It’s always an honor for me to be invited to this hallowed space of worship, of music, of song, of embarking on your very full days and of return. Thank you to Rector Giles and Reverend Wydner and the whole chapel staff for this invitation. And I welcome everyone back to Concord from your spring vacation. I hope it was a time of refreshment, rest, and renewal for the final few weeks of the school year. Now that you’re back from vacation, I’m going to ask that you join me as I offer some thoughts about vocation. Vocation, a word that finds its root in the Latin word for “calling.” Though you might already be thinking of your next vacation—just over a couple months away, I’ve been wondering about how we find our respective vocations, our callings, in life.
There was a time when the opposite of a prep school like St Paul’s, or the usual alternative track for young people to follow if they were not going to attend more academically rigorous high school, was what used to be called vocational schools. It seemed then that young people were tracked, from an early age, to go into the trades among which were carpentry, mechanics, plumbing, or HVAC. They could become medical or dental technicians, metalworkers, masons. My classmates who were on that vocational track seemed to be assigned their vocations. Sadly, senselessly, those not being trained in such trades, those more at happy with their homework assignments in math, science, languages, or history, were often encouraged to look down on those who would work in the trades.
Thankfully, I have seen a blurring of the classism that those divisions in education seemed to enforce. Some of the most insightful, erudite, wise—not to mention well-compensated-- people I know, make a living by their handiwork. They practice crafts that combine knowledge, skill, intuition, and the ability to relate to people across differences. My life is filled with interactions with those whose joy in their vocations comes from the exercise of such skills.
One such example is the character of George Pocock, the boatbuilder and philosopher without whom there would be no story behind “The Boys In the Boat.” He appears in the movie, but he is more much central in the book. Just as the success of that underdog 1936 Olympic crew would be impossible without Mr. Pocock, so St. Paul’s rowing would be much less accomplished without Mr. Matt Bailey who practices his craft in the shop at the boathouse of Turkey Pond.
We encounter the teachers, staff, grounds crew, and maintenance crew, food service crew, many of whom are doing their job, quietly, with nobility and dignity every day. It’s always a joy to see Mr. Roger Farwell, the steward of this magnificent space whenever I come here. He and his colleagues on this campus do essential work, work for which I hope they derive enjoyment and even delight that’s beyond just punching the clock to fulfill the hours of the terms of their employment. I hope we notice and thank them for the pursuit of their respective callings.
I am curious about how you will hear your vocation, your calling. Perhaps you already know it in a burning desire to follow in the steps of someone you admire, someone you feel you’d like to emulate. Perhaps you’ve heard someone you know who is quite happy and content with their work say, “Do what you love, and you will never work a day in your life.” I don’t know if I’ve ever trusted that. I love being a Christian priest and bishop, can’t imagine doing anything else, but it is nonetheless work somedays.
Frederick Buechner, the popular theologian of the 20th century, is often cited as describing vocation in this way:
There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of society, say, or the superego, or self-interest.By and large a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need to do and (b) that the world needs to have done...The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
What is your deep gladness? And what strikes you as the world’s deep hunger? Where do those things meet or intersect for you?
Perhaps you’re just beginning to ask those questions. So what if you get a hint of what your vocation may be by the experience, not of drudgery or tedium, or monotony, but of the opposite of those things: Ecstasy
Ecstasy is an odd word to apply to thinking of vocation. The culture might suggest ecstasy as a selfish state of extreme exhilaration, of incomparable perhaps even bacchanalian delight. It can suggest a kind of madness, a possession of the spirit, a rapt state. Ecstasy is hardly the theme of serious, purpose driven people who sit in these pews, right? We are all after all, residents of New Hampshire. We are known for being anything but ecstatic. No, we are granitic.
It's worth noting that the word ecstasy comes from the Greek, ek-stasis. Ek “out of, from, beyond and stasis, standing, the state of self, or position. Those experiencing ecstasy find themselves outside of themselves, in a rapt state, a kind of self-forgetting. We seldom notice that state, because we are less aware of ourselves when we are in it. Athletes might describe it as being “in the zone.” Artists or those solving a math or physics problem speak of being in a state of flow. Writers, speak of entering an altered state, a “fictive dream.”
As I suggest, probably the opposite of ecstasy is drudgery or tedium: where we keep looking at the watch or the clock, consigned to a minute by minute sighing awareness of the weight of time and effort. We think, all will be so much better well, once we get that one assignment done, or once that final push on the athletic field is behind us. Maybe today, as you’re back from vacation, you’re already thinking, “Just a few more weeks, and it will be summer. Can I last until then?”
More painfully, we are also aware of being mired in the deep conflicts and stresses of our world. We eagerly long for a day when there will be no more tyrants, despots, poverty, sin, brutality, violence, or death. So how can we imagine an ecstatic vocation in the face of these persistent antagonisms?
For decades now I have been working my way through the often dense poetry of W.H. Auden. He has a cycle of poems entitled ‘Horae Canonicae’ composed in the middle years of the last century. The Canonical Hours are the monastic hours that shape a day of prayer in a monastery. The poem set aside for the sixth hour, or noonday, opens this way:
You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,
you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,
wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function...
There should be monuments, there should be odes,
to the nameless heroes who [first got so lost in their vocation]
to the first flaker of flints who forgot his dinner,
the first collector of sea-shells to remain celibate.
Where should we be but for them?
Auden is describing ecstasy, self-forgetting, a kind of rapture in the calling, the pursuit, the energy of God’s heavenly realm seeking to draw us our of ourselves and to send us into the world.
As I was preparing these remarks, I thought I would visit the St Paul’s School website to look at the eyes and faces of so many of you caught up in your vocation. Yes you are called here as members of this community. I saw images of many of you forgetting yourselves in a task: playing a saxophone; threading a soccer or lacrosse ball through a crowded defensive field; on stage in an intricate dance; engaged in animated discussion in a classroom; eyes trained on Mr. White’s choral direction. Nowhere did I see anyone looking at their watch, or at their cell phone trying to escape the current moment by doom scrolling or waiting for an incoming text. The eyes I saw there are, I believe, the same as what Auden describes as those in a vocation... the truest kind of ecstatic self-forgetfulness.
It’s easy to state that your deep gladness in those moments are being fulfilled, but do these things meet the world’s deep hunger? Do we actually need that? How will such things actually dig the world out of our warfare, our environmental degradation, the deadliness of our cultural, political, racial, and economic divisions?
Yes, the world needs persons skilled in diplomacy, in engineering, in the healing arts, prophets and poets, chemists, and physicists and farmers to solve our crises in hunger, water, ecological collapse. We need prudent soldiers and judicious attorneys. We need people who love keeping our streets and cities just, safe, and clean. We need people whose commerce will employ, house, feed, and educate people. We need singers and makers of song.
But undergirding all these vocations is a deeper calling. What the world really needs are those who see the beauty of living, who live with a kind of abiding joy in nourishing healthy relationships, who notice how light filters out of trees. Those who, even if doing work that many may seem as utterly tedious or incomprehensible, will see and share the miracle of living, of sharing this precarious existence on this fragile and magnificent planet. What we need are human beings fully ecstatic, and thus fully alive for each other and our world.
To the extent this place prepares and equips your being so fully alive and ecstatic is the extent to which St. Paul’s School will be worthy to be called a vocational school in the deepest sense of the word.