By Chris Armstrong, reprinted from Humanism as a Way of Life.
See previous posts in this series starting here and continuing here, here, here and here.
One source toward a “spirituality of vocation”
Finally, I want to return to the idea that if we take Christian ideas of vocation seriously, we can bridge the sacred-secular divide that so many experience in their work in the modern West. We can work and live as integrated, rather than dis-integrated, selves.
So in closing, I’m going to offer just one example of a Christian thinker who can help us with this re-integration.
If the central problem with how Christians today approach vocation is, as I’ve described it, a dis-integration of the spiritual and the material, the sacred and the secular, then we need to reach back to an earlier Christian spirituality that does a better job of addressing the material and social dimensions of our lives.
Specifically, I’d argue that we need to acquaint ourselves with some dimensions of early and medieval thought and spirituality.
A nearby guide to a far land
And since most of us are not used to doing that kind of retrieval work, which involves a high degree of contextualization in historical knowledge, I typically recommend looking to a modern guide who himself embodied premodern tradition, the British author and public theologian C S Lewis.
Lewis is no infallible guide, but he has this going for him: He was a modern person who absorbed premodern incarnational, sacramental faith not just intellectually – as a medieval scholar – but also intuitively and practically, as wisdom to live by.
The “discarded image”
· A spiritually animated cosmos
· A sacramental worldview
In his book The Discarded Image, Lewis shows us the medieval view of the cosmos as a material place nonetheless charged with the spiritual, [quote] “tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine.” And thus, “a world of built-in significance.”
As alien as such a view of the world may seem to us, in fact there is a coherent “theo-logic” to this view of things:
· First, the premodern Christian understood—based on the scriptural account of the Creation—that the material world is not evil—nor is it (as we moderns are more tempted to believe) spiritually irrelevant, for it all was made by God and bears his imprint.
· Second, the premodern Christian also understood that the material world cannot hold the ultimate end and fulfilment of human life. Where do we find that end and fulfillment? Only – as Augustine, Boethius, and all who followed insisted – in God himself.
· The middle way earlier Christians walked between the gnostic and the materialistic error about the material world was that because of God’s action in first creating it, and then indwelling it, and then continuing to love and care for it, the world must be shot through with the truth, goodness, and beauty of the Trinity itself. It must be a place of God’s presence and glory, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
The theological term for this vibrant medieval understanding of the material world is sacramentalism. This is a linked set of beliefs that, first, the outward and visible can convey the inward and spiritual; second, all creation is in some sense a reflection of the Creator; and thus third, God is present in and through every square inch of his world—waiting to be discovered.
Medieval “inklings” toward a spirituality of work and vocation
· What every schoolboy knew
· The “mental heaven and earth”
· The institutional results
In Lewis’s book English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, he describes the mind-set of a medieval boy who starts at school, where he learns [QUOTE] “farriery, forestry, archery, hawking, sowing, ditching, thatching, brewing, baking, weaving, and practical astronomy.” This material, concrete knowledge, Lewis says,
mixed with their law, rhetoric, theology, and mythology, bred an outlook very different from our own. High abstractions and rarified artifices jostled the earthiest particulars. . . . They talked more readily than we about large universals such as death, change, fortune, friendship, or salvation; but also about pigs, loaves, boots, and boats. The mind darted more easily to and fro between that mental heaven and earth: the cloud of middle generalizations, hanging between the two, was then much smaller.
In other words, a sacramental consciousness blanketed every part of medieval life like a divine canopy. And Lewis himself, in his own religious life, absorbed and followed this sacramental path.
Nor was premodern sacramentalism limited to the rituals of the church. It animated early Christians’ invention of the hospital, the university, and the research laboratory, and their pursuits of law, politics, and the arts. In other words, huge swathes of the modern working world – healthcare, education, science and technology, public service, the arts, and more – were all infused at their origin with this premodern understanding of the interpenetration of the sacred and the secular.
A higher calling
· Working as unto God
· Working for eternal creatures
· A bigger understanding of human flourishing
In a war-time talk to a group of Oxford students about the vocation of being a student, Lewis contradicts the modern tendency to dismiss the ordinariness of our vocations. “It is clear,” he says, “that Christianity does not exclude any of the ordinary human activities. St. Paul tells people to get on with their jobs. . . . Christianity does not simply replace our natural life and substitute a new one; it is rather a new organization which exploits, to its own supernatural ends, these natural materials. . . . All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest, and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not.”
This is at least potentially a sacramental view of work, because it raises work to spiritual significance. Returning to our definition of vocation as essentially relational – involving both a relationship with God and a relationship with others – we can see how the spiritual, material, and social can come together in our very ordinary work, as it did for premodern Christians.
Consider Lewis’s words in his sermon “The Weight of Glory”—especially one familiar and powerful section in which draws so deeply from the medieval mind-set that he even slips into ecclesiastical Latin in the final sentence:
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship. . . . There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. . . . It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit. . . . Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.
If our work serves such beings as these, and if it can at the same time truly be done “as unto the Lord,” then a proper “spirituality of work and vocation” should serve a bigger understanding of human flourishing than a secularist approach. A Christian spirituality of vocation must transcend the mere fulfilment of desire for material and social goods, and address the higher truth about human beings that Lewis points to in his sermon.
The Green Room 