Duke Divinity School Professor Richard Lischer once wrote: “Vocation puts an end to you in order to disclose your true end.” 

These words give me pause. Sometimes absorbing a profound truth requires a bit of courage. For so many years now, I have had a small quote from another writer, this one a poet, framed on my desk:

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

I used to teach the poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time” to my middle school students, and we began by defining avocation as a hobby and vocation as a job. They spoke and wrote of the “worst” possible jobs—garbage collector, income tax investigator, factory worker, mortician—and the “dream” jobs—astronaut, professional sports team coach, National Geographic photographer, film star.

I tried to push them a bit into considering the possibility of the so-called “worst” jobs offering a kind of goodness and satisfaction that could not be found in those “dream” jobs, and although they came up with some good insights, their youth left them clearly unconvinced. “But,” I told them, “Robert Frost is suggesting that the ideal job is the one where you hesitate to even call it a job because you enjoy it so much. It is the work you would do for no pay if your financial circumstances didn’t require it. It is work that feels like play.”   

Not many people find this meeting of vocation and avocation, for a variety of reasons. I am immeasurably grateful that I did. Even as a child, I was unconsciously applying Frost’s principle, as my most prolonged and pleasurable play was setting up a school in our basement and teaching various stuffed animals and dolls when my sisters refused to participate. Pursuing a career as an educator was inevitable, not because I was a woman in a time when it was one of the more “acceptable” choices, but because it was my passion.

And it was good. Middle school is a golden place, a time of in-between, a time when the child is disappearing—but not entirely, and the cares and challenges of a bigger world are precarious and exciting both. When I moved on to teach high school, there were new rewards—teaching more challenging material, conversing on a deeper level, watching these almost-adults transform as they developed their gifts, asked hard questions, and seriously considered future vocations.

When I retired, I began asking myself some hard questions. What becomes of a teacher when the classroom disappears? And who am I if I am not a teacher? But these questions about who we are when we relinquish something that has given us purpose and direction apply to many moments. Retirement is one relinquishing among many, as I’ve been realizing over the past several months. Thus, Lischer’s quote continues to both haunt and intrigue me: “. . . an end. . . in order to disclose our true end.” 

What is this true end? Death? In a sense, yes, as we are reminded time and again in scripture that we are “dust and shall return to dust.” But that end is really only the “cover and title page,” as C.S. Lewis reminds us at the close of his final Narnia book The Last Battle, “Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever; in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

Now at last, in a season where I find myself having to relinquish meeting with the Life Change Book Club inside the Handlon Correctional Facility, I am once again standing on a precipice, wondering who I really am and what will become of me. When I set aside my vocation several years ago, I knew that teaching was the gift God gave me in order to strive to enlighten those tender souls put into my care, and in the process, to draw myself closer to the Giver of all good gifts.

Now, in this season, I am hoping that, in that striving, I offered my students and my fellow readers in prison something “for Heaven and the future’s sakes.” And so my prayer becomes “Oh God, when all else is set aside, I discover that I am your eager but bewildered student. Teach me, then, so that I am ready for Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read.”

Header photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash