Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about - quite apart from what I would like it to be about - or my life will never represent anything real in the work, no matter how earnest my intentions.
That insight is hidden in the word vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin for "voice". Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live - but the standards by which I cannot help but life if I am living my own life.
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Today I understand vocation quite differently - not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice "out there" calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice "in there" calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfil the original selfhood given me at birth by God.
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The deepest vocational question is not "What ought I to do with my life? It is the more elemental and demanding "Who am I? What is my nature?"
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Buechner's definition starts with the self and moves toward the needs of the world: it begins, wisely, where vocation begins - not in what the world needs (which is everything), but in the nature of the human self, in what brings the self joy, the deep joy of knowing that we are here on earth to be the gifts that God created.
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The experience of darkness has been essential to my coming into selfhood, and telling the truth about that fact helps me stay in the light. But I want to tell that truth for another reason as well: may young people today journey in the dark, as the young always have, and we elders do them a disservice when we withhold the shadowy parts of our lives. When I was young, there were very few elders willing to talk about the darkness; most of them pretended that success was all they had ever known. As the darkness began to descent on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that i had merely embarked on a journey toward joining human race.
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Lacking insight into my own limits and potentials, I had allowed ego and ethics to lead me into a situation that my soul could not abide.
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Here, I think, is another clue to finding true self and vocation: we must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situations - projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves - and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits.
Source: Let Your Life Speak (Listening for the voice of vocation) by Parker J. Palmer
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