My colleagues in the Chaplaincy are some of my favorite colleagues at the university where I work. I’ve written in the past about the work we’ve done together exploring ideas and definitions around vocation and calling, and over the winter break this year, they had us back at it again. 

This time, it was for an informal book club for staff across campus, reading the book Follow Your Bliss And Other Lies About Calling by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore and discussing how it could inform our work with students as well as our own understanding of calling and what it means in our lives. 

Unsurprisingly, given that reading is one of my main hobbies, I’m a sucker for a good book club, and Miller-McLemore’s book provided great material for a rich discussion with my colleagues.

Perhaps my main takeaway from her book was thinking about the ways calling varies at different life stages and reinforcing the notion that calling isn’t a one-and-done sort of thing. It seems so obvious — that calling would ebb and flow throughout our lives and that we’d embrace multiple callings at various stages — and yet too often we talk as if each person has one definitive calling or purpose in life. 

But Miller-McLemore delved into the ways calling can shift and change during a person’s life. She also acknowledges the multiplicity of callings. We will all have multiple callings over the course of our lives, rather than one sole calling. In fact, sometimes we will be forced to choose between two competing callings (what Miller-McLemore calls “conflicted callings” in a chapter of the book.) None of this suggests that one calling is all we have in this life.

Too often I think people equate calling to their “dream job,” their “life’s work,” or something similar. Miller-McLemore effectively challenges these ideas and adds some much-needed complexity to our understanding of calling and vocation.

My other favorite part of her book is her emphasis that calling can at times be deeply painful. As the title of her book suggests, calling is certainly not all about “following your bliss,” and over the course of the book, she makes the compelling argument that we are in dire need of a “vision of calling that incorporates suffering rather than overrides it.”

Callings can be incredibly life-giving but can also include grief, pain, and suffering. I think most of us know this from our own lived experience and the complexities of our own callings, but it can be a helpful reminder that calling is really not about following your bliss, finding that one true calling, and then coasting for the rest of your life.

In chapters on missed callings and relinquished callings, Miller-McLemore acknowledges the deep pain that can go along with giving up a long-held calling or letting go of something you thought would be your calling but did not come to fruition through no fault of your own. In a chapter on blocked callings, she highlights the ways people can be kept from their callings by the systems we’re embedded in, by racism and sexism, or by other circumstances beyond our control. In a chapter on fractured callings, Miller-McLemore leaves space for the ways we screw up and fail in our callings.

All of these can be painful and complicated experiences, but it is a vital part of calling. Miller-McLemore doesn’t shy away from the fact that finding our callings and allowing them to unfold over the course of our lives is hard work. It requires resilience, hope, and persistence. As she concludes in the introduction to her book, “calling involves bliss and sacrifice.” But she argues, and I agree, that telling this truth, rather than pretending calling is all about bliss and happiness and total fulfillment, will “help pave the way for living more meaningful and purposeful lives.”

Her book wasn’t necessarily ground-breaking, but it was a reminder about the many myths that endure about calling and vocation and the need to have honest conversations, both about the joys of discovering and living into our callings as well as the suffering and sacrifice.