***This is a series of posts based on writing I did on personal retreat in October 2009. Read earlier posts in the series here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |Part 5|Part 6|Part 7***
Have you ever heard someone say “I hate my job”? Of course you have. Is this normal? Unfortunately, it is. Does “normal” make it OK? NO!
Thomas Merton said:
“A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.” I read these words so many years ago, at the beginning of my first “real” job, with no clue that they would bring such joy to me now. God was planting these seeds in my heart long before I knew what they were planted for. As my displeasure with my “job” grew, so did these seeds.
Vocation
Vocation is something other than “work” or a “j-o-b”; vocation is “a strong feeling of suitability for a particular career or occupation.” God kept increasing my dissatisfaction, knowing it would lead me to my vocation. “Where the whole man is involved,” Marshall McLuhan said, “there is no work.” Merton echoes that here in saying that, “when we find our vocation – thought and life are one.”
This doesn’t mean that, upon finding your vocation, you do not work anymore, but that the work now seems to be its own end. Where the reward of a job is usually financial, employing oneself in a vocation is both the work and the reward.
When you have “a job” it is usually not graded on scales of service or suitability, but on factors like pay and benefits. This is not to say that these become non-factors in employing oneself in a vocation, but their significance is greatly diminished.
5 Lies I Used to Believe
It is difficult for me to reconcile the futile thinking I allowed myself to indulge in when I was a slave to this mentality. There we certain “facts” that I believed to be irreversible:
- That I was too old (at 32) to ever make something of my life
- That I could never take a job that paid less than the one I currently had
- That I would just have to live with the mistake of not going to college
- That the best I could do was make a lot of money so that my kids could have a better life than I did
- That I could have “been something” if I hadn’t made so many mistakes
What a load of rubbish. God blessed Abraham and Sarah with a child when they were a hundred years old. How little faith did I have in him to think that he could not use me because I was past my expiry at 32?
Merton goes on to list some characteristics of one who is functioning in his true vocation. He has found completeness; everything is in unity, in order, at peace; work no longer interferes with prayer nor prayer with work; contemplation is no longer a special state for God penetrates all. And lastly, one does not have to think of giving an account of oneself to anyone but Him.
But finding your vocation does not suddenly create endless days of sunshine and rainbows. In fact, recently when people have asked how my new job is going, I reply that it’s tough and tiring and difficult and a huge challenge and infinitely rewarding.
We Were Meant For More
You see this is what man was created for. He was not created for ease or endless sensual pleasure. He was not created for distraction or to be entertained and yet our entire society is set upon the principle that most people must work at jobs they despise in order to afford a few weeks away each year in which they “really live.”
This is a sleight of hand on a massive scale.
To “really live” is to apply oneself in a vocation – however difficult, frustrating, and tiring it might be. There is no real joy outside of this. Without a vocation, a vacation becomes an escape fantasy rather than a restful adventure. Your job becomes a massive investment of time in order to secure a minuscule amount of time for yourself in return.
Are you still working at a j-o-b? Why?
We are meant for more.
