November 23, 2023

“Why are you thanking God?” says the aggrieved father at the Thanksgiving.  “You should be thanking me!  I’m the one that worked to put food on this table!”

I’ve heard that on some TV show or movie.  (Can anyone identify the source?)

We are right to thank God for our Thanksgiving feast and for all of our other blessings through the year, even though they come to us by means of ordinary human beings.  This is because Thanksgiving has to do with vocation.

Luther explains that in his explanation of the First Commandment in the Large Catechism (para. 26-27) [my bolds]:

For even though otherwise we experience much good from men, still whatever we receive by His command or arrangement is all received from God. For our parents, and all rulers, and every one besides with respect to his neighbor, have received from God the command that they should do us all manner of good, so that we receive these blessings not from them, but, through them, from God. For creatures are only the hands, channels, and means whereby God gives all things, as He gives to the mother breasts and milk to offer to her child, and corn and all manner of produce from the earth for nourishment, none of which blessings could be produced by any creature of itself.

Therefore no man should presume to take or give anything except as God has commanded, in order that it may be acknowledged as God’s gift, and thanks may be rendered Him for it, as this commandment requires. On this account also these means of receiving good gifts through creatures are not to be rejected, neither should we in presumption seek other ways and means than God has commanded. For that would not be receiving from God, but seeking of ourselves.

These “channels” for God’s blessings are vocations.  Luther goes on to say, in his explanation of the Fourth Commandment, that “through [civil government], as through our parents, God gives to us food, house and home, protection and security.”

So it’s appropriate on Thanksgiving to thank the aggrieved father.  Or, like Bob Cratchet in the Christmas Carol thanking his tight-fisted boss Ebenezer Scrooge as the “founder of the feast,” despite his wife’s objections.  And to be thankful for our country.  As well as those whose hands prepared the meal.  And the farmers, turkey ranchers, truck drivers, warehouse workers, grocery employees, and everyone else who made your feast possible.

Appreciate them as “channels” of the love of God.

 

Photo by Monstera Production: https://www.pexels.com/photo/diverse-friends-praying-before-having-thanksgiving-dinner-5876710/ via Pexels

 

September 4, 2023

This is Labor Day, that secular holiday that we are Christianizing by making it be all about vocation.  Meditate on these words from Martin Luther about loving our neighbor in our everyday labors in the world.

From Secular Authority, The Extent to Which It Should Be Obeyed, whose 500th anniversary we have been celebrating:

Love of neighbor seeks not its own, considers not how great or how small, but how profitable and how needful for neighbor or community the works are. (249)

A true Christian lives and labors on earth not for himself, but for bis neighbor, therefore the whole spirit of his life impels him to do even that which he need not do, but which is profitable and necessary for his neighbor. . . .

He serves the State as he performs all other works of love, which he himself does not need. He visits the sick, not that he may be made well; feeds no one because he himself needs food: so he also serves the State not because he needs it, but because others need it, that they may be protected and that the wicked may not become worse. (239-240)

Here is how this principle of love of neighbor in vocation applies to rulers.  We might apply it, by extension, to politicians, office holders, executives, and anyone with power and authority over others:

If they are born princes or chosen to office, they think only that it is their right to be served and to rule with power. He who would be a Christian prince certainly must lay aside the intention to rule and to use force. For cursed and condemned is every kind of life lived and sought for selfish profit and good; cursed are all works not done in love. But they are done in love when they are directed with all one’s heart, not toward selfish pleasure, profit, honor, ease and salvation, but toward the profit, honor and salvation of others.  (263)

He must consider his subjects and rightly dispose his heart toward them in this matter. He does this if he applies his whole mind to making himself useful and serviceable to them, and does not think, “Land and people are mine; I will do as I please”; but thus, “I belong to land and people; I must do what is profitable and good for them. My concern must be, not how I may rule and be haughty, but how they may be protected and defended by a good peace.”

And he should picture Christ to himself, and say, “Behold, Christ the chief Ruler came and served me, sought not to have power, profit and honor from me, but only considered my need, and did all He could that I might have power, profit and honor from Him and through Him. I will do the saec, not seek mine own advantage in my subjects, but their advantage, and thus serve them by my office, protect them, give them audience and sup- port, that they, and not I, may have the benefit and profit by it.” Thus a prince should in his heart empty himself of his power and authority, and interest himself in the need of his subjects, dealing with it as though it were his own need. Thus Christ did unto us; and these are the proper works of Christian love. (264-265)

 

Illustration:  From PublicDomainPictures.net

August 17, 2023

I read a wonderful essay by Nadya Williams about Dorothy L. Sayers.  If you aren’t familiar with Sayers, a British writer and scholar who lived from 1893 to 1957, you should become so.

