An educator and author shares how she lives out her vocation, looking at the circumstances not of her own making as well as some of the gifts by which her vocation is both enlivened and enjoyed.

When I was a junior in high school, I was invited to a Seder at the home of a Jewish friend. This family was warm, hospitable, and delighted to include me in the Passover meal and to teach me their traditions. After dinner, the father took me and his daughter into his study for a conversation in which he carefully compared this Seder to one of the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper and helped us to see both the connections and the differences between them. A few days later, Martha, his daughter and my friend, went with me to the Maundy Thursday service at my congregation, Trinity Presbyterian Church. The thrill of explaining to her what was going on in the service was electrifying. Never before had I seen so clearly how wondrous that night is.

Even at the time, that Thursday night felt like a second confirmation. It was a fruition of the Christian education I had had thus far — and also a glimpse of what it might mean to be an educator concerned with caring for and interpreting the stories and way of life that became so vivid to me through that service of Holy Communion. The events of that paschal week also placed my Christian identity into a larger context, as I discovered that my faith need neither break under the challenge of difference nor destroy the good will of people whose beliefs were different from my own. My joy in having been baptized into the Christian life grew within me, and so did my desire to study and teach this way of life.

The Givens and the Gifts
This is what I have done in one way or another all my life long, as student, professor, spouse, parent, friend, author, colleague, and congregant. Tracing my path through a series of academic institutions and personal stages, with a pause at each crossroads, would not really get at what matters here. Instead, I want to consider some of the givens — the circumstances not of my own making — that have shaped how I live out my Christian vocation. And I want to consider some of the gifts by which vocation is both enlivened and enjoyed, which often arrive in the hands of the specific neighbors with whom one shares life, work, and mutual service.

One crucial given is history. I was born in 1949, near the front end of the baby boom and just in time to occupy a front-row seat as women’s opportunities for service in the church expanded. Beginning around the age of twelve, I felt called to ordained ministry, something that was technically possible in my denomination (Presbyterians began ordaining women in 1956) though in fact quite remote from anything I had ever observed. Subtle remarks here and there, as well as specific advice from pastors and the fact that church leadership positions were consistently offered not to me but to boys much less devout and capable than I, made it clear that this path would be an exceptionally difficult one.

Perhaps I lacked the courage to respond, or perhaps what I encountered was not prejudice (or not only prejudice) but rather a well-founded communal discernment that my gifts lay elsewhere. In any case, I soon learned to keep my sense of call to myself.

In college, I discovered that being a theology professor was a pretty good alternative for someone whose deep desire was to learn more about Christian faith and to share her learning with others. By an odd twist of history, my academic pursuits found ready support amid the rapid change of the 1970s, in part because theological educators had suddenly become aware of their institutions’ urgent need for women scholars and teachers. Since that time — first as a seminary professor and now as an author and editor who teaches mostly in church settings — I have found, or have been found by, work that fulfills both my youthful yearning to minister in Jesus’ name and my desire as a Christian scholar to serve those who would study the way of abundant life Jesus promises and provides. I still wonder, however, what place I might have found in a church that was more open to my youthful aspirations, or less supportive of my adult ones. History matters as we live out our vocations.

The needs and gifts of our nearest neighbors also matter. Mine — husband and children — have helped me in more ways than they or I can imagine to experience and embrace the Christian life more fully. They also have drawn me to the Lutheran tradition, into which I have now been received and from which I am still learning to live.

Specificity of Vocation
Living out a vocation is not an abstract enterprise. Like many who serve in the church or the academy today, I often have felt crushed by the multiple duties of work and family, no matter how dearly I cherish both and how earnestly I try to do what is right and good. Vocation must be lived out across a series of days that never have more than twenty-four hours, across weeks that are cluttered with busyness, over years that are of limited number and duration. Further, vocation is lived out in a specific place that never turns out to be Eden; each place, after all, is the home of sinners, chief among them myself. Service becomes burdensome and corrupt when central purposes are forgotten in the face of multiple distractions and, worse, when self-satisfaction, self-criticism, or recognition from others seem to determine its value.

As a new Lutheran, I am grateful in such times for an admonition this church speaks with great clarity: “Remember your baptism.” I am grateful to be reminded again and again that forgiveness is at the heart of things, that this forgiveness is for me as well as for others, and that I am not imprisoned by yesterday’s sin but set free for service in each new day. Being part of the Lutheran community helps me to see that those of us who work as teachers and scholars in and of the church are the same as all Christians: joyful service in our particular calling depends on the grace of God, freely given through our baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus, that we might walk in newness of life.

One benefit of being a student and teacher of Christian life and thought is that it allows one to revisit, again and again in the midst of everyday work, the core truths on which one’s life and the life of the world depend—something I am grateful to have experienced anew while writing this essay. This is a great privilege that is shared by pastors and others who serve the church in rostered ministry. And yet such visits can be little more than intellectual tourism if we do not also come to Christ’s table hungry for the nourishment provided there and to God’s Word longing for wisdom, in the company of brothers and sisters who do every good kind of work.

Dorothy Bass is director of the Valparaiso project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith, the editor of Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People (Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, 1998, $18.95), and a member of Christ Lutheran Church in Valparaiso, Indiana.