ANSWERING THE CALL WHEN THERE IS NO CALL [M, 3-31-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—ANSWERING THE CALL WHEN THERE IS NO CALL [M, 3-31-25]

 

Our pastor is preaching his last Lent. Well, at St. Mark’s. He’s retiring at the end of June. He’s a good preacher, though. It’s unlikely that the bishop will let him get by without some part-time work. [1]

He’s earned his retirement. He has the looks and energy of a well-preserved fifty-year-old, but he’s seventy.

I was once chatting with a middle-aged, second-career Episcopal priest. He told me that when he was being ordained, he said to his bishop that his only regret was that he spent so many years as a business man before going to seminary and becoming a priest. “How many years will you be a priest before retirement?” the bishop asked him. “Only twenty.” “My God, man, that’s enough!”

Our pastor has put in 44 years all together, so that’s twice enough.

Social research has concluded that the Episcopal bishop was right. Twenty years is plenty for any job. Actually, these days, if you can get twenty in before technology or culture eliminates your job, you are doing pretty well.

Rapid cultural change causes many problems, because the basic needs of humans remain the same, even though the means of fulfilling them change. One of those basic needs is satisfying work, work that at least comes close to being a vocation, a calling.

When I felt the call to preach, the ministry was referred to as “the high calling.” I think the title was called high so that we wouldn’t notice that the pay was low.

Calling, though--the feeling that you are doing what you are supposed to do--does not necessarily go with job title. The job might be called high, but if you don’t fit in it, your life is low. I have known homemakers and teachers and farmers and bus drivers and cooks and gardeners and carpenters and so many others who experienced their lives as a calling, even if they didn’t use that language. They fit their job.

Even then, though, you probably need some sort of renewal. And these days, that twenty-year rule seems to apply. I knew a plumber who said, “The first seventeen years, I thought I had the best job in the world. I didn’t mind the yucky parts of plumbing because I enjoyed so much diagnosing problems and fixing them. But then there were no new problems, only old ones, ones I’d seen before. It wasn’t satisfying anymore.”

Well, you’re right. What can someone my age know about this? I haven’t worked in a long time. Even more, since this column is for old people, why bother? We don’t have jobs to get tired of.

But we do have lives to get tired of. That’s the point—satisfaction with job means satisfaction with life. After twenty years of not having a job, we can get dissatisfied with retirement. When you get dissatisfied with retirement, it’s a short time before we are dissatisfied with life itself. As Charles Albert Tinley put it in his great hymn, “Stand By Me,” when my life becomes a burden… stand by me.

We have a calling only if there is a call. A call from God is a call to trust. Trust depends on neither work nor age.

John Robert McFarland

1] After I wrote this, I learned that he is already slated to be the interim pastor in a nearby congregation.