She was the author of some first-rate Christian apologetics, similar to that of her friend C. S. Lewis.  (See Creed or Chaos and the collection Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine.)  She also wrote one of the best contributions to the field of Christian aesthetics in Mind of the Maker, in which she closely ties human creativity to the creativity of the Creator, finding analogies to the artistic process in the doctrine of the Trinity.

As if that weren’t enough, she was the catalyst for revival of the classical education movement with her essay The Lost Tools of Learning.

Perhaps her greatest achievement was her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Hell, Purgatory, Paradise), in which she manages to carry over into English Dante’s terza rima, the interlocking three line stanzas rhyming aba, bcb, cdc, etc., etc.  It is much easier to find rhymes in the Italian language than in English, and yet somehow Sayers pulls it off, thus keeping the form as well as the meaning of the great Christian epic.

Furthermore, the best guide to Dante has to be Sayers’ Introductory Papers on Dante.  Just as Virgil explains the realms of the afterlife to Dante, Sayers explains Dante’s writings about the realms of the afterlife to the modern reader.  Underscoring that the work is an allegory, not a travelogue, Sayers unpacks the spiritual meaning and insights of the poem, which even us non-Catholic Christians can appreciate.

Sayers is best known, though, for her Lord Peter Wimsey novels, which established her as a pioneering novelist of the mystery genre, on a par with Agatha Christie.

Williams is one of the Christian historians who contributes to the Patheos blog The Anxious Bench.  Her post about Sayers, entitled Dorothy Sayers Solves Her Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, focuses on this incredibly talented woman’s career path.  She begins:

In the wake of WWI, a brilliant woman in search of an income found herself in a quandary. Here she was, a woman in a man’s world, and therefore unable to become a professor—a path she would have likely pursued, had she been born half a century later. She was, nevertheless, someone prone to live inside her head, dwelling less comfortably with people than with her intense and deep ideas about so many topics, from the Greco-Roman Classics to Dante’s poetry to French literature and, most of all, theology and God’s claims on her life.

So she became an advertising copy-writer.  This enabled her to make a living through her facility with words. “But this time in her life was not wasted. Rather, she used this period to solve her own crisis of the evangelical mind and in the process, perhaps not even quite realizing it at the time, she determined the track that the rest of her life took.”

She knew that writing cringey ads pays, but writing poetry or very serious academic books doesn’t. But she also knew that she did not want to spend the rest of her life as a copywriter. So, she found a middle road that ended up being more financially successful than perhaps she ever expected: writing crime novels. This road, at least, involved less of an intellectual selling out in her view than writing copy for Guinness ads. And it freed her over time to do the kind of earnest theological writing and translation work that she really wanted to do all along.

But there is an irony of sorts in that fateful decision that Sayers made to create Lord Peter Wimsey, a hero who turns 100 this year, and whose crime-solving antics she herself, his very maker, saw at times with such disdain. You see, because the Peter Wimsey novels turned out to be the most profitable writing Sayers ever did—read by the greatest number of people of all her works in her lifetime, at least—her name became so associated with his that even today, the website of the official Dorothy L. Sayers Society introduces her as “renowned English crime writer.”

Though overshadowed by her popular fiction, Sayers did, in fact, use Lord Peter to bankroll her scholarly projects.

Williams’ post is especially poignant because she herself recently walked away from a tenured full professorship at a secular university, both because it was making her miserable and in order to spend more time with her family.  She tells about her decision in her post Discerning Vocation:  Walking Away from Academia.

In the Sayers post, she shows how Sayers fulfilled her true vocation by pursuing work that seemed to have little to do with her vocation.  She points out that in the world of specialized academic research, a scholarly tome that was the work of years may be read by fewer than a hundred fellow specialists.  Whereas writing for the general public, as Sayers did, can reach and have an impact on multitudes.

Williams celebrates the vocation of the “independent scholar.”  Freed from the narrow specialization required for academic careers, Ph.D.s  are positioned to be “public intellectuals.”  There will be more and more of these, not only because there are few academic jobs for humanities specialists but, I would add, because the state of academia today is driving many true scholars away.  I notice that Williams herself is pursuing this route, and I wish her the best.

In my career, I did both kinds of writing, but found an academic haven in Christian colleges, which supported my more popular writing that has proven to be of far greater consequence.

Are there other examples of people finding their vocation by losing their vocation?  Do any of you have experience with this?

