Vocation

The English word entered the language in the early fifteenth century from the Latin vocatio, meaning "a calling" or "a being called." The root is vocare, "to call," which is related to vox, "voice."1 In its earliest English usage, the word referred exclusively to a spiritual summons, the call from God to an individual to perform a specific task or enter religious life.

The Latin Bible used vocare to describe God calling Samuel (1 Samuel 3:4) and Jesus calling James and John to follow him (Mark 1:20). In medieval Christianity, vocatio typically meant a call to the priesthood or monastic life.2

Martin Luther widened the word in the sixteenth century. He argued that God's calling extended beyond the monastery to include secular occupations. A farmer, a merchant, and a craftsman all fulfilled divine callings by performing their daily tasks faithfully.3 John Calvin went further, distinguishing between a general calling to serve God and a particular calling to engage in a specific work. The Calvinist tradition emphasized disciplined, relentless labor as evidence of spiritual election.

The secular sense of "vocation" as simply one's employment or occupation appeared by the 1550s.4 Cotton Mather, the Puritan minister, warned that it was "not lawful ordinarily to live without some calling," predicting that idleness would lead to "horrible snares and infinite sins."5 The religious duty to labor had become a social expectation.

The related word "avocation," from the Latin avocare ("to call away"), entered English in the 1610s to describe that which calls a person away from their proper business.6 Robert Frost captured the gap between the two in verse, writing of his wish to unite "my avocation and my vocation, as my two eyes make one in sight." Researcher Amy Wrzesniewski at Yale has found that employees who view their work as a calling report higher satisfaction than those who view it as a job or a career.7