Writer and academic Professor Karen Swallow Prior has written and contributed to numerous books. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic magazine, The Washington Post, and on the Gospel Coalition website, among other places. Her latest book, You Have a Calling was reviewed in last month's print edition of en (see review here).
Here, en Reviews Editor John Woods and Andrew Roycroft of Grace Publications speak to her about it and some of the issues raised. Quotes in blue type are from the new book.
en: What was the itch that you felt you needed to scratch in writing this book?
KSP: I think that there is a particular cultural context in which we are thinking about questions of calling and vocation, which are timeless questions. But at the very end of modernity and late modernity, with its endless choice and the pressures and anxieties that attend the choices we make about our jobs, careers, vocations, lifestyles. There are many distorted views and romanticised ideas about what it means to have a calling and what a calling looks like. I am writing in that particular moment, drawing on the decades of teaching college-age students who are grappling with these questions and are often the victims of this unhealthy approach. I also write for the rest of us who are not so young, but are still grappling with the same questions.
en: It was interesting that you talk about your mother’s calling as a teacher, even though she never did that as a paid job. Your use of writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s “hobby, job, career, vocation” template as a grid for thinking about calling was helpful. How does this wean us away from one-dimensional thinking about what we do?
KSP: One misunderstanding that I am trying to combat in this book is that we only have one calling and all our eggs must be placed in that one calling basket, and if we miss it we lose out. A calling is something that comes from the outside of ourselves as a transcendent thing. We can see that the things we are doing in our ordinary lives that we might not have consciously chosen are very much our callings.
“Life is long and full. We do lots of things and take on many different tasks and roles. It might be that only in looking backward or amid a crisis or turning point do we see the way in which all the aspects are woven together into a kind of tapestry that depicts our true callings.”
en: Do you think it is possible that while people are restlessly labouring over whether they are fulfilling their calling, they already are? How can we slow down mid-journey to take stock of the seemingly small but truly significant things God is doing through our personalities and giftings?
KSP: In writing this book and seeking to redefine our definition of calling we take an important first step. I am a word person and a definition person. Words and definitions give us a framework for understanding things and so we can re-educate ourselves to understand that calling is so much more than one great big, magnificent thing that defines our lives forever, that pays us lots of money and gives us lots of happiness. If we throw that myth out of the window and understand that many of our callings will occur in ordinary everyday life. They may grow and evolve with the things that allow us to see their significance more dramatically or they may just remain ordinary things that are still ways we are serving our families, neighbours and communities.
en: What ways have traditional means of talking about calling in the evangelical church been helpful or harmful?
KSP: That’s a great question. Of course, I am coming from the Protestant tradition which teaches a doctrine of vocation that says essentially that there is no such thing as a sacred or secular calling, that vocation is not limited to vocational roles within the church, but we can have vocational roles outside of the church.
What has happened in the modern evangelical tradition is that we have taken this good doctrine of sacred and secular and re-romanticised and idealised calling – whether in the church or outside the church –to be this thing that God uses to do mighty and great things to change the world. The evangelical tradition, at least in its modern iteration, has inadvertently and maybe sometimes unintentionally suggested that if you are famous and have a big platform then that is your calling from God. Yet this is not the case, for most people our callings tend to be ordinary, quiet and humble.
en: You write about the dangers of perfectionism and the notion of finding “the dot of the perfect will of God in our lives”. Why is that dangerous, and how might the opposite attitude be dangerous too?
KSP: Perfectionism is something that tends to end up being paralysing. It demands a standard that nobody can reach. It can become stifling. We overlook as a culture “the good”; that is why I have a whole chapter on “the good”. Goodness is good. Striving consistently for what is good will often mean that we find ourselves pursuing our calling.
One of the gifts of modernity that has shaped evangelicalism is the emphasis on the individual. We should recognise the individuality that God has created, that includes our gifts, skills and passions that God can use. Yet assuming that the stars will always align in my life can breed a great deal of frustration because it does not always work out like that.
“I’ve seen the devastation wrought by people and institutions that, through manipulation, and guilt, exploit earnest people within a system built by cheap labour and cultish loyalty."
en: One of the ways in which you have modelled Christian grace and courage to many, including myself, is your willingness to say the difficult things about Christian institutions. I know this has come at tremendous cost for you personally and professionally. Could I ask you to open up a bit more for us on how Christian institutions can leverage the goodwill and Christian sincerity of people in ways that are harmful or exploitative? How might an individual recognise that this is happening to them, or that they are unconsciously perpetrating this on others?
