By Chris Armstrong, reprinted from Humanism as a Way of Life. Part four of a series.
Finally, at the root of all these cults (and many others no doubt), there is one underlying common cultural narrative. It’s the one that Levin and the Onion satire points to; a flashy, self-obsessed careerist narrative. This vision of our working lives stands as the stark opposite of the kind of vocational life that Paul tells the Thessalonians to make their ambition – a quiet, hard-working one – a steady, sustainable one that serves our communities and our families well, and resists the pressures to enslave ourselves and disrupt our personal and relational lives for the sake of some idol of worldly success or the building of some modern Tower of Babel.
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.” Keller liked to hold up the animated movie Babe as the epitome of this narrative: Here is a pig who through sheer gumption (one might even 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. This is work as self-fulfillment, self-realization. It is not Luther changing a baby’s diaper and giving thanks that God has seen fit to give him such a great and glorious responsibility. It is not us serving Jesus in the guise of the needy by doing ordinary things like feeding them and caring for them when they are sick. It is not the medieval Benedictine monks bowing to the guest as he enters, because they are venerating Christ in the guest – and then caring for all who are sick, and incubating what will become the modern institution of the hospital, within their monasteries all across Europe. It is the American narrative of work as self-actualization.
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 . . . 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 . . . defeats even itself. No man who values originality will ever be original.”
So how can we ever make a mark on the world, in a good way? How can we contribute to the ordinary things we work on, in our own unique and God-gifted way? 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.”
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 various culturally dominant “cults.” Each of these, by itself, is a potent enemy of ordinary work. Each threatens to leave us 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.
But in fact, most of us are not called to a romantic, world-saving vocation. We are called, again as Paul told the Thessalonians, to “make it our ambition to live a quiet life and work with our hands”—that is, to serve people in ordinary ways that will never win us awards or build our platform. We are not called to the self-aggrandizing work of Babel but to the loving service of the kingdom.
And it turns out that this other kind of more humble work has a power to give us what we were looking for in the first place – joy in serving others. And even an impact on those others for the kingdom.
The Green Room 