 

 

 

Dorothy L. Sayers (1928) by http://www.biography.com/people/dorothy-l-sayers-9472925, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34552819

February 10, 2023

Jordan Ballor, a scholar whom I respect, has an article in World Magazine entitled Bonhoeffer’s courage, 90 years later, with the deck “The young Lutheran’s stand against Nazi idolatry and an oncoming catastrophe.”  It resonates with a book I am reviewing on the German resistance to Hitler.

Ballor tells of a radio address Bonhoeffer delivered on February 1, 1933, just two days after Hitler was made chancellor.  The broadcast was cut short by technical difficulties, probably due to the radio station’s fear of the new government, but Bonhoeffer gave his remarks later as a lecture.  He is warning his audience about the dangers of confusing their leaders with God.  He does so by applying the doctrine of vocation.

Here is Ballor’s summary of what Bonhoeffer said:

Leadership and authority, argued Bonhoeffer, are important and legitimate callings. Far from being an idealistic pacifist or fanatic anarchist, Bonhoeffer’s Lutheranism formed his understanding of the legitimate role of political authority. And in extreme cases, such as that faced by Germany in 1933, it is understandable how a powerful personality might exercise influence over a nation’s citizens. But, warned Bonhoeffer, “the leader must radically reject the temptation to become an idol, that is, the ultimate authority of the led.” This was, in fact, the critical feature of Hitler’s leadership: his personality shaped politics, and his will became the law.

The consequences of such an inversion of the office of leadership were catastrophic. Individual people, created in the image of God, must stand before God in their callings. They could not place anyone else in the ultimate seat of judgment and authority. “Only before God,” said Bonhoeffer with characteristic Lutheran emphasis, “does the human being become what he is, an individual, free, and at the same time bound in responsibility.” To allow anyone else to come between the individual and God was to commit idolatry. To do this was essentially to replace God with another creaturely authority. . . .

“Leader and office that turn themselves into gods mock God and the solitary individual before him who is becoming the individual, and must collapse,” concluded Bonhoeffer. “Only the leader who is in the service of the penultimate and ultimate authority merits loyalty.” Without naming Hitler directly, Bonhoeffer challenged the pledge of ultimate and personal allegiance that the Nazi leader demanded. And he rightly predicted the disaster that awaited, albeit only after much suffering and loss.

What he says about vocation of the leader, the leader’s temptation to become “the ultimate authority of the led”–that is, an idol–and the temptation of the led to treat the leader in this way has applications beyond political rulers.  It can apply to leaders in the church, in the family, and in the workplace.

This echoes what Jesus Himself says, how leadership should not be about “lording it over” the led, but, as with other vocations, loving and serving them.  Which is how Christ Himself, the ultimate leader, carries out His authority:

And Jesus called them to him and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.  For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”  Mark 10:42-45

What Bonhoeffer said 90 years ago also applies to another of our concerns today:  identity.   “Only before God does the human being become what he is.”

 

Photo:  Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Wissen911 – Bettina Rott: Wilhelm Rott, 1908–1967: Lebenszeugnis, Pro Business Verlag, 2008, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52692413

January 14, 2022

 

Charli D’Amelio is a 17-year-old who two years ago started posting on TikTok videos of herself dancing and lip-synching to popular songs.  Today she is TikTok’s biggest money-maker, last year bringing in $17.5 million.  She is an “influencer,” and she makes more money than the chief executives of some of the country’s biggest companies.

The Wall Street Journal has published an article by Joseph Pisani on this lucrative profession entitled These TikTok Stars Made More Money Than Many of America’s Top CEOs with the deck “Charli and Dixie D’Amelio, Addison Rae are among TikTok stars who out-earned leaders of many S&P 500 companies.”

By way of illustration, the article (which is behind a paywall) points out that Exxon pays its CEO $15.6 million; Starbucks, $14.7 million; Delta Airlines, $13.1 million; and McDonald’s $10.8 million.  The median compensation of the CEOs of S&P 500 companies, much of which comes in the form of stock options and other perks, is $13.4 million.  Such amounts strike us working stiffs as wildly over the top, but they fall far short of what a teenage girl earns by lip-synching on social media.

How is this possible?  Well, online platforms and advertisers typically pay a small amount for every thousand page views.  Miss D’Amelio has 133 million followers.  That adds up.  “Influencers” with big followings then get paid by companies to use and promote their products.  That, in turn, can lead to endorsement deals on other media and to product lines branded with the influencer’s name.

Miss D’Amelio is the most successful, but there are countless individuals on TikTok and YouTube who make their living and sometimes big fortunes simply by being on the internet.  (Others, of course, make a living on the internet by using it as a medium to provide goods, services, art, information, and ideas.  I am not talking about them.)

