Discerning Vocation

The Taylor Paper: God and Vocation in Christian Higher Education

The Summer 2023 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review is all about understanding the idea of “vocation,” with a particular focus on how Christian universities prepare undergraduates to work through this challenging, ambiguous topic.

One of the papers that stood out to me is by Tom Perrin. Here a summary of his argument:

My claim is that teaching about vocation and calling provides my institution’s (largely Christian) students with a model for a relationship with God that is quite different from the one they possess when they walk through our doors. In particular, I will argue that vocation and calling programs teach students that a call from God need not be entirely nebulous, emotional, and individualistic in nature; instead, while there are important nebulous and emotional aspects to vocation, the concept might also be rational, conceptual, and open to being developed in conversation and in community with others. Furthermore, I will suggest that not only do vocation and calling programs give students tools for helping them discern a vocation, but also that they help move students away from their previously held assumption that discerning vocation is a quasi-mystical endeavor—beyond the reach of tools, strategies, and tactics. Moreover, well-conceived programs that focus on vocation and calling can provide students with precisely the tools, strategies, and tactics that they need for the process of discernment.

He follows this with an overview of his method:

I will make this argument using as a case-study an assignment on the philosopher Charles Taylor that has been a mainstay of my institution’s calling and vocation program since 2014. I suggest that, through the characteristic ways in which our students succeed (and do not succeed) in this assignment, they reveal much about the assumptions they bring with them about vocation and calling—and how our program can shake those assumptions in productive ways.

Like many people outside of academia, I first encountered Charles Taylor through James K. Smith’s brief guidebook How (Not) to be Secular. Although Perrin draws on Taylor’s essay The Ethics of Authenticity rather than A Secular Age, which is the primary focus of Smith’s text, I recognized many of the same concepts underpinning both works.

Here’s what I found most interesting about the study:

The language many students use to describe their own “ethics of authenticity” is similar, in crucial ways, to the language they use to describe their relationship with God. Several features are common to both “the ethics of authenticity” and many students’ sense of what it means to know what God wants of them.

Here are the four features he identifies:

1. they rely on an opposition to the counsel of others: First, as with their responses to Taylor, many students seek to distinguish what God wants from what others of various stripes might advise them to do—as if these things could not work in tandem. Knowing what God wants is based on a private and individual relationship with God; God’s plan, in the minds of many of our students, does not reach them via the mouths of friends and family.
2. they depend on a nebulous communion (with the self or God respectively): Second, students tend to have a strong sense that they share a nebulous communion with God that allows them to know what God wants of them, and that they are able clearly to distinguish this from what they want for themselves. 
3. this communion is fundamentally mysterious in some way: Third, while its nature is clear, many students’ method of intuiting what God wants for them is quite mysterious.
4. these matters are emotional and seemingly arational: Finally, students’ sense of how one intuits God’s calling is distinctly emotional in nature. 

The author then goes on to work through the advantages and limitations of these beliefs and how Christian universities can provide resources to guide students as they discern their vocation.

It’s easy to dunk on these students and their feelings about vocation, but this list reminded me of how I used to think about the purpose of my life when I was in college. The future was full of possibility, but it was also terrifying. It seemed like there were pitfalls on every side and that understanding my vocation ultimately came down to somehow finding that one thing that only I could do.

Now, my understanding of vocation is much more flexible (as well as less emotional and more rational, which Taylor would applaud). The way I see it, vocation is not set in stone: it evolves with different seasons of life and opportunities, and–like faith–it is an ongoing process that is never finished. That’s what I wish I could tell my undergraduate self, and that’s what I still keep telling myself today.