About a dozen years ago, I was struggling with a writing assignment.
(Anyone who knows me well will promptly roll their eyes at this. When do I not over-think a writing assignment, after all? It’s a fair point, including the very reflection you are reading…but back to the story at hand.)
This particular personal essay troubled me because I was supposed to write a vocational reflection–how did I understand my own trajectory as a human being and perhaps especially as someone who felt called to work in higher education, mentoring and teaching undergraduates who were wrestling with similar questions about who and how to be? That’s a lot, and despite the fact that I was reading avidly in theology and literature and all manner of texts expanding the concept of vocation–that it is never just about work; that it isn’t singular–I found myself getting snagged again and again by these vocational “myths.”
One part of my brain knew that my calling could never be reduced to simply what paid the bills, but then another part of my brain piped up, reminding me of the decades I’d been in school working toward a doctorate. Wasn’t a career honoring that background an important part of my calling? If I loosened my grip on the idea of a certain professional future–e.g. a tenure-track faculty position–wouldn’t I just be selling myself short?
These weren’t the only vocational questions swirling around in my mind, though. I had recently embraced a new, very dear role when Sam and I became parents to Baby Lukas. I will never forget his large, beautiful eyes peering back at me in that over-crowded delivery room; Lukas was taking in and constructing whole worlds under those luxurious eyelashes. As his parents, Sam and I could be right there with him on that journey, and what greater calling could there possibly be than the one being tightly knit in that hospital?
I still remember something else in the delivery room with me that day, and I am honestly not sure whether to recount this detail with embarrassment or with humor. Maybe both. Stacked neatly on the rolling bed tray as I literally labored sat a pile of unmarked student papers. I lugged them along in case I had time to grade them(!)–you know, in between contractions(!!!). I’m sure I also packed them in my go-bag because I realized that, if this was really and truly labor, then I wouldn’t be coming home right away and might need to get back to my students within a few days of giving birth. But still. My logic in that running-to-the-hospital moment, my sense of responsibly balancing those competing commitments, strikes me now as both funny and painful.
The vocational reflection I ultimately ended up drafting grappled with the importance of seasons and transitions in our understanding of being called. I did not feel that I captured this sentiment as eloquently as I would have liked in my essay, but then again, I was nursing a baby and perpetually sleep-deprived. I had hoped to form an articulate reckoning with vocational nuance, of the sort I had felt but not yet encountered in writing.
Twelve years later, I am privileged to work with a team in the Division of Calling & Spiritual Life that regularly takes up these sorts of broader, transformative questions. Working alongside Kat Peters and Kristin Lewis, I am daily inspired to wonder and think more deeply about what it means to be called and how we can better and more meaningfully cultivate space for students and colleagues to explore how they are called to lead and serve. This year, we have been particularly energized by a new book from Dr. Bonnie Miller-McLemore, Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling (2024), and it’s one we’ll be reading and discussing with a group of students as well as other faculty and staff colleagues. In it, Dr. Miller-McLemore deftly pierces many of the vocational myths I wrestled with in that long-ago essay, giving powerful language to the way so many of us misunderstand callings.
“Seldom are callings straightforward or without suffering. We don’t resolve them easily or early or all at once. Discerning an inner voice or hearing a higher call from outside ourselves is hard work. Callings conflict and compete for our attention; they are seldom singular or monolithic. Nor do callings rest on our own efforts but instead require the difficult navigation of external demands, unwanted pressures, oppressive social dynamics, and help from others. Sometimes vocation is not where ‘our deep gladness’ meets the ‘the world’s deep hunger’… [C]hallenges and hardships are not a problem; they are an essential element in a life well lived” (8).
Such insight is powerful, true, and beautifully described…even if it is not so comfortable to acknowledge and inhabit. In a world where we often equate a vague sense of happiness or satisfaction with a “good life,” obstacles or difficulties can appear as impediments to what we’re supposed to do and be–when in fact they are just as crucial a part of our journeys. While this recognition may lack the jaunty cheer of a motivational poster or bumper sticker, it has the benefit of being true.
Moreover, as Dr. Miller-McLemore wisely counsels, sometimes how we resolve competing commitments or live into our callings is frustratingly ambiguous and unclear. We rush headlong, seeking clarity, when instead we need patience to walk in the ambiguity and uncertainty.
This may seem like an odd “vocational” note to strike so early in the year of chapel reflections, but I’ve actually found it–perhaps paradoxically–cheering. Figuring out how to hold tension and ambiguity is part of the point of any education worth its salt–something we continue to do long after our degrees have been conferred.
As human beings in a world where we are always students, we have the privilege and opportunity of living into our questions, as opposed to simply seeking answers. “Loving” and “living the questions” might even be our calling; poet Rainer Maria Rilke certainly thought so in his Letters to a Young Poet:
“Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
I would love to tell you that I snapped my fingers, or witnessed spiritual sky-writing, or had a cartoon sort of lightbulb-above-my-head epiphany moment in figuring out my own callings and path, back then or even now. It would probably make for more exciting storytelling in this paragraph, but you already know where this is going.
Instead, I try to daily practice faithfully living and loving the questions–questions about what it means to live and to love, to lead and to serve. These questions aren’t easily resolvable, but they are gifts in their ambiguity–sacred invitations toward meaning and purposes that often lie beyond my capacity to fully discern them.
Valparaiso University’s motto “In Thy Light, We See Light” doesn’t mean that we will have a perfect earthly vision of these purposes. As the 17th century poet Henry Vaughn saw long ago, “there is in God / A deep but dazzling darkness,” and human beings will “see not all clear.” Instead, we can travel a dim road by faith, knowing that God calls us to the questions as well as the answers.
– Dr. Anna Stewart
Director, Institute for Leadership and Service
09.04.2025