My question is, is being an internet influencer a true vocation, in the Christian sense of that term?

You can see Miss D’Amelio’s videos here.  Usually she is lip-synching.  She isn’t dancing much anymore, as such.  Sometimes she talks to her audience about her life.  Some of the videos just show her using products–putting on cool sneakers, brushing her teeth with a product-placed toothpaste, wearing different outfits.  She doesn’t seem to be doing too much on her videos, which are extremely short.  But, as her Wikipedia entry shows, she has parlayed her internet celebrity into many other more traditional ventures, including film, television, make-up lines, a book, notebooks and coloring books, and other merchandise.

Nothing against this young lady–she is talented, ingenious, and has an engaging personality–but I am just agreeing with what she herself told an interviewer:  “I consider myself a normal teenager that a lot of people watch, for some reason. It doesn’t make sense in my head, but I’m working on understanding it.”

Now the intrinsic value of work cannot be reduced to its monetary value.  Farmers, factory workers, the people who pick up our garbage, and others who perform services vital to our physical existence are doing far more important tasks than celebrities–not just influencers, but movie stars and professional athletes–and yet they are paid far, far less.  Even among celebrities, influencers are a special case.  Movie stars are paid exorbitantly for their art of acting.  Professional athletes are paid exorbitantly for their physical performances.  Internet influences do produce something–their videos–and they are putting on a performance, but they seem to be celebrated mainly for their own selves.

What defines Christian vocation is love and service to the neighbor.  Who are the influencers’ neighbors?  And what is the service they are rendering them?

Advertising is surely legitimate, a way of alerting people to products they might find useful.  Madison Avenue advertising executives, marketing personnel, and people in sales are performing legitimate vocations.  Aren’t influencers in that role?  And yet, they are not planning marketing strategies or closing sales.  They are not so much advertisers as the medium for advertisers.

I think the appeal of influencers, as well as other internet stars who chalk up big money-producing traffic numbers without advertising, is that they seem like friends.  To their followers, they are attractive, personable, and cool, someone fun to hang out with.  In our times when personal relationships are hard to come by, and even on-line relationships can be vicious, judgmental, and status-driven, watching someone you can relate to on a video channel makes a pleasant substitute.

So is being an influencer a vocation, a calling from God?  I would say, not really but sort of.  It is not a real vocation, but it is a virtual vocation.  It is parallel to virtual communities and virtual reality, a simulacrum that falls short of embodied relationships and physical existence, but, for some people, is better than nothing.

 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

 

January 13, 2022

 

Dealing with the COVID epidemic has been taking a toll on nurses and other health care professionals.  The overtime shifts, the staffing shortages, the triage of patients, the grief at losing so many, exasperation with the healthcare establishment, and firings due to the vaccine mandate are leaving frontline medical workers frustrated, exhausted, and emotionally drained.

It has gotten so bad that two-thirds of America’s nurses say that the COVID epidemic has made them consider leaving their profession.

So reports The Wall Street Journal in an article on burnout among nurses that turns into a reflection on vocation. Rachel Feintzeig has written the feature story When You’re Burned Out at Your Job, But It’s Also Your Calling , with the deck “Overworked nurses are considering less intense and remote jobs due to Covid-19, but stepping away is hard when you’ve dedicated your life to caring for others.”

The term “calling,” along with the Latinate form “vocation,” of course, has become commonplace even in secular circles.  But it derives from the Christian doctrine of vocation, a preoccupation of my recent writing (see  the links below) and of this blog.
Though the Wall Street Journal doesn’t discuss “calling” in terms of the One who calls us to love and serve our neighbors in all of our stations in life into which He has brought us, it raises some important issues that are worth thinking through theologically.
The problem of burning out in one’s calling is not, of course, limited to nurses.  Nor is vocation limited to our economic callings, what we do to make a living.  We also have callings in our families (as spouses, parents, and children), in the church (as pastors, other church workers, and laypeople), and in the state (as citizens, officials, voters, etc.).  We can burnout in our work and we can burn out in those vocations, as well.

In the course of her discussion of the plight of nurses, Feintzeig says,

In recent months, as I’ve written about burnout, I’ve heard from overwhelmed teachers and social workers who say they too struggle with toxic bosses and unsustainable workloads, but wrestle with the guilt of abandoning people they pledged to help.

The question they face: How to leave a job that feels like a calling?

