The Vocations of Dorothy L. Sayers

Last updated on: August 12, 2023 at 9:29 pm By Gene Veith

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

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Vocation vs. Idolatry

Last updated on: February 10, 2023 at 8:30 am By Gene Veith

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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

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Virtual Vocation

Last updated on: January 13, 2022 at 3:23 pm By Gene Veith

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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

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Burnout and Vocation

Last updated on: January 13, 2022 at 8:37 am By Gene Veith

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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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Vocation vs. Slavery

Last updated on: October 17, 2021 at 8:54 pm By Gene Veith

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The Anxious Bench, a Patheos blog run by various Christian historians, recently published a fascinating post by Nadya Williams, a professor of ancient history at Western Georgia University, entitled Created for Work?: The Cost of Leisure and the Privilege of Work in Antiquity and Today.

She discusses the concept in ancient Rome of otium, or leisure, as opposed to negotium, or busy-ness. “Otium was held to be the ideal state of existence in Roman society,” she observes, “for this leisurely state of being was essential for philosophical reflection, writing, and any meaningful life of the mind.”

Though the Roman playwright Ennius and the statesman Cato the Younger argued that an excess of otium was just as bad as an excess of negotium, Romans still tended to prize the former and look down upon the latter. These values had a particular consequence. Prof. Williams writes,

When we reflect on the Roman ideal of otium, we have to keep in mind that it could only exist if someone else took some of the negotium off your hands. Put plainly, Roman otium was only made possible by the existence of slavery.

She goes on to write about the Roman institution of slavery–based not on race, but on the subjugation of conquered people–a system so extensive that even some slaves owned slaves.

If the pagan Romans, as well as the Greeks, favored otium, Christianity, with its doctrine of vocation, put a great value on work, including manual labor (1 Thessalonians 4:11).

Thus, going outside the scope of Prof. Williams’ post, when Rome fell and Christianity began to be culturally influential, the slavery of pagan Rome faded, though some aspects of it arguably continued with the rise of serfdom, though medieval peasants were never considered property and enjoyed certain rights that slaves never did.

Still, the greater status of otium remained with the feudal social classes. You find it as late as 19th century novels, which sometimes portrays an aristocratic family being scandalized if their daughter fell in love with a “tradesman.” Or if a younger son of a noble family went into “business.”

Slavery–this time based on race–was brought back, though, by Spanish, Portuguese, and later English colonists in the New World, who demanded vast amounts of labor to work their plantations. They became complicit with the Muslim slave trade, which reflected the continued practice of slavery throughout the Islamic world, and then started their own brutal slave trafficking. The Catholic Church condemned this new slavery, though many Catholics ignored that teaching, just as many Catholics today ignore the church’s teaching about abortion.

This was during the classical revival of the 16th and 17th century, which, in its humanist as opposed to its Reformation form, may have brought not only the good but some of the bad elements of the Greeks and the Romans to the fore. Such as an unhealthy respect for otium, looking down on those who did the actual work, and selling out for slavery.

Protestants in Northern Europe, evangelical Anglicans in England, and Puritans in America tended to be the driving force in the abolitionist movements in the 19th century. These are the Christians who would have had the most robust appreciation of the doctrine of vocation.

I realize that the issue is complicated, with plenty of failures and inconsistencies to go around. Some Christians argued that being a slave is a vocation, confusing the Greco-Roman institution cited in the New Testament with the slavery of the new world, which consigned a whole race to slavery with no provision for individual callings.

Certainly, there is room for otium in vocation, as we see in the mandates for rest in the Biblical ordinance of the Sabbath. And vocation is not a matter of constantly being busy, as we see in Christ’s admonition to Martha, with her negotium, and His praise of Mary taking time to sit at His feet (Luke 10:38-42). And in the Gospel, all Christians have rest from their works (Hebrews 4:9-10).

After all, the whole point of vocation is that God is the one who is working through human beings, as they love and serve each other.

Today, though, we seem to have both an obsession with otium and a life of often meaningless negotium. Vocation can help us sort those out and can bring freedom, both for ourselves and for others.

Illustration: Mosaic of Roman slaves performing agricultural tasks, Historym1468, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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Vocation as Life Organized around the Forgiveness of Sins

Last updated on: September 4, 2021 at 4:36 pm By Gene Veith

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Happy Labor Day, which this blog is Christianizing as Vocation Day!

To celebrate this holiday, in addition to enjoying your family vocations and receiving your daily bread by cooking out, it is fitting to meditate on this important but oft-neglected doctrine of vocation, which we have been trying to bring back to the fore and thus revitalize Christianity.

Today I would like to draw your attention to another theologian who has written with great insight about vocation: Einar Billing, author of Our Calling.

In my own writings on the subject, I have drawn heavily on Gustav Wingren’s Luther on Vocation. Billing (1871-1939) was another Swedish theologian, a bishop from a previous generation. Wingren (1910-2000) disagreed with Billing, insisting that vocation falls into the category of “Law,” whereas the bishop believed that it falls into the category of “Gospel.” But it strikes me as an odd controversy. Wingren has a rather idiosyncratic view of the Law, but he certainly brings out Luther’s emphasis on God’s work and God’s blessing in vocation. And Billing says directly that our calling also has a law dimension. What he is addressing is the fact that Luther uses the same word “calling” both for how, in the words of the Catechism, “the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel” and for our various tasks and relationships in ordinary life.

With their different emphases, if you put Wingren and Billing together, you get a rich, multi-faceted perspective on the teaching. Our Calling is a little book of no more than 64 pages. Strangely, it is out of print and not even available on Amazon, You can, however, check out an online version with a free account from that wonderful resource, The Internet Archive. (Someone needs to bring this book back into print!)

Here are some excerpts for your Vocation Day reflections:

Life organized around the forgiveness of sins: that is Luther’s idea of the call. (p. 8)

In all our religious and ethical life we are given to an incredible overestimation of the extraordinary at the expense of the ordinary. (p. 29)

When it began to dawn on Luther that just as certainly as the call to God’s kingdom seeks to lift us infinitely above everything that our everyday duties by themselves could give us, just that certainly the call does not take us away from these duties but more deeply into them, then work becomes calling. (p. 2)

Luther, indeed, sees a threefold value in the work that is one’s calling. It educates myself, inasmuch as through its toilsomeness and its “cross” it disciplines my body and so in reality gives what Roman Catholicism vainly sought in the artificial work of monasteries. It becomes the means by which I can serve my neighbor better than through all the almsgiving of Roman Catholicism. Finally, it contributes to community life, peace, and security. (p. 6)

There where you sit or go about your menial tasks, there you have even now everything, then you have God himself. (p. 5)

Photo: Einar Billing (1920) by Finn, Emil L:son, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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