Quotables

"...Often we want to be somewhere other than where we are, or even to be someone other than who we are. We tend to compare ourselves constantly with others and wonder why we are not as rich, as intelligent, as simple, as generous, or as saintly as they are. Such comparisons make us feel guilty, ashamed, or jealous. It is very important to realize that our vocation is hidden in where we are and who we are. We are unique human beings, each with a call to realize in life what nobody else can, and to realize it in the concrete context of the here and now.
We will never find our vocations by trying to figure out whether we are better or worse than others. We are good enough to do what we are called to do. Be yourself!..."

Henri Nouwen
20th-century, Catholic Professor, Writer, Priest

"...The particular vocation of individual artists decides the arena in which they serve and points as well to the tasks they must assume, the hard work they must endure and the responsibility they must accept. Artists who are conscious of all this know too that they must labor without allowing themselves to be driven by the search for empty glory or the craving for cheap popularity, and still less by the calculation of some possible profit for themselves. There is therefore an ethic, even a "spirituality" of artistic service, which contributes in its way to the life and renewal of a people. It is precisely this to which Cyprian Norwid seems to allude in declaring that "beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work is to raise us up..."

Pope John Paul II
Letter to Artists

"...Those who perceive in themselves this kind of divine spark which is the artistic vocation -- as poet, writer, sculptor, architect, musician, actor and so on -- feel at the same time the obligation not to waste this talent but to develop it, in order to put it at the service of their neighbor and of humanity as a whole..."

Pope John Paul II
Letter to Artists

"...Great offices will have Great talents.
And God gives to ev'ry man
The virtue, temper, understanding, taste,
That lifts him into life; and lets him fall
Just in the niche he was ordain'd to fill.
To the deliv'rer of an injur'd land
He gives a tongue t' enlarge upon, an heart
To feel, and courage to redress her wrongs;
To monarchs dignity, to judges sense;
To artists ingenuity and skill.

The Task, "The Winter Evening," lines 788-797..."

William Cowper
18th century English poet

"...When I use the word "vocation," I must interpret that. We tend to use the word "vocation" in our everyday parlance as though it is synonymous with occupation. From the Biblical standpoint, the Bible talks about vocation as a calling from God, a calling to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Your occupation is what you work at. You decide that occupation and the character by which you work in that occupation grows out of your sense of vocation. You are a disciple of Jesus Christ. This is why I am saying that we do not separate the sacred from the secular. Christian faith is not simply a sacrament that you engage in at the eleven o'clock hour on Sunday morning. All of life becomes sacred; all of life is a sacrament; all of life is to be lived in the will of God; all of life is to be an expression that we have been reconciled to God and now we are out to reconcile others to know what it means to fellowship with Him. To say then that vocation as a Christian holds the sacred and the secular together means that there is no area of life in which you and I are not responsible to bring to bear upon that area of life the higher values of the Christian faith..."

Myron Augsburger
Mennonite theologian and farmer

"...For many of us who work, there exists an exasperating discontinuity between how we see ourselves as persons and how we see ourselves as workers. We need to eliminate that sense of discontinuity and to restore a sense of coherence in our lives..."

Max DePree
The Herman Miller Corporation

"...I'm a musician. I write songs. I just hope when the day is done I've been able to tear a little corner off of the darkness..."

Bono
U2

"...We need Christian people to work as healers: as healing judges and prison staff, as healing teachers and administrators, as healing shopkeepers and bankers, as healing musicians and artists, as healing writers and scientists, as healing diplomats and politicians. We need people who will hold on to Christ firmly with one hand and reach out the other, with wit and skill and cheerfulness, with compassion and sorrow and tenderness, to the places where our world is in pain. We need people who will use all their god-given skills, as Paul used his, to anaylse where things have gone wrong, to come to the place of pain, and to hold over the wound the only medicine which will reallly heal, which is the love of Christ made incarnate once more, your smile and mine, your tears and mine, your patient analysis and mine, your frustration and mine, your joy and mine..."

N.T. Wright
For All God's Worth

"...So at the end of our time as a band perhaps we will have only one song to sing -- just one very long, rambling, eclectic song that touches on life, death, pain, sex, anger, joy, peace, politics, God and the other elements of a searching soul in the twenty first century.

Maybe at the end of my life I will sing only one song, a song that has been refined and purified. A lonely group of notes that will be a sweet, sweet sound for an audience of one..."

Jon Foreman
Switchfoot

"...Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart..."

The Book of Common Prayer