How does the Jesuit understanding of vocation intersect with your own questions about vocation and calling in this stage of your life and ministry? Include quotes/citations, please
I have shared previously that I used to be a high school teacher. My undergraduate degree was in music education and when I left that field, I was serving as the mentor teacher to the world language, arts, and music team. I had given school wide presentations about being a better teacher and using different systems and tools to be a better resource for students. My APEST gifting was teacher by a long shot. I thought that I had it made in terms of fulfilling my vocation with my career.
However, I started to lose my zeal for education, and that was in no small part to the culture in which it exists. As a music teacher, I was thankfully immune to a lot of the requirements that the “core” classes had to deal with (standardized tests, performance based on test results, teaching to standardized tests, etc.). I started to become jaded at the institution of education as opposed to the field of education. It created a cognitive dissonance. What else is better suited for me than being a teacher?
I’m not entirely sure when I was able to disassociate my identity from the career of teacher, but once it happened, I found a lot of freedom in how in both how I taught and how I pastored. In a way I understood that “[v]ocation overarches our work, jobs, and career and extends to the kind of person we hope to become. It is what we are called to do, and who we are called to be.”1 My mode of teaching was about sharing with my classes how I viewed the world through music. Music was who I was and I had a gift of teaching, it was easy to share that instead of teach that. In many ways, being a pastor is the same. It is an outpouring of who I am.
This is an ongoing process. I was a campus pastor for awhile and enjoyed that, and after that position I was seeking to be a senior pastor. However, it worked out that I currently serve as an executive pastor, and I really like that a lot. Martin writes about the time it takes for sediment of a pond settling inside of a glass to gain clarity and compares that to giving ourselves clarity in what our vocation is.2 Now that I see there is still debris swirling around, I am learning to be patient to gain the clarity I seek.