THE language of “vocation” can be slippery. It has become a word that is thrown around too carelessly in the Church, and too much. But we are not, of course, the only people to use vocational language.
Not long ago, a leaflet dropped through my door from the local further-education college, and it neatly defined “vocational” courses: “Practical hands-on learning and technical study for 16-18s.” The Church might deplore, in the name of its loftier understanding, the reductive hijacking of vocational language by the contemporary world of education. But the way in which the Church talks about vocation has its own temptations.
The Church can be tempted to use the language of vocation to avoid treating people in a responsibly professional manner, as if it is not decent for those who are seen to have a vocation to raise awkward questions about, say, adequate pay, decent accommodation, reasonable hours of work, or respectful treatment. It is a bit like one of those “irregular verbs” in Yes, Minister: I have a vocation: you must make a sacrifice: he had better stop complaining.
But individuals can also be tempted, particularly those hoping to enter the ordained ministry, to misuse the language of vocation as a way of shielding some of their less presentable motives from scrutiny, whether by the Church or by themselves.
When I used to talk to would-be ordinands, some of whom moved rather fluently in the language of vocation, I would try to cut through this by saying, “Yes, but what do you really want?” What was it that the truest part of them really wanted, behind the pious language, and beneath the inevitable layers of our self-deception? For all of us, it is the simplest of questions, and one of the hardest: “What do you really want?” Pondering this might not be so far off from exploring vocation — or at least one side of it.
THE first book that I ever reviewed for the Church Times was Ordination and Vocation, Yesterday and Today (Churchman Publishing, 1990) by H. J. M. Turner (Books, 19 October 1990). It is a strong and contentious argument from church history that vocation is about the Church’s calling of the individual, not the individual’s desire or inward conviction of being called.
St Hugh of Lincoln, it reminds us, was made deacon against his will. When he subsequently informed his director how much he now desired to be ordained priest, he was thunderously told, “Who could believe that you could be so presumptuous?” It was Cranmer who shifted the goalposts towards personal conviction, when he introduced the question into the Ordinal, “Do you trust that you are inwardly moved by the Holy Ghost, to take upon you this office and ministration. . . ?”
Turner’s book goes on to become an unconvincing polemic against the ordination of women as priests, but his basic contention about vocation has stayed with me over the years.
Not many of us would accept that vocation to the priesthood should disregard the individual’s sense of the rightness of the action, but there is a great deal to be said for rebalancing the individual’s sense of being called with a stronger sense of the Church’s calling of the individual. It is only in the meeting of the two that we might speak of vocation, within an unfolding interplay of personal conviction and invitation by the Church — sometimes one coming first, sometimes the other — and never, ever, “my vocation”.
THERE is something else about the word “vocation”. We all know that it comes from the word to call or summon. We might also bear in mind that it is related to the word for “voice”. It is sometimes said of creative writers that they reach a stage at which they “find their voice”, where what they really have to say finds its authentic shape and expression.
I like the idea of vocation as a process of finding your voice. And it is a process that is, crucially, shaped, whether in creative writing or in the Church, by the response of other people and the possibilities that they make available.
The leaflet that had come through my door seemed a world away, until, lo and behold! I noticed in the college’s strapline: “Supporting creative minds to find their voice.”
Vocation is a concept of great richness — in ministry, in the Christian life, and in the wider world. It is also a notion that can be used manipulatively, whether for institutional or individual self-interest.
Bishops and selectors, preachers, candidates and advisers all need to mind our language. We must certainly claim and use the language of vocation, but with a clear grasp of just what it is that we are talking about. And we shall do that with no less conviction if — to revive a good Tractarian term — we do so with reserve.
The Revd Philip Welsh is a retired priest in the diocese of London. Read his review of In the Fullness of Time: A story from the past and future of the Church by Paul Bradbury here.
Vocations features