Faith features

It's your call

This weekend sees the Cathedral packed for the ordination of nearly twenty people to serve in Church of England churches throughout the Diocese of Worcester.

For them it is the conclusion of one journey and the beginning of another. The journey they are beginning is of serving God as deacons and priests in his church, having just completed up to three years of training.

Before that, came a long process of what we refer to as testing of vocation – seeking, with the help of others, to discern whether or not they are being called to this particular life. I say life rather than work because being a deacon or priest is a way of life rather than a job.

The word vocation comes from the Latin word meaning to call. Clergy talk about what they do as a calling. Sometimes - but not often - you hear doctors and nurses and a few others using the same language. Sadly, hardly anyone else seems to think of their life in terms of vocation nowadays.

This represents quite a shift. A generation or two ago, very many more people in a range of occupations would have understood their lives in terms of a calling.

I had some fascinating conversations a couple of years ago with a very elderly man who was an expert in repairing clocks. Having been apprenticed at the age of fourteen, and ridden a bike twelve miles to get to work every day for the first few years of his working life, at the age of ninety he was still repairing clocks. It was his life and he loved it. He believed that he was called to do it and that he was performing a real service in doing so, which he was. 

When people no longer understand what they do as a calling, much is lost. Jobs are done just to pay the bills and without any larger object in mind. To speak of vocation is to speak of being part of a larger vision, it is to understand one's life to have a particular purpose.

Without a sense of vocation, it is all too easy for life to lack that purpose and for empty materialism to follow. That does not makes for happiness.

Having a call, of course, implies that someone is calling you. That someone is God and leaving God out of life seldom leads to happiness, either.