KSP: It absolutely is [happening], which is why I included that point in the book. The major argument in the book is that vocation and calling are not about fulfilling ourselves; they are about serving our neighbour. But that does not mean that we are to be doormats, or that use and misuse of people’s talents and skills is acceptable in any context, but particularly in the church. Because this is true and Christians teach this as true that we serve our neighbours through our vocation, gift and callings that does not give anyone a licence to exploit us. But unfortunately, that doctrine of vocation can [be] and is exploited. People and institutions can and do make others feel guilty if they say no to something. Because the church teaches self-sacrifice and service, which it should, it becomes much easier to mistake a sacrifice and service for calling and good stewardship. What has happened in this particular moment is an institutional crisis for the church, in the way that the celebrity culture and powerful platforms can make us miss our call and do things that we are not supposed to do just because we are being asked to, and our loyalty, sacrifice and service is questioned if we don’t. At a level of critical mass, the institutions themselves have become built on false loyalty, cheap labour and false guilt. People are trying to do the right thing, but are not clear about where the boundaries are. We must remember that we are accountable to God first, and His calling on our lives, and not human institutions that gain benefit from the misuse of our gifts and callings.
en: In You Have a Calling, you refreshingly call us back to the transcendentals of truth, goodness and beauty. This is so counter-intuitive in a world which urges us to strive for significance, position and influence as ends in themselves. In what ways have you had to retrain your own moral and affective compass to make the transcendentals your object of pursuit? And, if pursuing truth, goodness and beauty is “everyone’s calling” as you say, where do we start in setting these as the focus of our appetites and ambitions?
KSP: Answering that question more personally, my primary calling now is as a writer. This is not the best time to be a writer. One of the realities for writers is that there are so many writers, so the market is saturated. This means that it is a challenge to get readers to notice what we have written. In such a climate it is very tempting to do the things that help that happen so, as any writer knows, we need to build our platform. But as a writer I must refocus on the goodness, truth and beauty of the writing, which is the purpose or what I am doing, and not let the platform and means of getting the word out there become the end.
That is from my own corner of vocation and calling, but I think that we live in a world where it is so easy to confuse end and means. We talk a lot about that in morality and politics. It is so easy in our vocation and calling to lose sight of the end from the means. That is why it is so important to pursue truth, goodness and beauty. What constitutes the true, good and beautiful in our own situations is going to manifest in different ways, yet if we are pursuing those, we will always be fulfilling our calling.
en: As we are conducting this interview we are in the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk. How might we pursue truth, goodness and beauty in thoughts and conversations that arise from this cultural moment?
KSP: What I talk about when I introduce these concepts, truth, goodness and beauty, is that they are called the transcendentals and is something that comes from classic philosophy as well as early teachings from the church. That idea of transcending a particular moment and time is really important, not only transcending but also transforming our particular time, place and moment. We don’t want to so rise above our cultural moment that we pretend that we can be unaffected or ignore the way this moment affects our neighbours even if it does not affect us directly. We have to remember that the categories, definitions and labels that define any particular time are of our making, are fixed in time and will change. So if we can engage in our cultural moment in ways that connect to what real people are undergoing and how we are being affected, but do that in a way that connects them to, and leads them to, what is eternal, transcendent and transformative. Then we are less likely to be trapped in the defining moments and categories of our time, yet while acknowledging that we still exist in them. It is the picture of Jesus, who is not only transcendent, but also immanent. That is the model that we need at this moment.
“The idea that the less competent you are for a role the more God is glorified, is not wisdom.”
en: There is a vein of thinking within evangelicalism that God’s empowerment can override our weakness in the tasks we seek to fulfil, and that even incompetence can be a qualification for doing things we seem ill-suited to. We have, perhaps, made Moses’ reticence in his calling a norm rather than a quirk of his particular character. In You Have a Calling, you challenge this thinking in a very helpful and powerful way. Could we explore two things in regard to this? Firstly, how can we avoid blind spots where our passion for something is at odds with our genuine abilities and we end up a “square peg in a round hole”? How can we help others in this regard?
KSP: The two things that I will say about passions – they are helpful and useful. We do have passions and have them for a reason. Some of our passions and desires are given to us by God as part of our nature and the way that He made us. Our passions and desires can also be cultivated and constructed by our context. We indulge certain passions and desires and want more of the same. This is true of healthy and unhealthy eating; you can train your body to desire healthy food, and you can train it to do the opposite. So, we need to pay attention to our passions because they are there for a reason, but discern whether or not we can cultivate new or better passions. We need to realise that just because we have a passion doesn’t mean that we will fulfil that passion in the way that we think that we will. We may have a passion that our particular church or culture does not need at this time, or isn’t going to be paid well. We need to pursue other ways of pursuing this passion within the reality of our world. I have an inner passion to be a ballet dancer, but that is never going to happen! If we are not telling the truth about abilities, it is a double tragedy because people miss out on pursuing their abilities in areas where they could thrive.
en: Secondly, how do we acknowledge our genuine giftings, even celebrate them, without taking glory from God or lapsing into arrogance?
