What Are You Doing Here?

Great leaders and awful tyrants can command and inspire, but what will be done in consequence will be done by many acting together.

“What do you do?” It’s a question we ask when meeting somebody. The usual answer is an occupation: “Engineer/priest/carpenter/lab tech/pole dancer,” or whatever. Or, “I am unemployed,” or “I am retired.” The answer tells something about you. It may or may not be accurate, depending on the stereotypes the questioner has about these occupations. But many see the answer as their identity, even their worth in society.

A better question is “What are you doing here?” Whether you believe you were put on earth for a reason or arrived at random, how you make use of the time and talents allotted you shapes the story of your life, and of those around you, and maybe even beyond.

It connects to the term “vocation,” a Latin-based word meaning your calling. “Vocation” is often distorted in churchy circles to mean a church career. The “Director of Vocations” for a diocese is not interested if you want to become an engineer or carpenter. His/her job is to find potential priests, deacons, parish workers, youth directors and such. To thus exclude the great majority of vocations may explain some of the inertia in so many churches.

As you likely know, baptism is the entrance sacrament to be in the Church, the Christian community. Among other actions when you are baptized, God ordains you as a priest and crowns you as a monarch (see 1 Peter 2:9, for example). Those are your first vocations, foundational to all the others.

As life progresses, you will be called to other vocations as well, such as husband, wife, mother, father, and other family roles (child, uncle, aunt, grandparent, etc). You will be called to be a friend. Coming of age, you will be called to exercise responsibility as a citizen of a nation. You will be called to be a neighbor, functioning for the common good of a community. You will be called to a lifelong vocation to learn, and likely to teach also. You will be called to an occupation, or many occupations, some of which will pay you money.

Underlying all these will be your basic roles as priest and king/queen. Some confuse the priestly role with the apostolic priesthood, the presbyterate. It can make the clergy caste nervous. But the early Church considered the laity, the laos, to be an ordained order along with the three apostolic offices, each office having its specific vocation. The Protestant Reformers used the term, “the priesthood of all believers.”

Unfortunately, this good term became twisted in some circles to mean believers didn’t need the other orders. American individualism decided everyone could just interpret the mysteries of faith and Scripture for themselves and just be “me and Jesus.” But rightly understood, our priesthood is bestowed in baptism. It is, as Dumitru Staniloae describes it, “Every one of man’s possessions and he himself becomes as sacrifice, in being offered by man to God,” thus the whole world is “the visible part of a universal and continuing sacrament.” We are, as recent Orthodox theologians have noted, “cosmic priests” to offer back to God the gifts he has given us, and indeed, on behalf of the whole earth, to be the connection between Creator and creation.

We do this formally by being together in the Eucharistic community and bringing forward our gifts of bread and wine at the Offering, products given by God (grain and grapes), then shaped by human effort into bread and wine. They represent in summary the entirety of our effort and life in all the vocations we each have. With the apostolic priest presiding, we all join together in the offering of our self, our vocations and all the creation around us. It is the highest and best meaning of “concelebration” of the Eucharist, the order of the laos joined as full participants in the action of the Mass. “In the immense cathedral which is the universe of God, each person, whether scholar or manual laborer, is called to act as the priest of his whole life- to take all that is human, and to turn it into an offering, a hymn of glory” (from the French theologian Paul Evdokimov)

This offering is made with the fruits of your stewardship, your mandate to nurture and care for the natural order and its creatures. Your priesthood is to fulfill the great commandment to love God. Your monarchy is to fulfill the second commandment to love your neighbor. Keep in mind that Christian kings and queens are not called to be absolute dictators, but to exercise their vocations in accord with God’s will. Therefore, “What are you doing here?” Many would answer that clergy and other church workers are here doing the Lord’s work. The rest of the laos in this scenario lives “in the world” and performs in occupations and tasks unrelated, in their view, to stewardship, except to enable contributions to finance those with church vocations.

That entirely misses the point of why you are here, as a baptized human being. As Christians, we are supposed to operate this sacred earth and offer our effort to God. As humans, we are given the ability to organize on a large scale and consciously relate to God in carrying out our mission. Other creatures have far better skills than we in some areas (horses can run faster, fish can swim better, etc). They are endowed with an intelligence allowing them to successfully function in their lives. But only humans have been given the mandate for global management, together with the skills and cerebral capacity to do it. That mandate is meant to be exercised together. No one (human) person can save the world. We cannot even reproduce ourselves, let alone manage the earth, without cooperative effort. This is not often done by great heroic deeds. The world is managed, or mismanaged as the case may be, through millions of micro stewarding acts every day.

There is a Polish folk legend which claims the world is actually kept going by a dozen secret saints. They are not famous or glamorous. A village tailor, a peasant, a store clerk, a farm wife, a country priest, a factory worker and similar ordinary looking people really hold the earth together “under the radar.” The legend is just a legend, but the thought is exactly God’s plan. Great leaders and awful tyrants can command and inspire, but what will be done in consequence will be done by many acting together.

God commands and inspires, and in the logic of his plan delegates us to do the management. “The universe, although created ‘very good,’ is not intended to be static; it is meant to be going somewhere, and for this, creation needs man,” as Elizabeth Theokritoff notes. Having done our part, in our micro kingdom with a micro effort, we then bring it to his altar and as priests, offer all to God, together with millions of the Faithful around the world in our shared Eucharistic sacrifice. Each effort and offering is minuscule, but without the shared minuscule offerings, there is no sum total becoming a macro one. Do not misunderstand me. We still cannot save the world by our effort. That remains God’s sole ability and responsibility. But our vocation is not to save the world, rather it is to manage, steward, it.

The several vocations you and I have are thus all intended to be sacred acts of managing the sacred earth and its’ creatures, including us humans. Loving our neighbor, loving the creatures given in our care, loving the environment in which we have been placed, is not reserved just for clergy, although they have the same mandate, too.

We have entered the season of light (Epiphany means literally to shine a light upon something). We have seen the Incarnation, love come among us, become one of us, so that we might all be together with God, in a universe which is “going somewhere.” Each of us has multiple vocations to carry out in this massive project.

Returning to the question: What are you doing here?