If you know any Latin, or if you’ve picked up a knack for spotting prefixes and stems of words that are linked together (transience, transparent, transgender, etc.), then you might be able to deduce the roots of ‘vocation.’ Vocation comes from the Latin vocare, “to call”, through the past participle to vacationem, “a calling, being called.” (This also related to our word ‘voice’).
Unsurprisingly, this concept originally had a religious undertone. A vocation was ‘to be called to’ by God. In other words, it was a calling of the highest order, an imperative that linked this world and its finite contours and choices to a divine world. Perhaps the example par excellence is Joan of Arc: as the story goes, she heard a voice and was quite literally called to lead the French army to victory against the English in the 100 year’s war. Joan of Arc was an illiterate, female peasant in Medieval France. The juxtaposition between what her life ‘ought’ to have looked like and what it in fact became undergirds the power in a calling. A calling raises us outside of what we thought we were and moulds us into a higher form.
By the 16th century, the word vocation had come to be used as “one’s occupation or profession” more broadly, and the sense of this word has continued to flatten and morph into the present day. Now, vocation is heard most often in the term ‘vocational school’, which is, in a sense, the opposite of the esoteric, self-aggrandizing root of the word. Vocational school trains specific, and mostly manual skills. What is implicit (and sometimes explicit) in its usage is how it stands in juxtaposition to secondary education at the university level: vocational skips over the ‘fluff’ and trains you in hireable, no nonsense trades. It is not c
oncerned with teaching you ‘how to think’ but rather how to act, in a utilitarian, practical sense.
So how and why has this word transformed, and what does it say about our evolution as a society? First off, it’s worth noting that from where we stand today, there’s an explicit linkage between labor and calling, but at its roots, that link doesn’t exist. One’s calling in life could take myriad forms: to become an expert in butterflies, to master fine woodworking, to change policy around gerrymandering. In a capitalist society, it is not surprising that a calling has come to be conflated with our job– if we are going to spend a third of our life doing whatever we do to earn money, it’s convenient for that to also tick the box of a calling. But when we adopt that attitude, we are approaching meaning through the lens of efficiency, which is rarely (if ever) an honest fit. Vocation is not not labor, but it isn’t limited to it as such. In fact, to draw a line between what one does for ‘work’ and the rest of one’s time would likely strike anyone operating under the original sense of the word as absurd–Joan of Arc didn’t clock in a 9 to 5 on her calling.
Instead, I think it’s more useful in our modern moment to think about vocation in the way Krista Tippet talks about orientation. That one should be ‘relentless in their orientation’ but hold lightly to their goals. A calling, at base, is something that moves us. We hear it, it ignites our particular magic, and we move toward it, knowing that we will likely never reach it. It serves to extract us from the mundane, from the danger of nihilism, from the fear that even success, added up, flattens into nothingness. Vocation is the lighthouse, the reminder that we each have a part to play in the project of being human.
At a time with so many inputs, perhaps the wisest way to approach vocation and the meaning inherent in is through the analogy of harmony. Many of us mourn (knowingly or not) the simplicity of a singular aim, a singular calling, a singular way of being. We fill our lives up and then fantasize about when we will escape the fullness. The image for each of us is different: maybe it’s a cabana on the beach with no cell signal or wifi, maybe it’s a farm, maybe it’s going to the same bakery in your city’s neighborhood every Friday morning. Maybe it’s still work, but a magically transformed version of work, where your inbox is always at zero and your days are spent on a singular, all-important project, with no interruptions, no stressors. The fullness of our modern lives is both a blessing and a curse, but if we accept it as a base state, then, to go back to how I started this paragraph, perhaps the wisdom a word like ‘vocation’ offers us is not in rejection, illusion, or self-categorization, but in harmonization. How can we find the chord in our life, the notes that become richer through their multiplicity and combination? How can we orient ourselves towards that resonance, and live in its hum?