By Chris Armstrong, reprinted from Humanism as a Way of Life. Part three of a series.
At the root of all these cults (and many others no doubt), there is one underlying cultural narrative. This narrative stands in the way of the kind of vocational life that the Onion article is pointing toward through its satire – a vocational life that is satisfying, sustainable, serves our communities and our families well, and resists the pressures to disrupt our personal and relational lives by moving from city to city and working overtime to climb the ladder of success.
This is the narrative of expressive individualism. It is a heroic narrative of self-invention that tells us that, by following our hearts and bucking all societal constraints and communal wisdom, we can “be anything we set out to be.” Tim Keller liked to hold up the movie Babe as the epitome of this narrative of expressive individualism: Here is a pig who through sheer gumption (one might say, pig-headedness), beats all the odds and becomes a sheepdog. See? You should take the reins of your life and live however you want – expressing your individuality against all convention! Finding your vocation is all about personal choice and individual identity. Of course there is no room in this story for ordinary work, of any kind.
Lewis makes a very acute observation on this syndrome of individualism, in his essay “Membership”: “I have wanted to try to expel that quite un-Christian worship of the human individual simply as such which is so rampant in modern thought. . . . I mean the pestilent notion (one sees it in literary criticism) that each of us starts with a treasure called ‘personality’ locked up inside him, and that to expand and express this, to guard it from interference, to be ‘original,’ is the main end of life. This is Pelagian, or worse, and it defeats even itself. No man who values originality will ever be original.”
So how can we ever achieve originality? How can we stamp our personality on the things we work on, in our ordinary work? Simply, Lewis says, by buckling down and doing your work well: “try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work’s sake,” he says, “and what men call originality will come unsought. Even on that level, the submission of the individual to the function is already beginning to bring true personality to birth.” (119-120; my emphasis)
In the common narrative today that insists we will find our vocation when we find what we’re passionate about, or what feels fulfilling to us, we are indulging this same individualism – which distracts us from the nature of work as neighbor-love. In this narrative the primary driver becomes our individual happiness and fulfilment, to which all else is subsumed. I’m afraid that it doesn’t take very much attention to this narrative of personal fulfilment to completely skew our approach to the vocational journey.
And our captivity to this narrative is also a big reason why, when we embark on the complex, fraught journey of seeking out our vocations, we find ourselves so tempted to worship at the altars of the three “cults.” Each of these, by itself, is a potent enemy of ordinary work. Each pushes us into the position of the Onion article – deathly afraid that our vocation will somehow lock us in to the dark prison of an ordinary life, walled off from the freedom, the meaning, and the individual satisfaction and fulfilment of an extraordinary life – a life that changes the world.
A Christian Understanding of Vocation and Work
But is this really a Christian understanding of vocation and work?
Jesus summarizes all the law in the twin command to love the Lord with all our heart and soul and strength and mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Then he adds “Do this and you will live.”
Augustine says that if you want to know whether someone is good, don’t ask what he believes, or hopes, but what he loves. The more richly love dwells in someone, the better they are.
The former Augustinian monk Martin Luther then takes this understanding of the primacy of love, and he weds it to ordinary work. We remember Luther for making justification by faith through grace once again central to how we think about salvation – as Augustine too had done. But do we remember the other powerful teaching that Luther brought to the church in his Reformation?
In this core teaching, the priesthood of all believers, Luther does not make every person into a church worker. Rather, he recognizes every kind of legitimate, moral work as a sacred calling. Why? Because ordinary work – the 100,000 hours worth of work, in the marketplace, in the home, paid or unpaid, that most of us will do in our lives – is the primary way we love our neighbor, and is even one important way we love God.
Think about it. What can be more ordinary than the work described in the parable of the sheep and the goats? Yet that work loves (as it serves) both the neighbor, and through the neighbor, God himself:
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”
What’s going on when you do ordinary work? For example, what are you doing when you serve customers or clients in the marketplace? Though in some kinds of work, it may be hard to see how – because you may be at several removes from where the real service is going on – nonetheless you are serving, and therefore loving, your neighbor, and you are loving God in them.
And what is going on when you serve your family by feeding, clothing, and protecting them, either through the paycheck you bring home, or more directly, through the work you may do as a primary caregiver? Again, you are loving both your family, and God in them. So in every kind of ordinary work, you in fact fulfil the love commandment: “Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself.” And the Lord says, “Do this and you will live.”
That is why we can sing the praises of ordinary work. Because the more ordinary the work, the more it serves people in basic ways that are at the heart of what it is to flourish as human beings. In a delightful letter to a housewife who has clearly been expressing a sense of discouragement about her very ordinary work, Lewis flips the script on housework: “it is surely in reality the most important work in the world. What do ships, railways, mines, cars, government etc. exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes? As Dr Johnson said, ‘To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavor.’ (1st to be happy to prepare for being [448] happy in our own real home hereafter: 2nd in the meantime to be happy in our houses.) We wage war in order to have peace, we work in order to have leisure, we produce food in order to eat it. So your job is the one for which all others exist . . .”
If we can see the value of housework in such a light – surely we can have the same appreciation for all other legitimate work? As Luther puts it, when we get up in the morning and pray the Lord’s Prayer – “give us this day our daily bread” – God is already beginning to answer that prayer through the humble work of the baker, and of the farmer who grew the grain, and of the storekeeper who sells the bread. Our ordinary work turns out to be the means of God’s common grace and his provision to others. Suddenly we’re not trapped any more in the vocational narrative of individualism. We’re seeing the forest of the common good, not just the tree of our own vocational quest.
To be continued . . .
The Green Room 