Yes, I’m trying to coin a new word. Googling “voxistential” will only take you to definitions of “existential” and maybe to a 2019 article from the magazine Vox about whether climate change is an existential threat. But I’m taking a cue from my oldest son who made up the word “crenescence” a couple years ago and used it casually around the high school lunch table just to see if it would catch on. (The word allegedly meant something like the opposite of irony, but not quite the same as coincidence. And no, it never caught on.)
By “voxistential” I mean to bring together “existential” and “vocation,” from vocare, “to call,” and the Latin root vōx, meaning “voice.” Traditionally, both words point to a similar idea—namely, that a person needs to find or make meaning and purpose, especially when life doesn’t hand them ready-made answers or pre-cut patterns. The meanings of the words have drifted apart in recent years, perhaps because we have overused each one. Recently, though, wise scholars like Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, author of Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling, are reviving existential questions within vocational reflection.
“Existential” was Dictionary.com’s word of the year in 2019. Newsfeeds that year burst with debates about whether climate change posed an “existential threat” to humanity. Others used the word for the rising risks related to widespread gun violence, and still others for their political opponents, as when Biden said this about #45: “I believe that the president is literally an existential threat to America.” (Now that #45 is also #47, my email inbox contains more than one appeal from organizations such as MoveOn or Sojourners asking for support in resisting this existential threat to democracy.)
With this widespread use has come something of a flattening of the word’s meaning. At least since the mid-twentieth century—with the rise of the philosophical and literary movement called existentialism—to “get existential” was to plumb issues that were not just negative and difficult, but also true, important, and ultimately life-giving. In other words, “existential” pointed to matters that were dark, such as—well, the fact that you and I are going to die. It also foregrounded the authentic purpose and hard-fought meaning of one’s life, which paradoxically emerges as one also confronts life’s absurdity and death’s finality. Today, by contrast, we usually stick the word in to emphasize how really, really bad or scary something is. At times, I feel like “existential” is something to say or write when we don’t have access to the “screaming in fear” emoji.
According to Miller-McLemore, a similar drift or flattening of the meaning of vocation and the manner of vocational discernment has occurred in recent years, albeit in the other direction. Whereas recent uses of “existential” leave out all the good (authenticity, meaning, purpose) and highlight only the bad (threat, crisis, insert screaming in fear emoji here), finding one’s true calling or vocation sometimes tends to emphasize only the positive (bliss, success, living the “good life”), leaving out all the “dark sides.” She begins Follow Your Bliss by reflecting on why she didn’t want to write a book about vocation, especially after the concept had “lost its meaning through scientific truncation and secular exploitation.” Particularly guilty is pop psychology and corporate business culture, which “have hijacked the notion and then reduced it to pursuing one’s own personal bliss or job happiness.”
(Try entering “follow your bliss” in an online image search. You’ll find a lot of sayings attributed to Joseph Campbell in front of mountains or river rocks. You can no doubt find the same bad advice about vocation, or ones like it, printed on rustic-chic kitchen décor or posters in board rooms and dentist offices.)
It would seem that much, if not most, of this flattening of vocational discernment—into questing after bliss and overcoming every obstacle—comes from popular culture. (We can expect that AI will repackage and sell us more of the same.) But Miller-McLemore also points to social-scientific accounts of vocation, which have increased exponentially in the last 15 years. These accounts often fail to grapple with—how better to say it?—the existential depth of vocational reflection, to say nothing of living vocationally. That’s especially important when it comes to “the dark side of calling,” or all those painful parts of living with purpose. According to Miller-McLemore, social scientists typically treat this dark side as “a problem with calling that must be overcome.” Alternatively, she sees them as “a necessary and even good part of calling, something that can enhance life precisely through its hardship, duty, and even suffering and sacrifice, especially if we talk openly about the challenges.” Camus or Sartre couldn’t have said it better.
Click hereto listen to the Callings episode featuring Bonnie Miller-McLemore titled “The Double Edge of Calling.”
The whole of Follow Your Bliss lifts up those existentially difficult and essential components of life that lead to suffering and sacrifice, but also occasion authenticity and a life filled with kindness and courage. Some callings are planned and successfully discharged, but many more are missed, blocked, conflicted, fractured, unexpected, or relinquished. (Miller-McLemore focuses on one descriptor in each of her eight chapters.) Owning up to these elements of our lives—ones that we don’t desire or choose—can be rather difficult. To college students, existentially-deep vocational reflection might feel like it’s only delaying their task of deciding on a major and pursuing a career without regret and remorse, doubt and detours—or all the wanderings and wonderings about what it all adds up to. Indeed, I taught Follow Your Bliss last semester in the final unit of a religion course. One otherwise bushy-tailed student quietly cried out within my hearing before the start of one class: “This book is giving me an existential crisis!”
“A VOXistential crisis!” I shouted back, just to see if it would catch on. (No, not really.)
The student’s frustration suggests that many conversations about calling in college often help students move decisively ahead in their chosen careers without pausing to ask: why? and to what end? And while I don’t try to induce crises in my students, I have reason to believe that troubling them with difficult questions can be quite valuable. When students used Miller-McLemore’s categories in their final papers to explore their understanding of vocation and their own felt callings, they lifted up their own regret, frustration, struggle, suffering, wanderings, and wonderings—and their gifts and loves as well—in ways that were deeper and more reflective than many other accounts I’ve read.
I suggest above that Camus or Sartre have got nothing on Miller-McLemore when it comes to infusing existential depth into a life of meaning and purpose. Closer to her own thinking—but in a very different style—is Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth century “proto-existentialist” who ruminated throughout his life on anxiety, melancholy, despair, “fear and trembling,” and “the sickness unto death.” Yet somehow he saw the dark paths of these dispositions as leading to a joyful life before God. In an upcoming post, I’ll return to Kierkegaard, Miller-McLemore, and other authentic voices (vōxes?) calling us to deepen our vocational explorations.
Jason Mahn is professor of religion and director of the Presidential Center for Faith and Learning at Augustana College, Rock Island, IL. His essay “The Conflict in Our Callings: The Anguish (and Joy) of Willing Several Things” appeared in Vocation Across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education (Oxford 2017). He has recently authored Neighbor Love through Fearful Days: Finding Meaning and Purpose in a Time of Crisis (Fortress 2021), co-edited So That All May Flourish: The Aims of Lutheran Higher Education (Fortress 2023), and contributed to The Christian Century. For other posts by Jason, click here.
