Waldo Beach - "On Vocational Choice" (February 7, 1960)

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-	Amid the old routines of getting back to classes	0:19
	and taking up the fight against the system again,	0:24
	it's about this time of year	0:29
	in the academic gross	0:31
	when most students are vaguely bothered	0:34
	as well as elated	0:37
	by the prospect of spring.	0:40
	Bothered because spring intrudes	0:45
	with hard questions of destiny and decision	0:48
	as well as gay promises of Bermuda shorts and picnics.	0:53
	Seniors look over the last hurdles	0:59
	and see next year coming.	1:04
	Interviewers begin to invade the campus.	1:08
	Get a job.	1:14
	What kind of a job?	1:16
	Graduate school?	1:20
	Or would this postpone the vocational choice?	1:23
	And underclassmen are haunted by the questions	1:28
	of what to major in,	1:31
	what courses to take.	1:33
	By what criterion do you choose	1:37
	as you wait in registration lines,	1:41
	like cattle feeding into the great IBM slaughter.	1:45
	(audience laughing)	1:50
	Do you choose by tossing a coin	1:53
	or by following the devices of Robert Benchley,	1:57
	who, as I recall, engineered his whole college curriculum	2:01
	by the rule that he take only those courses	2:05
	that met after 11:00 AM in the morning	2:08
	and below the third floor of any building	2:11
	with none on Saturday,	2:14
	(audience laughing)	2:16
	or you choose a major by following	2:20
	the path of least resistance	2:24
	and going into what your dad went into	2:26
	when you don't really know what you're cut out for.	2:30
	A university is a kind of limbo	2:36
	of vocational uncertainty	2:39
	where we grope around in the curricular dark	2:44
	looking for our professions and destiny.	2:49
	It's a rare student	2:54
	who has known he was going into chemical engineering	2:56
	from the age of nine.	3:00
	For the great bulk of us,	3:04
	we're always on the way before we know where we're going	3:06
	and we're pushed to choose	3:12
	before we're ready to choose.	3:15
	Goals emerge on the way	3:19
	if they emerge at all.	3:23
	Sometimes, they emerge too late.	3:26
	This question of vocational choice	3:32
	is a co-ed question too.	3:37
	Questions of destiny, career, marriage,	3:40
	are as urgent and close to east as to west.	3:44
	Perhaps, the second thing you may overhear	3:50
	a co-ed say in passing is	3:52
	I met the nicest guy,	3:54
	he is a junior,	3:56
	he is pre-med	3:58
	or	4:00
	he is a senior.	4:03
	He doesn't know what he wants to do.	4:05
	The dread quality of vocational choices	4:09
	thus show through even our dating and our romantic choices.	4:13
	But there is a religious dimension	4:20
	to this problem of choosing a life job as well.	4:23
	For here,	4:28
	in the secret place	4:31
	within and in the presence of the holy,	4:33
	I am confronted not just by the proximate issue	4:38
	of majors and schools and job,	4:43
	but by the ultimate question	4:48
	of responsible existence.	4:51
	In college, I hold in my hands in a sense	4:56
	the span of my life,	5:00
	the gift of my years to spend,	5:04
	fingering a decision about how it's to be used.	5:09
	Now, I suppose the question of vocation is decided	5:17
	as much for me	5:21
	as by me	5:23
	by forces beyond my freedom.	5:26
	But insofar as I do have a say,	5:30
	I know that it is an urgent and acute and sobering question	5:34
	to ask, what do I do with my life	5:39
	to justify displacing this much air in the universe	5:44
	for as long a time as I'll be around?	5:50
	What relevance does the Christian faith have	5:57
	to this problem of vocation.	6:00
	At first glance,	6:04
	not much.	6:06
	In figuring out what he's cut out for,	6:09
	a duke student would go to the bureau of testing	6:14
	and guidance	6:17
	or the bureau of appointments	6:20
	before he'd go to the chapel.	6:21
	And at the level of practical wisdom	6:26
