By Steve Garber
Some years ago I led an ongoing study for PhD candidates in various engineering disciplines in Carnegie-Mellon University's Robotics Institute. They were unusually able and widely read, and together we pondered the theological and cultural context of their work. In a place where all things seemed possible technologically, their most persistent concern was with the meaning of their learning and labor. What is the future of my research? Who will use it? What will it be used for? Will it be for honorable ends?
At one point in those years together, we were reading a European philosopher of technology, someone with a broad and deep vision of the challenges of the modern world, but also with a profound grasp of the philosophical and theological issues implicit for those who live in a technological society.
One day, right in the middle of our discussion, the door opened a crack. No one entered, and we went on. I did not think about it until the following week when a visitor joined us, a professor from an Australian university there at CMU for a sabbatical year, writing a book on artificial intelligence. At the end of our study that day, with some chagrin he told us that he had come looking for us the previous week. He had been told that a group of Christians met in the Robotics Institute on Thursdays at noon. What had surprised him was opening the door and hearing us talking about technology!
His assumption? That we would be talking about something more "Christian." That somehow people engaged-heart and soul and mind and strength -in the work of the technological society, laboring day by day to understand what they did in light of what they believed, instead would be discussing a matter of faith or doctrine that was somehow privately nourishing but vocationally irrelevant, personally helpful but occupationally disengaged.
In the last few months a group of chiefs of staff who for 15 years have met regularly in the Capitol to think through the meaning of their vocations, reading and reflecting together on the deeper issues of faithful political involvement, decided to invite their pastors to join them for a lunch.
A large motivation was to involve their pastors in their world, thinking it might be interesting and even important to see the push-and-shove context of the vocational settings in which their parishioners labor. These are remarkably serious people: serious about God, about vocation, about politics, about culture, about the world. Their reading over the years has been amazingly broad and deep. Their conversations among themselves have been wonderfully stimulating, but to add to that, they have often drawn in people as diverse as Bono of the Irish band U2 and Tom Wolfe the American novelist.
Though the invitations were timely and sincere, not one pastor was able to join the group for lunch. Interpreting the response, the members concluded that while they are "parishionally-prized" by their pastors-truly loved -their work is seen as "indifferent" to the mission of the Church, i.e. we have programs that the congregation needs supported, so please to do so with your money and time-but your work on Capitol Hill, well....
These two stories capture the dilemma that too many experience as they take up their vocations. On the one hand are recent and not-so recent graduates of undergraduate institutions who face the great challenge of working out the meaning of their beliefs with the weight of life upon them. I think I know what I am supposed to be doing. But is this it? And are there any honest relationships between what I do and what I believe, or am I just hoping against hope, and this "vocation" business is just academic, an ivory-tower conversation unrelated to the way the world really works? On the other is the difficulty that confronts both pastor and parishioner over the character of vocation. What is the pastor's calling, in the end, if not to shepherd his flock in taking up its own callings? What is the mission of the church if not to be a community marked by a liturgy of word and sacrament, of life and labor that takes the gospel of the kingdom into the world?
The questions raised, and the answers given, matter. Now almost two decades later, the penetrating insights of Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life still echo across these United States- for those with ears to hear. Robert Bellah and his colleagues took up Alexis de Tocqueville's landmark study of America in its first fifty years, wondering "who are we? what do we believe? and how do we live?" a century-and-a-half later.
With broad brush-strokes they set forth a vision of the "habits of heart" that are required if we are to sustain our experiment in representative democracy. Formed by their own sensitivity to transcendence and truth, even to what they term "the biblical tradition," they sensed that we are badly fraying, unable to hold onto the fragile relationship between the "me and the we," the individual and the community. In their final chapter, "Transforming American Culture," they propose that a "reconstituted social world" is necessary, arguing that " a reappropriation of the idea of vocation or calling" is critical to this recovery of a "revitalized social ecology." Particularly intriguing and important is the authors' argument that the church played a key role in shaping the worldview that set in place the habits of heart that Tocqueville identified as essential, if the American experiment was to be sustained.
For people who care about America and its history-past, present, and future -- the stakes are not small, for the church and for the culture. It is for this reason that The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation, and Culture has come into being. With a vision that is at the same time very local and embodied, and very national and international, we are a network of men and women who are learning about the meaning of vocation, of what it means to hear God as he calls people to care for the world in his name. We believe this is a strategic place to begin- seeking the renewal of our common life as we do so.
For blessing and for curse, Washington, DC is the capital city of the world in these early years of the 21 st-century. Our beliefs and choices, our attitudes and ambitions ripple out across the face of the earth. Before God and our neighbors we are responsible to do justice and to love mercy, forged by an honest humility, in the push-and-shove of our callings and careers, our vocations and occupations. As complex and difficult as that is, that is our responsibility.
The great Czech playwright who became a prisoner who became president, Vaclav Havel, has said it so well, seeing into the core of our humanity: the secret of man is the secret of his responsibility. Karma is the not the last word. Neither is fate. By God's grace, we are able to respond, responsible. It is not a small word, ever.
We invite you to join us.
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