Work, Job, Career, Employment
I wonder what you call or called the part of your life that occupies or occupied the largest part of the waking day. Maybe you are or were paid for it, maybe you weren’t, but for many of us it is something that makes up a big part of how we see ourselves.
One word that is sometimes used to refer to employment is “vocation”. In English, it is usually used to refer to a job to which we feel particularly suited. We might say that someone has really found their calling in life when we can see how they are flourishing in their chosen career.
This is understandable, but there are three dangers to this restriction of the word.
The first is that we sometimes see some jobs as more inherently moral than others (you are more likely to hear teaching referred to as a vocation than, for example, collecting rubbish). This leads us to expect higher standards from some people than from others, and while I agree that it is appropriate to hold people in public life to account for their behaviour, should we not all try to live up to those same standards?
The second is that we sometimes seem to see that enjoyment of a job as a reason to pay someone less: as if their moral reward should offset a financial one. This is most true, of course, in the way we consider those who care for their own children or vulnerable family members as economically unproductive. Sometimes it appears that the more a job involves care for others, the less well paid it is.
Fasting is simply the act of showing how seriously we care by choosing voluntarily to deny ourselves a meal or two. It also provides us with more time in our busy schedules to pray. It doesn’t force God to act, but it is good for us to be a little more serious than simply giving five seconds’ thought to others’ suffering.
There won’t be any extra services across the Benefice, but the usual Ash Wednesday service (at All Saints, Yatesbury at 1pm) will include a time of prayer for Ukraine and Russia.
But thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it can lead some of us to undervalue the important role we each play in our society. Whoever you are, whatever you do or have done, whether you got to choose your career or not, we all have a vocation, a calling. As a Christian, I believe the most important calling is to worship God, a value I know some of you share with me. But Jesus also teaches us that our second most important calling is to each other. Whether you are generating wealth by funding new start-ups, growing food for all of us to eat, making meals for your family, or providing your neighbour with the only 30 minutes of human contact they have had this week, we can all live up to that calling. Whatever we spend most of our lives doing, we can do it wrapped up in ourselves, or with an attitude of service.
75 years ago Princess Elizabeth became our queen. She didn’t have a choice, it was something she had been prepared for since the age of 10. It was her calling, and on 6th June 1952 she promised God and us that she would do her best to live up to that calling. It may be that you envy her that particular calling, but we don’t get to choose who we are born as. We can fight injustice for ourselves and others, but in the end, we all need to live up to our calling wherever we are. And in the 75 years since her coronation, through good times and bad, I believe Her Majesty has set us an example to follow wherever are. May she, and you, be blessed in your calling this year.