	and technical choice,	6:29
	he'd probably be right.	6:32
	But the problem of vocation is much more	6:36
	than a technical one.	6:39
	Spiritual answers to it go way beyond	6:42
	what any battery of tests can catch or measure.	6:45
	Indeed, from a religious standpoint,	6:52
	if you try to answer the vocational question	6:54
	just on a technical basis,	6:58
	you may wake up to yourself	7:03
	years later going through the motions of living,	7:05
	doing a job	7:10
	but with the poignant realization	7:12
	that the meaning,	7:17
	the point of it has washed out, has vanished,	7:19
	and you are going through the motions of existence.	7:24
	The classical biblical doctrine of vocation	7:33
	is the fixed point	7:36
	from which we can best move into this problem	7:39
	to show how one can draw lines	7:43
	from the biblical doctrine of vocation	7:47
	to where we are in this anxious limbo	7:50
	of vocational uncertainty.	7:56
	What does the Bible offer?	8:01
	What does it say?	8:04
	Well, it's a book about work.	8:07
	It describes a working God.	8:12
	Significant that what he did on the six days of the week	8:19
	in creation	8:23
	is much more important than what he did on the Sabbath	8:25
	when he took off.	8:28
	This is a working God	8:33
	who calls men continually in whatever job they pursue	8:37
	to serve the needs of community.	8:42
	In the biblical frame,	8:47
	it is always a situation of confrontation and command.	8:49
	Man, Adam,	8:54
	Isaiah,	8:57
	Jesus, Paul,	8:58
	whoever addressed by the divine	9:00
	and commanded to serve a need in the world.	9:06
	One of the finest expressions	9:10
	of the biblical doctrine of vocation	9:12
	is just on the edge of being in the Bible	9:17
	out of the Apocrypha.	9:21
	It's our scripture of the morning.	9:23
	It describes the work of the smith,	9:26
	the engraver,	9:29
	the farmer	9:30
	and it closes,	9:32
	they maintain the fabric of the world,	9:35
	and in the handy work of their craft	9:39
	is their prayer.	9:43
	One of the great revolutions	9:48
	in the history of the west	9:51
	took place	9:52
	when Luther recover this biblical doctrine	9:55
	and associated it finally	10:02
	with the whole Protestant tradition.	10:04
	Luther was profoundly moved	10:09
	by the awareness of the call of God to men	10:11
	in the menial and the common place	10:14
	to a divine mission,	10:18
	not to leave the world	10:20
	to go into the church,	10:23
	but to reverse the traffic,	10:27
	to go from the church into the world,	10:29
	into the marketplace,	10:33
	and there, to live a life of faith, active in love.	10:34
	And for Luther,	10:41
	any job which maintains the fabric of community	10:43
	becomes the occasion to fulfill vocation.	10:50
	From this standpoint	10:57
	of the Christian doctrine of vocation,	10:59
	we can look quickly at two opposite misunderstandings	11:02
	about what it means.	11:09
	The first is fastidiousness,	11:12
	which is the point of view	11:17
	that concentrates on the what of a job	11:18
	and draws a neat line between religious and secular jobs.	11:22
	By this division,	11:31
	a religious calling then is taken to mean	11:33
	going into church work,	11:36
	becoming a minister,	11:39
	or a missionary.	11:41
	People speak of full-time Christian service,	11:43
	and this means church work.	11:48
	Or very pious serious people	11:52
	have experiences of being called	11:55
	or serving the Lord.	11:58
	And this means becoming a minister.	12:01
	In the name of the Bible and of Luther,	12:05
	this is all wrong	12:07
	even though it's common talk among us.	12:11
	It divides off the sacred and the secular in a way	12:14
	which misunderstands the biblical message.	12:18
	Luther sharply pointed out this great error	12:24
	which is an essential error of the medieval church	12:28
	by describing the divine irony	12:33
	of the incarnation,	12:37