KSP: I love that question. I have examined this closely in my previous book On Reading Well. In the final chapter I reflect on a writer I love, Flannery O’Connor. I focus on two of her works through the virtue of humility, and humility is basically about not thinking too much of ourselves and not thinking too little of ourselves. The etymology of the word humility is hummus – the root word means earth. To be humble is to be grounded, to know that we are not God but that we are not worms. Flannery O’Connor is famous for replying to the question why she writes; her answer was: “I am good at it”. I extol her answer as exemplary of true humility. O’Connor was a Roman Catholic, steeped in her theology, and this shaped her desire to serve the Lord in her writing. When she gave her brief answer she was saying something deeply and profoundly theological. As Christians we know that our gifts come from God, and that even the opportunities we have are contingent on our particular circumstances. I love reading, that is how I am wired, but if I had been born 500 ago, I would not have been an avid reader because I would not have had access to books at that time.
en: How have your gifting and trained skills transferred from your former work as a teacher, to your present work as a writer?
KSP: The Lord was merciful in that this change I have had is something He prepared me for as I have been moving into the writing sphere. Over the past ten years I have been writing more and more, and speaking at events about the things I have written about. All of my writing comes from the same passion and gifts that I have of teaching and prophesying. Higher education is going through many changes so I may have found myself frustrated in that sphere. Perhaps the Lord was merciful to me in giving me another context in which to teach. It is the same calling, but it is another context. Through platforms like Substack the world has become my classroom.
en: How might the book land for a blue-collar worker living in a trailer park in Arizona, or a 20-year old Afghan girl growing up in Kabul?
KSP: That is a good question. I am of course writing for a particular audience and published by a particular publishing house which has a target audience. But I do honestly try to keep in mind that if what I write is not true for every Christian who has ever lived in every time and place then it is not essential or central to the Christian faith. That is true concerning vocation as well. I write about how workers of just two generations ago thought about work and calling very differently to how we do now, so obviously it is very different for other times and places. I point to some even older poetry and literature, Voltaire for example, who had interesting things to say about the purpose of our lives and cultivating our gardens. Even though I do not address these particular kinds of workers in other times and places, I hope that how I talk about our time and place sets a model for how we can talk about all workers.
en: Do you think there are differences for men and women in discerning and enjoying our calling?
KSP: That is such an interesting question because we are such a fragmented culture even here in the transatlantic religion in the 21st century. So I know women, who were raised around the same time period as I was, who were raised to believe that women can do anything. We see figures all the time about more women training at college and gaining professional degrees than men. But there are also, especially in the church, those who have a very different framework for what they can and cannot do in society. I try to write in a way that transcends these categories, but in full recognition that older women who didn’t do a lot of things may now look back on their life and wonder if they missed their calling in some way. I wrote this book with a woman I know in mind, and wanted to reach her and women like her. I wanted her to realise that if you were at home doing ordinary everyday things that few people were seeing, and you were not being recognised for, they were still fulfilling a calling that can bring joy and fulfilment. If you have done with these roles you still have a calling because in God’s economy nothing is wasted and there is still opportunity to fulfil our callings.
Our callings are affected by the sins of human beings; that is very much a reality. I think it is fine and good to name the reality of those sins and we can take it to the Lord and allow Him to redeem it and restore what is lost. We have to be open to the fact that it is something other than what we imagined it to be. We have these visions and expectations of how we expect things to go, but God is often far more glorious and unimaginable to us than our limited and often distorted expectations would lead us to be.
en: If the book had a soundtrack what would it be?
KSP: I did post something on Instagram about the book a while back and Instagram allows you to choose music for the post, so I chose Tom Petty’s Runnin' Down a Dream.
en: How do you summon the courage and imagination to step out of one zone into another?
KSP: Here my key point that we have multiple callings comes into play. That is helpful in a couple of ways. First of all, we may not be doing the same thing for our entire lives, as our fathers and grandfathers did. We may undergo a dramatic shift or series of shifts. Secondly, because we can have multiple callings, we have to consider any decision we make in the context of our other callings. How best do we serve our families, our church and our community?
I have been able to make decisions that other people have not been able to make because of particular circumstances. I was able to walk away from a really good job that I worked really hard for, but I was able to do that because I have a husband who is able to support me financially and spiritually.
If we are called to be part of the body of Christ in the church, and we love the bride of Christ, sometimes that means saying no to things that are marring that bride and adding blemishes to her. It is important if we are to live for truth, goodness and beauty that we have the right sense of proportion for all the things we do.
