is the economy in need of workers or society in need of activists. We have to be able to think outside of those boxes before we figure out what we can do inside of them, and this is how the liberal arts tradition teaches us to think. It teaches us, at its best, how to welcome surprise. And the capacity to be surprised is surely necessary if we are to pursue that larger “human vocation” of “unity with God.”
Even though I think we can say with confidence “what a university is for,” it is surely just as difficult for universities as for students to discover what exactly they are called to do in their particular circumstances. The liberal arts tradition teaches us how to think about our institution’s unpredictable futures, just as it teaches students how to think about their unpredictable career paths. I have suggested that the institutional vocation of a university is not to give students the answer to “what should I do when I grow up?” but to pose for them the questions that may lead to an answer, and that if we faculty are doing our work well, then their answers – their decisions about what to do with their lives – will be both financially prudent and socially responsible, without being reducible to financial or social concerns. But different institutions are suited to pursuing this vocation in different ways, and the devil will be in the endless details. When we dig into them, we too must aim for the same kind of answers, constantly reminding ourselves that the first question is not “what makes financial sense?” or “what does our theory of social justice require universities to be?” but “what must we do to keep the question ‘what are you for?’ at the top of our students’ minds?” And the answer to that question might also be a surprise.
