Loving our way to vocation

What do you love? What moves you? What do you have opinions about?

Some version of this question has been rolling around in my head for the past week.

Originally, it was Steven Garber’s book, Hints of Hope, that pricked my brain. Pulling from Augustine, Garber suggests, “What do you love?” is one of the most important question we can answer, for from it comes the telos and praxis of our lives—our vocation.

Time and time again, Steven tells stories of students, entrepreneurs, and politicians that long for wrongs to be made right, and have shaped their lives in pursuit of justice and reconciliation.

So when he asks, “What matters to you?” it is not merely “What do you want to do with your life?” A careful reading of Garber’s book puts you in his classroom; narrative after narrative, concept upon concept, the question of “What matters to you?” becomes inextricably tied to responsibility to one’s neighbor, economics of mutuality, and implication for love’s sake. There is no room for naked ambition in Garber’s definition of vocation. “What matters to you?” either resonates with a long held ache, or if you’re like me, reverberates in an empty skull.

This Sunday, my pastor asked the small congregation—what’s the best restaurant in town? The best music artist right now? The best NFL team?

As I listened to passionate answers fly across the room, I heard Augustine’s question within Steven Garber’s within my pastor’s question: What do you love? What moves you? What do you have opinions about?

After striking my initial thoughts,

• Coffee

• Food

• Clothes

I arrived at:

• Truth - for all people across all time

• Effective communication as an art

• Beauty, design, and harmony

While these are far from a definite answer to the meaning of my life, much less my vocation, perhaps our loves are signposts that point us in some direction, alongside our obsessios and epiphanias, toward our unique contribution to the Kingdom of God. Sometimes signposts are all we have.

Knowing a direction is just the first step. Steven observes, “…it is possible to know about and yet to not know. Only when we step in, only when we enter into, do we begin to know. Within the Hebrew understanding, we only know when we do; only when we see ourselves implicated for love’s sake do we know.” (Page 59, emphasis mine).

Garber is teaching me that the telos and praxis of vocation cannot be divorced from implication to one’s neighbor if we are to remain human as we were designed to be. Garber again:

In the greater economy of [Wendell] Berry, justice can never be “just us,” or even “just me.” Whether we want to be or not, we are implicated in the life of the world around us, responsible, for love’s sake, for the way the world is and ought to be. Very simply, Berry calls this greater economy reality naming it as “the kingdom of God.” and while noting that we can call it what we want to call it, what we cannot do is live for long as if it is not true, because it is beyond our choosing or preferring, reality as it is.

There may never be an arrival, but it is a holy thing to attend to the present, even if only a signpost toward the hope we have in a bigger story. A story that is bigger than our vocations, but not separate from our vocations. A story of justice and reconciliation—wrongs being made right, and at-one-ment with God and with each other.