	that the visitation of God came to man not in church,	12:41
	but outside of church,	12:47
	in a stable,	12:49
	in a way that the professional religionist,	12:53
	the clergy	12:57
	could not see or understand.	12:59
	It could be seen only by fisherman,	13:02
	tax collectors,	13:05
	riff-raff.	13:08
	Commenting on the verse in the Christmas story	13:12
	and the shepherds returned,	13:15
	glorifying and praising God,	13:18
	Luther says,	13:21
	"This is wrong.	13:23
	We should correct this passage	13:25
	to read,	13:28
	they went and shaved their heads	13:29
	and fasted and told their rosaries and put on cows.	13:31
	Instead, we read,	13:37
	the shepherds returned	13:39
	to their sheep."	13:42
	Oh, that can't be right.	13:45
	Did they not leave everything and follow Christ?	13:48
	No.	13:51
	The scripture says plainly that they returned	13:53
	and did exactly the same work as before.	13:57
	Though our immediate culture is Protestant in name,	14:04
	we have fallen into a bad perversion	14:09
	of the doctrine of vocation	14:11
	when we think of the minister as doing the religious job,	14:13
	and banker or the salesman or the lawyer	14:18
	doing the secular job.	14:23
	Maybe the best we can do by Luther	14:27
	is to have layman take up the collection on Sunday.	14:31
	But vocation has to do not with the what of a job	14:37
	but the how,	14:44
	the spirit with which it is done	14:46
	in faithful love,	14:49
	in obedient service.	14:52
	By this logic, the doctor in the duke hospital	14:57
	giving hours of compassionate time in the clinic,	15:02
	though his language may be a little peppery	15:09
	and religiously improper,	15:13
	is fulfilling a religious vocation	15:17
	more than the minister	15:22
	who preaches most properly in the pulpit,	15:24
	but mainly because he enjoys	15:28
	hearing the sound of his own voice.	15:31
	There are many divinity students incidentally,	15:37
	who would make better plumbers than ministers.	15:41
	I don't know	15:46
	whether it's the Christian doctrine of vocation	15:47
	that leads me to this comment,	15:49
	it's maybe because I've been reading blue books.	15:51
	(audience laughing)	15:55
	Now, if fastidiousness makes its mistake	16:01
	in concentrating on the hotness of jobs,	16:05
	the opposite error is a romantic indiscrimination	16:08
	which neglects entirely the hotness of a job and says,	16:16
	whatever job you're in,	16:21
	do it in the Christian spirit.	16:24
	But it's not as simple as all that.	16:29
	The normal vocation is,	16:33
	whatever work that maintains the fabric of community.	16:35
	There are some jobs certainly	16:43
	which by their very hotness	16:46
	are destructive of community.	16:50
	They tear and destroy	16:52
	human worth and dignity.	16:55
	It's difficult to see how one could be a Christian burglar	17:00
	however softly he may tread	17:05
	or a dope pusher	17:09
	in the Christian spirit.	17:11
	For that matter, it's difficult to see	17:15
	how one can be a spiritual dope pusher	17:17
	through TV advertising,	17:22
	drugging the minds of millions	17:26
	with delusions and nonsense.	17:28
	Now, there are moral ambiguities	17:34
	and compromises in every job.	17:37
	There's no pure job	17:40
	or an honest dollar purely earned to be sure,	17:43
	but discriminating choice about what job to go into	17:49
	is crucial.	17:53
	The Christian rule of thumb here	17:56
	is whatever job	17:59
	serves	18:02
	the fabric of community	18:04
	is the right occasion	18:07
	for the expression of obedience to God's call.	18:09
	Well, so what?	18:15
	How can one draw the line more sharply	18:18
	between this Christian doctrine	18:21
	and where we sit	18:23
	in the spirit of realism	18:27
	which steers	18:31
	between romantic idealism,	18:33
	which looks only at the stars	18:35
	and is oblivious to hard facts,	18:37
	or a kind of a	18:42
	hard cynicism,	18:44
