Osler's Razor

I've been thinking about vocation lately, and visiting last week with people like Stacy Rector, Todd Lake, Jeanne Bishop, and Randall O'Brien (all of whom live out a strong sense of vocation) has only deepened those thoughts.

Vocation is something more than a job-- Hulitt Gloer, quoting someone, described it to me once as the place where "your great passion meets the world's great need." It's something more than a job; it is what you do with your life, that thing you can give, and which feeds you spiritually as you do so.

Almost everyone I know who are my vocational heroes, including those four people named above and people like Bob Darden, Susan Stabile, and Neil Alan Willard, exemplify some of the things I see in true vocation. First, there is passion for an idea involved, and also there is something else... the best word for it, that I can come up with, is transgression. People with a vocation almost always are striving to make the world better, and in doing so, they transgress settled expectations. It isn't easy; I suspect that constant accolades are not a sign of true vocation, because the hard work of defying expectations and setting the bar higher is going to upset some people. And humility... that, too, is always part of the mix. So my recipe is Passion + Transgression + Humility = Vocation.

For Christians, the idea of vocation includes the driving force of faith, and a faith which is always (when viewed honestly) unsettling. It is, literally, a cross to bear. And perhaps Jesus's work is the best example of vocation, in the way I have described: Passionate, humble, transgressive, and going directly to this world's great needs. I fall so short of that example (and the example of the others I hold up here) that I am sometimes taken aback. Last week was wonderfully humbling that way....

In terms of what I do, the most important thing is teaching. The best teachers I have known had exactly those traits-- passionate, transgressive, and humble. In my advocacy work, what I do has a purpose (I hope)-- I want to sand down the roughest edges of our criminal justice system. That is what links commutation, my projects with the sentencing guidelines and my work against the death penalty and juvenile life without parole. (To hear me talk about commutation, you can hear my interview today with Stewart Harris at Tennessee Public Radio at 2 pm central time at wets.org/). I'm not great at it yet, but I am learning. Luckily, I have some very good role models.