On Vocations and God's Will

Here's a wonderful post (http://glory2godforallthings.com/2013/10/16/the-all-consuming-vocation/) by Fr Stephen Freeman reblogged below. The theme has resonance with the oft asked question in the life of the modern Christian, "what is God's will in my life?" I would recommend reading the post but also suggest to take a look at the comments which are even more illuminating.



For example Henry writes:

I am very uncomfortable with the term “The Will of God” as I have heard it taught in many of the churches I have attended. In my mind, it is a term that is front loaded with all sorts of unpleasant emotional baggage. I have heard over and over, that God has this “wonderful” plan for my life and if I am not utterly obedient, I will miss the mark and my life will lie in ruins. Those of you who are old enough might remember the television show, Let’s Make a Deal with Monty Hall. On this show the contestants would win really nice prizes, like a new color TV. Then Monty would give them the opportunity to trade what they have for what might be contained in a large box or hidden behind a curtain. Everyone knew that sometimes the prize behind the curtain might be an expensive new car or it might be a pet goat. Sometimes preachers have made me feel like God is Monty Hall, playing a cosmic game of Let’s Make a Deal with my life. 

I was in my 50s before I realized the will of God doesn’t quite work that way. 

In the parable of prodigal, Jesus tells us the way the Father feels about us. He loves us and is always waiting for an opportunity to run towards us, embrace us, and bless us. He wants to bless us and He wants be a part of our lives. Because of Jesus we are his sons and his daughters. God is not Monty Hall and our lives are not some sort of a cosmic version of a sadistic game show.

+ Comment by Henry, October 16, 2013 at 11:19 am, 

http://glory2godforallthings.com/2013/10/16/the-all-consuming-vocation/

And here are a few responses by Fr Stephen to some of the comments:

Imagine that we live in a town that has been struck by an earthquake followed by a hurricane. Devastation is all around. People’s most basic needs are going unmet. What do we do? We don’t ask, “What do I want to be?” We ask, “What can I do?”

It is, I think, an apt illustration. For modern culture, particularly in America, was hit by an earthquake at the time of the Great Depression. Huge dislocations occurred. Only the Second World War ended that stretch of time. Coming out of the war, what was set in motion was the consumer economy that now dominates our lives. Fundamental choices were and are being made to keep that economy going. We poured huge sums into college educations for G.I.’s following the war, creating the idea of education and vocation as the path forward. We began to create the mobile culture that would come to move 1 out of every 5 families every year. The Baby Boom did not invent this economic culture, but its demographics helped feed it. Mass marketing proved to be very successful.

One interesting decision of the consumer economy was to put the onus for its success on the individual. Today this is at its most extreme point. The individual has to figure out where the jobs are, what the training should be, and today must take out loans to pay for his or her own training, often to disastrous levels. The individual has to guess what the economy/market wants. Many times the model fails. When it fails, individuals are swept aside. They are made to bear the emotional weight of failure – as if they were somehow personally responsible for being able to manage their way through the marketplace and economic dislocations. For my generation – the government upped the ante but creating 401K retirement plans, where workers no longer had guaranteed pensions but the wonderful freedom of investing accounts in the market. The last 2 recessions have destroyed tremendous numbers of retirement plans. Again, the individual discovers that the onus of success is with him.

It is a model and many tout its freedoms and lack of guarantees as the absolute best of all possible worlds.

But your generation, attending and graduating college during the worst economic dislocation sense the Great Depression, is feeling the individualized trauma of this system more than any who have gone before. The “freedom” and manifold choices afforded you turn out to be not such a good idea. Many people will not have enough information to make wise choices. They will not succeed in the present structure. They will be unemployed or underemployed, saddled with debt, etc., and, far worse, told that the consequences of their failed prognostications are their own fault. You will be told that you are not as successful as this one or that one because you’re just not as good.

Worse still, the Christian world would make God an accomplice in this economic nightmare. The choices and path forward will be woven into some part of the “will of God” that the individual again must discern for himself. Thus his failures (and there will be plenty in our present model) will not only described as his own fault – but now a mark of his spiritual failure as well.

Of course, some will succeed fantastically. They will write books for the rest of us to read and tell us how to get ahead. We will buy them in such mass numbers that they will be yet more successful and yet more convinced that they are right.

It’s a lie.

What we see is not some evolution of the will of God in the modern world, geared to maximize personal fulfillment and satisfaction. Fulfillment and satisfaction are not rightly determined by career and success. That’s just mammon and a temptation. What we see is a massive economic engine that has accidentally been geared to make people crazy. It is designed and engineered to be driven by the passions. What most people think of as a career path is, in this culture, a path driven largely by the inner distortions of our unhealed passions. The stuff of success is the overconsumption of goods, driven again by the passions.

