If this current moment has primed us for anything, perhaps it is reflection. The past seven months have certainly taken more than they have given, but one small offering has been the unavoidable chance (or impetus) to think deeply, critically, and maybe even exhaustingly about our social and existential realities. As students in our last year of undergraduate education, add to this cocktail of philosophizing a healthy dosage of vocational angst, or the simple but repetitive panic caused by wondering what comes next in a world that struggles to understand its present.
I have found that there are two fundamental ways to think about vocation, and they are unsurprisingly quite dissimilar. On the one hand, you can discuss your job aspirations with anyone ranging from your therapist to your Uber driver, although these conversations only break the surface of an existential kiddie pool by comparing notes with little vulnerability and little consequence. At the other end of the spectrum lies an olympic-sized swimming pool of purpose-questioning and long-term consternation, a deep abyss into which we all know we must dive yet do our darndest to avoid. This polarization of approach, of course, renders intentional introspection a practice in measured investment: how deeply do we want to think and at what cost? What is the best way to swim through this metaphor?
There is something to be said about striking a balance between reflecting too much or too little, and unfortunately I do not know what that something is. However, for the sake of this ignorance and a quiet break from the deafening circulation of our own thoughts, with gratitude I remember that a lot of other people have thought about vocation before us. As Horizons Fellows, we get the chance to engage with a wide swath of individual philosophies on life, faith, and vocation, presenting a respite and a lesson on where to begin to approach a moment such as this. We read Patrick Reyes’s belief in the importance of life as the most fundamental calling; we approached Kate Harris’s hopeful connection between Christ’s incarnation and the reality of vocational flexibility; we listened to Kate Bowler’s testimony to the fallibility of prosperity gospel and the resilience of a faith rooted in the unknowable.
What, then, is our calling for the present? Is it to give up and give in to our ongoing apocalypse, or rather to wrestle in our current mud pile? Reverend Bill Haley and Patrick Reyes both remind us of the significant truth that our vocation is far simpler and deeper than we might expect, for it is not an attachment of ourselves to a certain understanding of what’s next but rather a full investment in and awareness of the glory of our present. What if our calling is to live now? What if it is to love today? What if purpose is not about what is next, but simply what is?
It is difficult if not outright futile to predict the next few months and years for those of us approaching our final months as students, but despite the benevolent pressures from career fairs and loved ones alike, our plans are not fully our own. If this is one of the few revelations worth keeping from this ordeal understood as 2020, then let the reminder of our sanctified present and a faith in the rest be most present in our ordained, ordinary walk.
image: original painting by Walter Sharon of the Blue Ridge mountains.