Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good

“Truth is in order to goodness.” Thus does the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Book of Order affirm an historic and foundational principle of church order. Here we find the settled understanding “that there is an inseparable connection between faith and practice, truth and duty.” What we believe shapes how we live. What we know directs what we do. Or at least we think this is how it is supposed to be.

In “Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good,” Steven Garber presents a searching reflection upon the connection between truth and duty under the rubric of vocation. Vocation is a way of seeing and knowing that leads to action. Vocation is a willingness to be implicated and obligated by the brokenness of the world. “To be ‘obligated’ requires that one know the reality of one’s situation, of one’s moment in time, in relation to God, to others, to the world. To be obligated means that one understands one’s responsibility, one’s accountability, and then acts upon it.” Vocation is a responsible seeing, an active knowing — a truth that is in order to goodness.

Against the landscape of an info-glutted culture of “whatever” that increasingly leaves us numb and disengaged, Garber persistently asks a number of implicating questions: Is it possible to know the world and still love it? How does one learn to see oneself as responsible for the way the world is and isn’t? Knowing what I know about the world, what will I do? He winsomely introduces the reader to a great cloud of witnesses whose lives and stories, sometimes tragically so, offer a human answer to these vocation-inducing questions. In the words and stories of artists, authors, philosophers and everyday people, Garber presents what the title promises — visions of vocation — windows into actual lives lived attentively, lived vocationally. I found some of the most compelling reading to be in the backstories of these vocational witnesses.

The author, who serves as the principal of The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation and Culture, writes with a keen awareness of both the human condition and the received wisdom of Scripture. He thankfully avoids turning the call to vocation into either a depressing jeremiad or a flight into Pollyanna-like fancy. Rather, he holds in tension the blessings and burdens of the human story believing that, at best, vocation is a vision that leads us “to know the worst and to still love – not only people, but the world in which we live. We will never do that perfectly, only proximately, at our very best.” In short, he offers an invitation to live toward a common grace for the common good.

In “Visions of Vocation,” Garber has given great encouragement to all who yearn for such a life well-lived. Those entrusted with the proclamation of the gospel will find here penetrating illustrations and a refreshing way of thinking about the call to “equip the saints for the work of ministry.” Those whose lives and livelihoods bring them closer to the brokenness and banality of the world will find here fresh inspiration to live as those who both know the world and still love it.

DON MEEKS is pastor of Greenwich Presbyterian Church in Nokesville, Virginia.