Everyone collects a certain amount of emotional baggage growing up, and for me that baggage is predominantly religious. And the emotional baggage I’m working on now has to do with the notion of “calling.” Frankly, I’m having a hell of a time getting rid of it.

But why would I want to?

The biblical background starts with the prophets. Elisha is called by Elijah and scolded when he turns to go tell his parents he’s leaving. God tells Jeremiah he’s chosen him for the task since before he was born. Ezekiel is command to eat a honey-sweet scroll, which then causes soul heartburn whenever he refuses to speak the painful words god gives to him.

In evangelical circles, calling is something which once received can never be refused. A calling haunts you. It condemns to a hellish existence if you avoid it. Jonah? Swallowed by the whale because he ran from his calling. In this vein, to be called is to be cursed, the spiritual equivalent of the bus (in that Keanu Reeves movie) that couldn’t go under 50mph without igniting the bomb.

The high church term for “calling” is “vocation,” from the Latin root for the same. The dreadful curse of “calling” is usually removed, but its meaning tends to fall into one of two unsatisfactory paths.

In one, vocation means what you are meant to do. This holds out the promise that you can be finally happy if you only discover what, precisely, you are meant to do. And that’s where it gets tricky. A less than completely satisfactory existence can be intepreted as sympomatic of missing your vocation. Finding your vocation (and/or your true self) becomes the key to happiness, even if the Buddha would say this is a pointless quest. The curse continues.

A second option secularizes vocation, turning it into “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.” Enter the Vo-Tech. Here there is little sense of higher purpose, perhaps only for those who are lucky or deserving enough to get a gig they enjoy. For the unlucky (or undeserving) majority, a curse of meaningless toil awaits.

At work we try to teach students a different meaning of vocation (which for reasons I’ll outline shortly, seems a poor term for it). We tell them vocation is the sweet spot between (a) what the world needs, (b) what you can do, and (c) what you’re passionate about. This sweet spot is wide enough that a number of different “careers” may fall into it.

Somewhere between (b) and (c) the notion of “gifts” peeks in. I have trouble narrowing it down to one or the other because you will likely be passionate about your gifts and not merely good at them and because you may be passionate about doing things for which you are not gifted.

Gifts—or “gifts and graces” in Wesleyan phraseology—are given to us expressly to be given to others. A gift may be a talent or knack or skill, but if kept by its holder it ceases to be a gift. Gifts thereby nurture and grow the wider community, even those gifts which are more introverted. It is not necessarily so with vocation.

If a gift is not given, there is no curse. The gifted thereby loses her gift (at least while it goes unused), and the richness of experience that it brings, but there is no haunting loss. Suppose I was a gifted pianist when I was younger but that I have fallen out of practice and do not even have a piano of my own. I can still remember a few of my favorite songs, and given regular practice I will be in full possession of my gift again, ready to give it to others. Gifts and graces, like blessings, do not die; they merely sleep.

Miroslav Volf offers “gift” as an alternative to “vocation” in Work in the Spirit (which seems to be a rewrite of his dissertation). Much of this essay draws directly from my skimming of that book.