The Rev. Stephen Harding on job versus vocation

"I Don't Have a Job, I Don't Have a Career, I Have a Vocation"

Early in my ordination process, part of what I was asked was whether I felt I had a vocation to the priesthood. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what “having a vocation” meant. Egotistically, I interpreted the phrase to mean “did I feel genuinely called to the ministry, and did the faith community in the persons of my Rector, Bishop, and Commission on Ministry agree that I was so called.”

That may be part of a vocation – it was then, but recently, I was thinking about being a priest instead of having continued to work on Wall Street. I realized that I am not having a “career.” People with jobs have careers: they start out wherever they start out and then rise or fall on their merits and who they happen to know. A successful business career is defined in this country by success – by rising up the pyramid. Over time, successful executives take positions in larger and larger corporations and they are measured by personal and corporate success.

I don’t have a job, and I don’t have a “career.” What I have is a vocation that does not measure my success as a priest by the size of the parish I work in or the position that I might hold as chaplain. “Success” in my vocation is not measured by money or position, but by how well I pay attention to the voice of God inside me, by how well I live out what I profess to believe, and by how well I am able to use my authority as priest for the greater good of the world.

Within my vocation as priest I have unparalleled freedom and access to explore anything. I could be an academic, theologian, professor, historian, ethicist; I could be a parish priest, therapist, hospital or institutional chaplain; I could be on the streets as a social activist, agitating for change or work in a homeless shelter; I could be a contemplative or monk, seeking to achieve union with the Divine; I am entering into the experiences of the spiritual realm through my own practice of prayer; I could be a writer. My vocation will support me in each of these areas and allow me to grow more fully into each one as I am called to work in it. My vocation lets me be included in the emotionally intimate and crucial times – births, marriages, dying – of human life, and my vocation will allow me to participate fully in the liturgies and sacraments of the Church as one of its priests. There is no area of the human experience that I, as priest, cannot be involved with, and the realm of the Divine, in all its mystery, is open to me as well.

Always, I am working with people. The human spirit is tremendously resilient; it is also miraculous how much human beings can survive. As part of a disaster response course that I took, the instructor showed a film from the Oklahoma City bombing. Because I had been involved with the recovery effort after September 11th, the images of the first responders and of the survivors affected me deeply. I empathized with the responders, and was emotionally okay with the sight of the disaster until the very end of the film: A first responder at the site, in bunker gear and helmet, streaked with dust from the ruined building, held a child of perhaps 24 months in his arms. In the film, the responder leaned his head forward toward the child. The child looked up at this man, tilted his own head up, and with exquisite innocence and trust, leaned forward and kissed the first responder on the lips. A simple, innocent, child’s kiss, after surviving the trauma of the bombing, made me cry – for the underlying message of innocence, trust, forgiveness, and hope for the future.

My vocation puts me in the heart of such moments, and I am so grateful.

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