	which sees only facts	18:46
	and will not look up at the stars.	18:48
	Let me suggest three lines or three leads	18:53
	which may be drawn	18:57
	in vocational choice.	19:00
	The first is a practical point.	19:05
	Vocational decision is in part a technical question	19:09
	to be answered on the basis of the best technical data	19:17
	you can get.	19:21
	And there are rich resources in this university	19:24
	that can help you.	19:28
	The problem here at the technical level	19:30
	is to match your	19:33
	special subjective talents	19:36
	and acknowledgement of limitations	19:40
	to the objective needs of community.	19:44
	It would be foolish for somebody	19:50
	who turns gray at a whiff of formaldehyde	19:52
	or has nightmares about dissecting a fetal pig,	19:59
	to think very long about pre-med,	20:04
	or for a girl who is	20:08
	generally lumpish in contour	20:11
	to apply as a model at Bergdorf Goodman.	20:14
	It would be wise on the other hand	20:21
	for someone who is naturally drawn to children,	20:24
	to go into teaching	20:30
	for recreation.	20:31
	Or for one who's a natural with quantities	20:34
	and design and structure	20:38
	to go into physics,	20:43
	engineering.	20:45
	The informal rule	20:49
	for answering this technical question about yourself,	20:50
	I suppose, is	20:53
	in the curriculum,	20:55
	what courses do you feel inside of	20:57
	absorbed in?	21:01
	Maybe, even to reading beyond the assigned chapter,	21:04
	rather than the courses you're outside of	21:11
	finding something strange	21:14
	and foreign.	21:17
	But the technical decision	21:20
	may do no more than indicate	21:21
	what I'm not cut out for,	21:24
	or give me an awareness of subjective talents and interests.	21:27
	The moral decision is the more crucial,	21:32
	for it looks out	21:36
	from the self to the human situation	21:38
	and hear the call of God to man	21:44
	comes through the human need to be met and matched	21:46
	by whatever one's best talents are.	21:52
	The call may not take a dramatic form	21:58
	as it did for a Schweitzer.	22:01
	It may come.	22:04
	Indeed, it most usually does	22:07
	in a prosaic, unspectacular way.	22:10
	But wherever a human need of body or spirit	22:16
	is sensed and answered,	22:20
	whether it be in business or in politics or in education,	22:24
	the professional decision becomes the vocational decision.	22:29
	All such jobs	22:36
	that serve to maintain man's common life,	22:38
	laying brick,	22:42
	teaching third grade,	22:45
	sanitary engineering,	22:49
	house wifing,	22:52
	these are all of equal status and dignity.	22:54
	There are no higher and lower professions.	22:59
	No grades between blue collar	23:04
	and white collar and backward collar jobs.	23:07
	The minister and the janitor are equidistant from the altar	23:12
	since their jobs are equally indispensable to community.	23:18
	They are all obedient to the perennial call of God to man,	23:25
	to maintain the fabric of the world.	23:30
	And in the handy work of their craft	23:34
	is their prayer.	23:38
	There is a third line to be drawn	23:42
	from the Christian doctrine of vocation to modern work.	23:47
	Though this line is oblique.	23:51
	One of the qualities of modern work life	23:56
	which puts us a long way away	24:00
	from the smith, the potter,	24:04
	the farmer of our scripture	24:08
	or even from the Christian craftsman of Luther's day	24:13
	is that the external conditions of work	24:19
	have been radically changed	24:22
	by the industrial and organizational revolutions.	24:25
	The machine and the system	24:31
	have come in between the spirit of man	24:34
	and the work of his hands.	24:38
	The exercise of creativity,	24:42
	of imagination,	24:45
	the experience of joy and magic	24:47
	in encounter with soil	24:53
	and wood,	24:56
	and class	24:57
	and word	24:59
	are almost gone.	25:02