“When you do really feel called to your profession it becomes intertwined with your identity,” says Delaney Barsamian, a 31-year-old in the Bay Area who left her emergency-room nursing role last year for a remote job helping patients make end-of-life plans. “It was almost like a breakup. I was in love with emergency medicine.”

Of course, all callings have as their purpose, in different ways, to help people.  And the constellation of our multiple callings, given to us uniquely and personally, constitutes our identity.  So frustrations with our callings and leaving our callings can be traumatic.  The article gives a useful term for why that can happen:

“Nurses are so angry,” she says. “I’m seeing and hearing this incredible sense of malaise and hopelessness.”

The feeling that pushes many to leave is one of not being able to do the job they signed up for, not being able to care for patients the way they believe they should. The technical term is “moral distress.”

“You’re put in a situation where what you’re asked to do defies your sense of values and ethics,” Dr. Brown says. “It’s like a creeping eating into your moral consciousness.”

“Moral distress”!  Not being able to do the tasks you were called to do!  Or being put in the position of doing something wrong.  Nurses experience “moral distress” when they encounter obstacles to their work, which creates a moral frustration, not being able to do what is right.

This applies also to other callings, such as teachers not being allowed to teach, police officers not being allowed to enforce the law, soldiers not allowed to pursue victory–to mention other vocations whose morale is currently low–and also to business owners who feel thwarted in trying to provide their goods and services,  farmers whose crops can’t get to market, factory workers who get laid off, and on and on.

Or, in the other meaning of “moral distress,” of being asked to do something that defies your values and ethics, when teachers are forced to teach something they don’t believe in, police officers put into positions that require them to violate the rights of citizens, soldiers ordered to violate their consciences, business owners who feel competitive pressure to pursue unethical practices, and so on.

Another vocation that has become especially burnout prone is the pastoral office.  Pastors can feel “moral distress” when they find their ministry is thwarted by squabbling parishioners, an interfering church hierarchy, or indifference on the part of those they are trying to minister to.  Or when they find it necessary to preach or practice what they don’t believe in.  Or when they start to do things that violate the moral law they are supposed to uphold.

And, in the family vocations, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters might feel “moral distress” when their relationships are not what they should be.  In marriages, this kind of burnout can lead to divorce, with ramifications for their children, as parenthood too becomes a casualty.

So what are the solutions to vocational burnout?  I can’t give pat answers–I’d like to hear your suggestions in the comments–but here are some thoughts.

Sometimes the Christian doctrine of vocation, which focuses on love and service to the neighbors whom the calling brings into your life, contrasts with the secular doctrine of vocation, which focuses on self fulfillment.

The self is voracious and constantly changing, so the quest for self-fulfillment tends to be futile, leading eventually to disappointment and the need to try something new, only to have that eventually fail also to be sufficiently satisfying.  Sometimes vocational burnout is a failure of self-fulfillment, in which case a Christian can refocus on love for the neighbor  (your spouse, your children, your customers, your patients, your country, your parishioners, God).  This can reset the vocation back to its true purpose, so that you again have the purpose that motivates your life and your work.

We can expect trials and tribulations in our vocations, the “bearing of the Cross” that forces us to rely more and more on God, who inhabits and works through our callings.  Could your burnout really be a Cross instead, one that by driving you to desperate prayer and a more intense reliance on Christ your cross-bearer, can actually increase your faith?

Burnout does not always lead to changing vocations.  The nurses interviewed in the Wall Street Journal story who left their particular jobs are still in the health care field, just in a different location or area of practice.  Similarly, a burnt out pastor might just need to take a call to another congregation in order to reinvigorate his ministry.

A caution, though, is in order.  Economic vocations can easily change, and sometimes people in one line of work, which they find frustrating, can be called to another line of work.  Some vocations, though, such as the family callings and the calling of the Gospel, are permanent.

If you are married to someone, as Luther once said, that is your vocation.  You have no calling to get married to someone else, as long as your spouse is alive, except, at most, under the direst circumstances.  If you are frustrated with your church, you might join a different congregation or church body, but don’t try a different religion.

Seeking help and counsel from others can also relieve vocational burnout.  (See, for example, Doxology, a ministry to pastors, which specializes in problems of burnout.)

Any other ideas?  Have any of you experienced this kind of burnout, but found a way to recover the joy of your vocation?

 

 

By the way, if you are interested in vocation, you might want to check out my “trilogy” on the subject:

God at Work:  Your Christian Vocation in All of Life,

with Mary Moerbe, Family Vocation:  God’s Calling in Marriage, Parenting, and Childhood

Working for Our Neighbor:  A Lutheran Primer on Vocation, Economics, and Ordinary Life

 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

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