There is a famous quote about vocation from Frederick Buechner which reads “your vocation in life is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” It’s a wonderful and instructive idea, but I think we tend to love this quote when we’re trying to find our vocation, and then promptly start to ignore it once we have found a path to start down. We find a sense of vocation and then we stop thinking so much about our gladness, and start trying to respond to all the needs we can. It’s understandable! There are a lot of needs. The world’s hunger is deep indeed. We quickly turn this quote into “where what you’re really good at and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Or even sometimes “where your resentful and grudging willingness to act and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Or maybe “What brings you deep gladness generally (but not when you’re this exhausted) and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
But I think Buechner’s emphasis on gladness remains important in the day to day work as well. Of course, work is often enough going to be work, and I’m certainly not suggesting that we’re doing it wrong if we’re not filled to the brim with gladness all of the time. But I see so many pastors, so many social workers, so many people in care oriented fields forget about their own gladness so fast, or maybe just forget that their gladness actually matters. And I think our gladness matters too much to let it languish.
It is tricky, this work stuff. We can find deeply meaningful work that connects in profound ways with who we are as people, but it still matters how we work. It still matters that the contexts in which we work are healthy and supportive. We can have done an excellent job at finding meaningful work only to find that the meaning has managed to drain right out of it faster than we could believe. This isn’t one of those posts about how we can optimize our way to vocational health. This isn’t a post about quiet quitting, or even about burnout. All of those topics are important, and have been better addressed by other people. But I do want to spend a little more time thinking about how we notice and cultivate gladness in our day to day lives.
This isn’t to say that you should just work harder to be glad. I don’t think that tends to work very well. But I think we tend to think of vocation as a path, and what matters most is finding the right trailhead, so to speak. From there, we just follow the trail markings and on we go. We think about our gladness a lot at the beginning, but forget to check in with it as we go. But what if we made our gladness, or joy if we need another word here, a barometer of our vocation? What if that became an important marker for how we’re doing, and whether we might need to make adjustments?
What if in our prayer lives and our supervisory meetings, our year end reviews and our daily examens, we stopped to wonder a little about our gladness? Do we feel glad at the end of the day to be doing what we’re doing? Certainly not every day, and sometimes not for a whole season, but some of the time? Enough that we are eager and curious about moving forward, about what could be next? Or have resentment and grudging acceptance taken over a bit? Does our sense of obligation overwhelm the possibility for gladness?
What if we all spent a little more time just noticing our gladness? I don’t mean to put any pressure on finding it, just noticing it when and where it is actually present. What if we allowed ourselves to simply sit and absorb that gladness when we do find it? Later on we can ask ourselves some questions about it. Where do we find it? What makes it flee? Is it increasing or decreasing over time? What might it be telling us about where we are going? I think Jesus wants gladness for us. Gladness in our work and our play. Not at every moment, but certainly as a part of the cadence of our lives. What if we watch for gladness and see what opens before us?
Wellspring 