Tuesday 9 December 2008

Advent vocation on theology blogs

There tends to always be an interesting discussion going on in the comments on Ben Myers' Faith and Theology blog. There have been some interesting posts about Stringfellow recently (that's the theologian not the nightclub). I was particularly interested in this post on circus and theology, partly because of the management idea of the "three ringed circus" as an image of an organisation where things are going well.
However this post quoting William Stringfellow on career versus vocation caught my attention in recent days and I've felt challenged by it as I mull over my own life. In the comments following that post Kim Fabricius
put up the following quotes on vocation by Rowan Williams:

"So in the most basic sense of all, God's call is the call to be: the vocation of creatures is to exist. And, secondly, the vocation of creatures is to exist as themselves, to be bearers of their name, answerable to the word which gives each its distinctive identity....
"So with the human world; God does not create human cyphers, a pool of cheap labour to whom jobs can be assigned at will. Each human being called into existence by him exists as a distinct part of a great net. To be is to be where you are, who you are, and what you are .... "... vocation doesn't happen, once and for all ... It happens from birth to death; and what we usually call vocation is only a name for the moment of crisis within the unbroken processs. "... Vocation is, you could say, what's left when all the games have stopped."

From the "Vocation (1)" in Rowan Williams, Open to Judgement (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994), pp.173ff.

Meanwhile if Dr B is still feeling like Father Christmas he might like to consider ordering me Kim Fabricius' Propositions on Christian Theology: A Pilgrim Walks the Plank. I know it's not quite Walter Benjamin but it looks rather good.

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