Vocation and the Divided Self

Talk to Pepperdine's "Comm Connection", March 2004

Andrew Yuengert

Professor Hoeckley reminds us that a vocation is a call into a community, and is not something purely individual. If the concept of vocation is a purely individualistic one – my vocation, what gives me "deep gladness" – then it works against community – the best example is the family that disintegrates because husband and wife seek happiness without reference to their commitments to each other – "I have to do this for myself, honey." Vocation, rightly understood, can help to orient us toward community, and perhaps can help to build up our families, churches, and other local communities.

If I would add anything to Professor Hoeckley’s talk, it would be to use the idea of vocation to address a human division even more fundamental than the divisions in our communities. If we understand vocation properly, it can help us to overcome deep internal divisions in our own individual selves.

Let me explain what I mean. It is very common for us to describe ourselves as putting on different faces in different social environments: at work we wear our "professional, technical, hardhearted" face; at home we wear our "faithful spouse and model for our children" face; at play we wear our "extreme recreational" face; and at church we wear our "pious, God-trusting, happy" face. I am exaggerating, but only a little bit. For many people, these different spheres of life require different rules, different moralities, different selves. They feel that there is no choice about this – it is just the way life is.

If this is the way you approach life, where is the real you? Is there a real you? If the real you is the one at home, or on the ski slopes, then you are living a lie in your other worlds; you are living a compromised life. If you cannot say which is the real you, then you don’t have a sense of who you really are. You do not have a sense of your own unity – integrity – as a person.

We live in a society full of divided selves; in a world like this, there is the risk that vocation will become another face, another mask to wear – the "career" self, the "what-color-is-my-parachute" self, the "self-actualizing" self. If this is what the idea of vocation does, it will make things much worse.

So how can the idea of a vocation help to integrate you – help you to discover your real, unified self amid all the various roles you play? The first step is to realize that your vocation involves all of you. If your idea of vocation only applies to one area of your life, then it will not do you any good. It will simply divide you further, and pit you against yourself.

This is one reason that in the Catholic tradition, of which I am a part, vocation traditionally meant "married life" or "religious life (priest, nun, brother)." These were (and are) nearly comprehensive vocations; they involve the entire self in the commitment to spouse and family in marriage, or the commitment to consecrated virginity and the brothers and sisters of a religious community in the religious life.

There are two pieces of advice I offer to help you to see your vocation as an all-embracing claim on your life, your all. First, notice that the word "vocation" means "calling," a calling implies a caller. Who is calling? Since Pepperdine is a Christian University, we can acknowledge that God is calling. Our fundamental calling as human beings is to seek out God, or more exactly, to allow him to find us, and to love him with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. There is nothing abstract about this – Christians believe that God wants to befriend us, and calls out to us continually "my lovely one, come." This fact changes vocation from a concept to a real call that we can hear and respond to. Even many non-Christian religions recognize this call to seek out and serve God as fundamental to human identity and happiness – the one who made us calls us to serve him.

If you meditate on the God who calls you by name – the name that only he knows fully, and that you will recognize as your own when he calls it – you will realize that this most fundamental call is comprehensive. God does not call just one part of you. He wants all of you. He sees through the different masks we wear in different roles. If you pray about your vocation, the graces you will receive, and the insight you will get, will not be limited to what job you should take. It will be comprehensive.

Incidentally, God’s opinion about what you should do with your life will not only involve you as a single, unified person; it will direct you toward community, as Professor Hoeckley said. It might also point you toward the duties and obligations that are already obvious to you. I was advising a student the other day who was considering changing his graduate school plans because his Mom had become a widow and needed his support. Some might think that his vocation is being thwarted by his duties to his mother; in fact, he is most likely to discover the fullness of his calling in living up to the duties God puts before him.

So the first way to apply the concept of vocation as a way to integrate our divided selves is to see it as an encounter with the God who made us, who calls us into communion with him, and who can help us to see ourselves as whole persons called to service in the world. The second way relies less on divine inspiration and more on a conscious effort to see the connections between the various tasks we carry out and the overall story of our lives.

We can’t really understand our actions as human beings – what to major in, who to work for, where to live - unless we place those actions in the context of the life we are trying to live. Unfortunately, the modern university, and particularly modern professional majors, hate context. Communication programs, business programs, and economics programs teach technique without context, for the most part. In my own discipline, economics, we teach students how to understand the relationship between prices, income, unemployment, and inflation, but we don’t teach them how to think about how much unemployment is too much, or which prices are too high. To understand these issues one needs context – what is the purpose of economic life, what do people need, what sorts of sacrifices should we be willing to make to reduce unemployment? We avoid these questions, because the disagreements about them go deep, and often appear to be irresolvable. So we take refuge in narrower, technical matters, ignoring for the moment its place in our lives as human beings. How often do you get annoyed when a teacher brings up a moral question in a technical class – why is she bringing ethics into the discussion? Just teach us how to design the publicity campaign, please.

Often the technical matters that we focus on in our research and training are important, and technicians can end up doing a lot of good, but our aversion to the human context of work contributes to the fragmentation of our lives, our divided self. We add the "technician" self, the "just doing my job" self, to our list of selves.

How can we discover the one person we are in the midst of all this technical, abstract training? One simple, repeated question can unify the various tasks of our different selves: WHY? Why are you doing this?

Let’s say you are putting together a marketing plan. You ask yourself "why?" To satisfy a requirement for a class. "Why?" Because I want to get a good grade. "Why?" So that I can get a well-paying job. "Why?"

You should never stop asking this most subversive of questions: why? If you keep pursuing the answer to it, you will force yourself to provide a context for your answer – the context of the goals of your entire life, and you will be forced to address hard questions like the balance between work and family, how much money is too much, what principles are important enough to risk your job security. Whenever you ask this question, no matter what you ask it of – Why am I going to the beach for spring break? Why am I dating this person? Why am I working evenings? – it will force you to justify your actions in the context of your entire life, and will help you to see the connections between the seemingly isolated actions you are taking. It may also force you to change your mind about what you are doing in one sphere of life, because your actions may damage things you value in other spheres. In other words, this repeated question "why?" forces you to reflect on your life as a whole, and the place of your actions in that life. This process is called reflection, and constitutes what Socrates called "the examined life." It can help you to become an integrated person.

So my advice is that you listen to God, who is the originator of your vocation, and that you get into the habit of relentless reflection on what you are trying to accomplish through your actions. How does liberal arts education figure into this? It should introduce students to these concepts, for one. I hope this is not the first time they have been presented to you at Pepperdine. A Christian liberal arts program should make students familiar with the riches of the Jewish and Christian encounter with God, and by bringing students into contact with that tradition, invite students to see their lives as a unified whole in a world where God is calling. The humanities and fine arts curriculum should bring students into contact with those writings and art that invite the student to reflect on their own purpose, on the meaning of evil, and the place of the individual in the community, and the good life. In my own experience as an undergraduate, it was not philosophy that showed me my life as a whole – it was the poetry of George Herbert, and the early music of Josquin DePres.

I should note that liberal arts curricula do not always live up to the high calling I have outlined. These days, they are often as concerned with technique as the professional disciplines; even the religion division, fearful of appearing to evangelize, settles for a technical treatment of Christian revelation. Nevertheless, a student who is seeking answers to questions like "Who am I? Why am I here? Why is there suffering? What should I do with my life?" can set the stage for his or her inquiry by engaging the rich texts and inspiring art in the liberal arts tradition.