Holy Mountain: A Blog about Our Common Life: Post No. 650: Blogging as a vocation, or whatever this is

Monday, July 13, 2026

Post No. 650: Blogging as a vocation, or whatever this is

bicycle at rack in front of ivy covered brick building

Hickok Hall at Coe College, where your humble
and mostly retired blogger wrote this post

I've been out of full-time teaching for two years now, which has left me with more time to read and write. This is a good thing! I write a lot--journals, songs, letters, blog posts. I seem to need to write, and I am grateful to you for reading and responding.

Blogging on Holy Mountain is what passes for work in my life these days, judging from the time I spend doing it as well as thinking about it when I'm not doing it. Sometimes, like now for example, I return to the academic building where I've had an office since 1990 to do this work.

What keeps me going, besides an apparent compulsion to write out my thoughts, is the sense that this is a meaningful way for me to contribute to important discussions about the state of our world. The rewards are when I write myself into a better understanding of things and/or when my writing stimulates thoughtful responses from others. I don't need money, but I do occasionally think about moving to a hotter platform like Substack.

Last week in Christian Century, Texas pastor Mike Gaventa wrote about a "crisis of vocation" in the mainline Protestant church. Actually, the phrase he used was "vocational theology," which focuses on the language we use to talk about vocation, but he had plenty to say about vocation itself. His article rang some bells, even though (a) he used vocation in its typical sense of a chosen career, and (b) he was writing specifically about careers in the church.

Gaventa begins by quoting theologian Frederick Buechner, who wrote in 1973 that "the place God calls you do is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." He suggests this fundamental truth might be amended by:

distinguishing the call from "market-based assumptions about value and social status"
seeking "the well-being and best interests of the whole body," often in opposition to the status quo
enabling "the doing of gladless work," of which his repeated example is cleaning toilets
continued personal discernment, "because God is never done making any of us"

Is it possible to find work that is personally meaningful, but also brings you into community with God and your fellow human beings? (It would be good if it also had decent pay and benefits.) All work, even messy work, has dignity under those conditions. In the 2023 Wim Wenders movie Perfect Days, Koji Yakusho plays a man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo. At first he seems to have a well-ordered life and a beatific attitude that is almost godlike, though in time we find there is dissatisfaction and loneliness and a backstory. Of course, when is there not?

Perfect Days trailer (1:44)

While at graduate school in the 1980s, I regularly participated in the Wesley Foundation at the university, and for a while served on the church's Pastor-Parish Relations Committee. I remember that the associate pastor in charge of the day-to-day operations of the Wesley Foundation had in her job description the charge to help students identify a sense of mission in their chosen careers. I've often thought about that since, that any career can be a vocation if you consider how you might use your work to serve God. I've also thought, during my career as a college faculty member, that institutions under financial stress must make compromises to sustain themselves, which sometimes call the mission itself into question. I've wondered, in times of high levels of doubt, whether it might be better to make money however you can, and seek a vocation in your off hours.

Well, now I'm in a position where all my hours are off hours. There's a version of retirement in the mass media that makes it sounds like second childhood. But it's not hard to conceive of an alternate version that is a vocation or something much like it, focused on community not financial gain and involving continued personal discernment. And, at least on campus, the skilled and reliable Nick cleans the toilets!

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