By
Photo by Jimi Lott
Doug Thorpe,
Professor of English
A teacher and a writer by profession, Professor Doug Thorpe sees his life's work as being attentive to others.
WHEN STUDENTS ASK MY ADVICE ABOUT VOCATION — the old "what can I do with an English major?" question — I invariably respond with practical questions of my own. Are you thinking of graduate school? Of teaching? Of law?
But these questions in turn always seem to lead to other, less practical questions. What draws you? What are you passionate about? What do you want to give yourself to?
I understand that such questions may seem like a luxury, but I also believe that we're better off if we begin where we love. "That's your road," I say, "so start there. Pay attention to it. Listen hard to what this says about who you are, about your way of serving."
For what else is vocation but a calling — through our desires, our passions, our wounds, our hungers — to serve? We listen to that still small voice and we follow as well as we can, one step at a time, making mistakes but also learning from them until the mistakes themselves become part of what we offer to others. Such is the way that the way is laid out; such is the way of faith.
I have a student working on the draft of an essay; the subject is friendship. To illustrate her thesis, she narrated the story of her friendship with another student whom she met her first year at SPU, how the friendship developed — and how it almost ended. As she explored the particulars of this relationship — as she wrote — she found herself going back to the rift and examining it, remembering it, looking at her friend's part and her own. This in turn led her to calling her friend and re-engaging.
There is where the current draft of the essay now ends. Her work as a writer led to an action in her life, which in turn altered — deepened — her work.
I believe that this is always where our work should lead: deeper into the truth. The particulars of the work matter less than the attention — the devotion — we give to it. As Simone Weil writes, "the solution of a geometry problem does not in itself constitute a precious gift, but Š [b]eing a little fragment of particular truth, it is a pure image of the unique, eternal and living Truth, the very Truth that once in a human voice declared, I am the Truth."
Every time we truly give ourselves to something, Weil argues, we are in fact seeking truth. And, she adds, there must be joy at the bottom of such work, whether it is in accounting or nursing, journalism or psychology, biology or philosophy. No matter how much suffering we encounter, whether our own or the world's, there should be joy in the search for the truth of things.
As any student or athlete learns, we attend to our work not because our parents, our teachers or our supervisors have told us to do so. We do it because that is our discipline and our joy.
All of our work is for this deeper end; all of it is intended to serve God. It's what we might call "building Jerusalem." And how do we build that spiritual city except through our actual work? We are creatures of matter; for the most part we know spirit through the body. Our work is, at its best, a matter of "making sacred."
"For what else is vocation but a calling — through our desires, our passions, our wounds, our hungers — to serve?"
This is true not only of the work we more narrowly think of as vocation — my work as a teacher or as a writer, for example. This is true of all of our work, every moment of our waking lives. Our work in fact is simply being attentive. This is how we serve: We attend upon each other.
At the grocery store, for example, we may come to find that the real exchange is not economic after all. The money and the goods are simply a vehicle for the spirit to connect — a little eye contact, a smile, a few words about the weather or the ballgame, the touch of a hand as a few coins exchange place. This is what we hunger for. This is spiritual food.
Our work is the way that the Spirit moves through us. Or, more simply still, our work is our way. It's how Christ is born again and again through every one of us.
"It is immaterial what the work may be," as Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote (quoting Meister Eckhart), "but it is essential that the [worker] should be given wholly to it ... it is working for the love of God in any case, because the perfection of the work is 'to prepare all creatures to return to God.'"
I honor my vocation as a teacher and writer by protecting my time and attending to my classes, my scholarship, my writing. I must sometimes close the door, withdraw into the mountains, or just into myself. I must feed myself with silence. I have to be ruthless about this, remembering the Christ who similarly withdrew, and who said that we may in fact honor our parents best by leaving them behind and following his call without a single glance back.
But it is also true that my calling is found, potentially, in every waking moment. In this deeper sense there is no such thing as an interruption to my work. In fact, it may be that the interruption turns out to be the most important moment of the day, and all the "actual" work that got done, no matter how important it seemed at the time, is little more than straw for the fire.
So, too, I suspect with an entire life. Who knows what our defining work is? It may be a life spent faithfully attending to the taxes of our clients. It may also be those moments over a cup of coffee listening to a colleague or friend mourn an impending divorce or death. It may well be the interruptions that save us at last.
At times we long for the security of a map that charts life's journey in clear yellow highlighter. But the truth is that we cannot know where God will lead except that it's always, whatever the particulars of the journey, deeper and deeper into himself.
And so we take things, as Lou Piniella might say, one day at a time. Of course we make plans, study hard, take the appropriate exams and carefully consider each of life's decisions. This is part of what attention to our vocation demands. But we do so with the knowledge that all of our well-laid plans are likely, God willing, to be waylaid.
If we are lucky, they will lead us to places we could never have imagined. After living as strangers at opposite ends of the same dorm as freshmen in college, I met my future wife at the American Express office in Athens, Greece. I went for a little sun and instead found myself at the beginning of the hardest and deepest journey of my life. At day's end I would not have it otherwise.
Such is the nature of our way, which we make by walking one step at a time. As William Blake said, we must attend to the little ones. Beyond that we do not know where it is we're going, and we do not need to know. That's our terror and our joy. That is our vocation.
Intriguing connections between work and spirituality drove SPU English Professor Doug Thorpe to collect essays for Work and the Life of the Spirit (Mercury House: San Francisco, 1997). "Everything we do is part of one work, one calling," says Thorpe. "I'm a teacher and a writer, but that's a narrow view of my work. I'm also working when I'm paying attention to others. Paying attention, as Simone Weil says, can be prayer."
While teaching at St. Mary's College in Indiana, Thorpe was three years from tenure when his wife got a job in Seattle. They decided to move. That's how he ended up at Seattle Pacific in 1988. "Part of what it means to have a calling," he explains, "is to serve those I'm in relationship with."
Thorpe appreciates the opportunity to teach at a Christian university. "When I'm teaching," he says, "the work is apparently teaching the poetry of Blake or Wordsworth, but it's also a vehicle for the deeper work of manifesting the body of Christ."
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