Andrew Roycroft reviews You Have a Calling by Karen Swallow Prior.
Calling, a crucial theme in Christian discipleship, is explored in depth and with clarifying force by Karen Swallow Prior in You Have a Calling. Beginning with a broad view of how our current culture conceives of work, passion and calling, Prior lays out a historical, literary and deeply Biblical vision of who we are as people and how our activities fit within God’s purposes.
Any work which tackles the theme of calling within a Christian worldview inevitably has some reconstructive work to do. With patience and through the most lucid of prose, Prior explores some of the misconceptions Western culture and Christian subculture can harbour about what it means to have a vocation or to be called. In the process, You Have a Calling leads the reader through the intellectual and labour-force changes that have taken place since the Industrial Revolution, culminating in an informal consensus that our working lives must be expressive of our vocational aspirations and passions.
Excessively sacred and magical thinking about calling is dismantled with firm gentleness, as Prior exposes some of the fallacies we can bring to the job we do, and the lives we lead. This is an inherently pastoral move, seeking to liberate readers from the unbearable burden of making every role they fulfil matter in some higher or vocational sense. Solid work is credited, as is a view of human personality that allows for diversity and divergence in the things that occupy our time and our affections across our lifetime. Praise is likewise offered of amateurism, of the ability we have to pursue matters of personal passion without these things occupying the majority of one’s time or defining our worth.
The true, good and beautiful
Compelling throughout, the strongest section of the book is arguably Prior’s description, celebration and application of “The Transcendentals”: “the true, the good and the beautiful”. In a particularly moving section of the chapter on truth, the reader is invited into an exploration of Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, with Prior pastorally applying Willy Loman’s mistaking of his purpose in life to how we can come to know ourselves, our giftings and desires and, consequently, our calling.
Similarly enriched and intelligent applications are made of goodness and beauty, allowing these high philosophical and aesthetic categories to find a home in how we do our jobs, relate to our families and live as neighbours. For a Christian subculture which can myopically fixate on getting the facts straight, You Have a Calling invites us to see this transcendental as important, but also as related to the equally important values of goodness and beauty.
Christians at every stage of their discipleship and career path will benefit from this text. Students considering their next steps and retirees surveying their life’s path will equally find encouragement and challenge from Prior’s journey through how we view ourselves, our gifts, and our place in the world.
Karen Swallow Prior brings a unique blend of virtues to her writing and thinking. Her grasp of the contours of Western thought historically and in our present moment, her instinctive recourse to the beating heart of literary works, and her reflex to gather this learning under the authority of Scripture, make hers an important voice in understanding our age and ourselves. These qualities and capacities have reached a powerful distillation point in You Have a Calling, making it a text that will stretch readers’ understandings, dignify their daily living and warm their hearts about how God has made them, and how they can humbly and effectively live for Him.
YOU HAVE A CALLING: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good & Beautiful
By Karen Swallow Prior
Baker Publishing. 144 pages. £16.99
ISBN 978 1 587 436 659