The anger you describe is the direct result, not of wrong choices you have made or made by earlier generations – it’s just the symptom of the culture we live in. You are frustrated because you’re either not happy with what you do, aren’t certain what the next step is, or other such things, but at the same time have a model of fulfillment and satisfaction dangled before you as the standard measurement for good choices or obeying the will of God, etc. And the anger (which is only one of the passions this engenders) will not go away when you make “good” choices or your fortune turns. It will remain because it is a passion. It is one of several that will ultimately result in acedia, the state of the soul the fathers called the “noonday demon.” I like the translation “despondency.” It is a spiritual lassitude and dissatisfaction. It keeps us from praying and creates depression, and other states of soul.

The only way forward in any of this is the medicine of the heart. The answer isn’t in job or education, etc. The answer is in healing the disease of the passions (in whatever measure we can at any given time). Recognizing the nature of the temptations created by the world around us is also an essential part of that healing.

God give us grace, one day at a time, to conquer the noonday demon and be at peace.

+ Comment by Fr Stephen Freeman, October 16, 2013 at 12:29 pm, http://glory2godforallthings.com/2013/10/16/the-all-consuming-vocation/

The questions you ask are posed, to a large extent, by the dislocations of our consumer culture. We create jobs with which someone cannot actually support their family. The economy/business does this as if it had no responsibility to do otherwise – and expects individuals to figure out how to take up the slack. And in the name of something-or-other (we use many names), we do it. I recently saw a statistic for how many Walmart workers in America have to receive government assistance in order to live. And these are people who work!

I think it is quite reasonable and responsible for us to ask what must I do to feed my family. It may not always be what I’m best at. There is no law anywhere (in Christ) that says I should or must do what I’m best at. The economy often gives us bad choices – and expects us to accept the responsibility for the whole thing. There’s not a good answer, because those who have arranged the questions don’t care about the outcome. Thus, we make choices, do our best and pray. Understanding your life as a follower, a husband and a father – you’re already way ahead. Whatever choice you make, keep those things intact. May God have mercy on us in such times as these.

+ Comment by Fr Stephen Freeman, October 16, 2013 at 1:45 pm,

http://glory2godforallthings.com/2013/10/16/the-all-consuming-vocation/ 

This is just a sampling, but please visit Fr Stephen's website and read "The All Consuming Vocation" for yourself.

ps. Here's the post reblogged in its entirety for reference:

The All Consuming Vocation

http://glory2godforallthings.com/2013/10/16/the-all-consuming-vocation/

“To the extent that man does not use his freedom, he is not himself. In order to emerge from that indeterminate state, he must utilize his freedom in order to know and be known as himself.” – Fr. Dimitru Staniloae

Vocation is a luxurious word. The very heart of the consumer economy is its ability to offer the individual a wide array of choices. We perceive those choices as yielding power and identity. Almost every child in the modern world knows the great existential consumer question: What do I want to be when I grow up?

It is an amazing thing to ask. Butcher, baker, candle-stick maker – every child can grow up to be President. What do I want to do? What will make me happy? What will make me fulfilled? If I am devout – what would God want me to do?

For we draw God into the consumer’s conundrum, even giving Him credit for such a wide array of choices as though such decisions are natural and the normal way of things. But through most of human history, people have had very few choices. Work was something someone did in order to survive. Opportunity was rather narrow. For most, the work that was readily abundant provided almost the only choice. My grandfather was a farmer as was his father before him and his father before him, etc. My grandfather eventually turned his talent for mechanical things into a job as an auto mechanic. My father was an auto mechanic as was his brother as well. There were other choices, but doing what was at hand seemed to them the thing to do. My mother’s father was a farmer as were his ancestors as far back as I can ascertain. Her father could still conjugate a Latin verb in his 80′s – he had finished high school – rare in his generation. But he did what his father did and probably never asked what he wanted to do.

The nature of our economy requires a mobile population – mobile both in where we live as well as mobile in what we do. That you will get a job at a company, work and retire is no longer an option for most – companies will need you to leave or become something different long before a career is finished. Cultural Christianity has obliged this changing market place and created a theology of vocation that gives Divine sanction to our vocational mobility. Indeed, the failure to know “what we want to do,” is almost never seen as a failure of the marketplace, a product of absurd dislocations and even more absurd educational planning. Instead, we view it as personal failure. “I never could figure out what I wanted to do,” the displaced, unplaced, unplaceable worker thinks.

My heart grieves for the false dilemmas that face young people today (and many others as well). How can anyone know what they want to be when they grow up? Be whatever you will, and I can assure you that at some point you’ll wonder whether you should have been something else.

The freedom God gives us – a foundation of our personhood – is not a gift designed to underwrite the consumer economy. To a large extent, I think it doesn’t matter what we do. Our vocation is not a job – it is the calling to be like our Father in heaven. St. Paul offers brief advice on vocation:

Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labor, working with his hands what is good, that he may have something to give him who has need. (Eph 4:28 NKJ)

What should I do? Do something. And whatever you do, keep God’s commandments and with thanksgiving share with others out of the abundance that God provides. This is our vocation.