	Our work life is a grind,	25:05
	a curse,	25:08
	because it's mechanical and external,	25:10
	meaningless,	25:13
	whether this is a factory job	25:15
	or the office job or the teacher's job	25:18
	or the plastic station wagon	25:23
	supermarket routines of suburbia.	25:26
	The dimension of depth and meaning	25:31
	is all but gone,	25:35
	lost in piles of triplicate memos	25:38
	and grade curves	25:43
	and personality inventories.	25:46
	We are thin men	25:51
	living in a flat universe,	25:55
	nameless faces,	26:00
	not knowing why we work.	26:04
	Like nothing so much,	26:10
	perhaps as the cattle in a rohol actor	26:11
	at Princeton, New Jersey,	26:16
	where the cows live their whole recognized existence	26:18
	antiseptically never setting foot on ground,	26:22
	never allowed to stand in a field of clover	26:28
	in the sunshine	26:31
	to chew their cuts.	26:33
	Now to talk of	26:38
	recovering vocation	26:40
	in this mechanical life of ours	26:42
	may sound romantic indeed.	26:46
	And yet to go back to the text,	26:49
	the fabric of the world,	26:53
	what is this fabric?	26:55
	If it's warp be the realm of things,	26:58
	objects outside,	27:03
	it's whoof	27:07
	is the realm of persons.	27:11
	This delicate yet resilient texture	27:14
	of interpersonal relations in which we always move	27:18
	no matter what kind of job we have.	27:22
	And even in the dreary anonymous situations	27:26
	of our workaday life,	27:31
	we can always detect	27:35
	if we are sensitive	27:38
	the call of God,	27:40
	as it requires of us	27:43
	the care of persons.	27:46
	Between the lines of whatever job,	27:50
	Christian vocation means then	27:53
	a certain how,	27:56
	a certain feel	27:58
	and style of choice	28:01
	that insists the will to care for persons	28:06
	as infinitely sacred and precious.	28:10
	For those	28:17
	who cherish the worth of persons	28:18
	whom life thrust into their keeping,	28:22
	there is restored even amid the drudgery,	28:26
	the dismo monotony of mechanical life.	28:29
	There is restored the magic,	28:35
	the mystery,	28:38
	the joy	28:41
	of finding an eternal purpose	28:43
	within a passing operation	28:47
	in all this fleshly dress,	28:50
	bright suits	28:54
	of everlastingness.	28:57
	Amen.	29:04
	Let us pray.	29:05
	Oh thou who just call us	29:13
	all to many laborers of hand	29:16
	and mind and heart	29:20
	in thy single kingdom,	29:23
	grant us by thy grace	29:27
	the vision without which thy people perish	29:31
	and the work of their hands idle,	29:35
	that we may have restored unto us	29:41
	the joy of thy salvation	29:45
	and establish thou	29:50
	the work of our hands upon us.	29:53
	Yay, the work of our hands	29:58
	established thou it.	30:01
	Now, may the grace	30:05
	of our Lord Jesus Christ,	30:07
	the love of God,	30:10
	and the communion of the holy spirit	30:12
	be with you all now	30:17
	and evermore.	30:19

Item Info

Title:

Waldo Beach - "On Vocational Choice" (February 7, 1960)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r45h7gv6b

Date:

February 7, 1960

Speaker:

Beach, Waldo

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Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0092
ref5385_3t6
uachapelsermaud
duke:627893
dcrau002121
ark:/87924/r45h7gv6b
c75bbba3-1779-4677-92f1-99bbc1bf5630

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Duke Chapel Recordings

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The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

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Waldo Beach - "On Vocational Choice" (February 7, 1960)

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1. Waldo Beach - "On Vocational Choice" (February 7, 1960)

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Waldo Beach - "On Vocational Choice" (February 7, 1960)

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