The Lost Vocation?

Religious vocations used to be a big deal at this school. At the beginning of the 1800s, the majority of Middlebury graduates became ministers, who were required to read the Greeks and probably had to wash their own dinner dishes. I don’t blame us for forgetting these origins — we were a little caught up creating gender, racial and socioeconomic diversity, figuring out how to accommodate the ice-skaters, the oboe-players and the aspiring architecture-neuroscience majors. These are all good things. I am fully for combating bigotry and fostering equal opportunity.  But I want to know where the clergy went.  When did Midd say goodbye to all its chaste, God-fearing, Latin-learned dudes?

To most of us here today, a religious vocation sounds like the last absolute call on earth we would hear.  But education, at its earliest, was not about figuring out what color your parachute was.  It was largely about the cultivation of self-discipline.

My friend Ian said something a couple weeks ago that is still rocking my brain — that essentially, our educations at Middlebury are defined by how we choose to spend our time. The liberal arts system enables and complicates this simple sort of characterization, as it creates the space and opportunity for myriad different choices and establishes systems to make the process and consequences of those decisions act as another kind of educational experience. Now we have more vocations than doctor, lawyer or minister to choose from, but we also have to cooperate with the negotiations of a community based on more than one canon and learn the bureaucratic intricacies that continue post-grad. But the theory is eye-glaze-inducing until you apply it to your personal situation.

Ian’s example was the recent episodes of “activism” on campus. One way to distill those students’ activities — or the way they choose to spend their time — is to reframe their self-proclaimed protest as their “education in activism.” We could envision the same for people who engage in all kinds of extracurriculars, formal and deliberately informal. The members of WRMC are educated in audio production and sexy radio voices. The yoga-practitioners are educated in flexibility and energetic harmony. The guy who crafts the most insightful advice for a pair of feuding housemates? An education in peer mediation. All these different, unofficial disciplines are part of the project of learning how to be a human being. It’s an education in the field of self.

We have to respect the fact that everyone is straining to hear a vocational call. We can disagree on what is a useful way to spend our time, but we can’t go condemning anyone for getting it wrong. In college, the activists may throw a tasteless protest. The girl who wants to be a publicity agent may throw a terrible party. But it’s generally okay, because the chemistry kids over there are definitely screwing up that experiment, and I definitely failed an English paper this semester. We are 20 years old and we are just trying to get it right. (Though “generally okay” doesn’t validate an educational program that alienates the community, breaks laws that protect human dignity, etc. You may wonder — will she ever stop using parentheses to avoid taking a stand?!)

In a zoomed-out world, as we take an honest look at the history of the human race, it is just era after era of people making the wrong decisions about how to spend their time.  We run around trying not only to do the right thing, but to do our right thing, to find our calling.  It’s funny, though, how hard we try and how repeatedly we miss the opportunity to be humble. I feel like I would be more impressed by a student who chose to make his or her point by scrubbing the stones on the Proctor Terrace rather than the one who drew graffiti on a wall. Somehow, when you zoom in on the day-to-day, you start to see that the choice to do something classically “good for you” — often code for gross and boring — actually results in good things. Your mother doesn’t tell you to eat broccoli for no reason, just like they didn’t make Middlebury students read Aristotle for no reason. People wouldn’t keep making sacrifices, big or small, if they were just empty promises. The people who make their way towards Mecca on their knees are answering a call, and doing so with a lot more passion and sincerity than I will ever know.

I took on the project of visiting one church of every faith during my remaining time here at Middlebury. Believe it or not, church is not always a fun session of enlightenment for me. It can be a dry, tedious, meaningless discomfort. I will be thrust into new discomfort when I leave for Turkey next semester and have to patiently learn a new set of unspoken cultural laws. But I think if we are unafraid of adding calculated effort to our educations, if we challenge ourselves to listen closely to all the little lessons in the ways we spend our time — the good, the bad, the spectacularly boring — something miraculous just might happen.