January 28, 2004
Choosing vocation: An open letter from the Dominican Republic
My dear students,
Our conversations of this past semester, across cups of coffee and tired burnt-orange chair pillows have been on my mind this holiday break. The country I am visiting this season keeps a pace that allows time for reflection and silence, two things lacking in the modern North American life, and issues of ethics and vocation have been able to take root and nest in me deeply.
They have not rested quietly. They rarely do. Rather, the living of a slower life, if even for a few days, has reminded me of the struggles many of you have shared with me about the quickness of university life. Many days, when an extra eight minutes avail themselves you walk into my office, place your heavy backpacks on the ground, check your email, slam a sandwich and tell me what’s on your mind. I take courage, not at your exhaustion, but that you stop by to talk of deep things. It gives nod to the internal work and radical rearranging one does when one contemplates, not career path, but vocation.
You will not know what your vocation is by the end of this letter. If, however, you feel compelled to give voice to something long-alive in your psyche, about how you can contribute to the healing of the world, you have read the letter well.
Gather a warm beverage, drop your backpack and think with me.
I challenge you to believe that your vocation is not your career path. Vocation implies a decision about how you will choose to live your life, and to what causes your life will be committed. Frederick Beucher says, “Vocation is the place where your greatest gifts meet the worlds greatest suffering.” Anything short of that complicated synergy is not vocation. There must be, on one hand, the deepest desires of your heart, the sharpest intellect of your mind and the best practices of your humanity. On the other, there must be human suffering. Both exist.
By no fault of your own, dear students, the term “greatest gift” might, at best, seem foreign to you, and at worst translate into a mental laundry list of things you do well. The pace of our “e-lives” seldom gives room for the proper exploration of those entities. Picking one heavily concentrated and specialized major takes much energy. In attempting to balance all the nuances of life, and navigating the specialized modes of university majors, it is possible to deduce that your greatest skill is your greatest gift, and should therefore be what you choose to build a professional life around.
But your greatest gift is not your greatest skill. Your greatest gift is that which the community knows you for and the thing that you simply, upon reflection of your life, can’t not do. (English majors, please forgive me.) It is the thing you do that brings you life and systematically brings life to the people and communities in which you exist.
The vocational plight of the North American student is not easy. Yours is a generation that must negotiate nuances of race, class, globalization, terrorism, poverty, hunger and a growing AIDS epidemic. Your work will need to engage creative and difficult reconciliation between people and nations, and must do so against the backdrop of growing global impatience. You will need to think quickly and digest deeply. The world you inherit requires people living out vocation. Without this, the problems listed above will intensify. No longer can students, those with the opportunity to study the world’s people and her history, not choose vocation over career.
However daunting this task may seem, know that you already possess the tools to “live” vocation. Do not underestimate the power of your intention, your thoughtfulness, your intellectual probing and, quite simply, your friends. I have seen you at work last semester, and in that work have seen you strive to carve out a way for yourselves where vocation is the way of living you practice.
I am honored to be a fellow sojourner.
Kate O'Dwyer Randall
Sosua, Dominican Republic
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