Chapel Talk by Claire Roscher

Given at St. Olaf College May 2001

On college campuses around the country, it has become time to pack.  It is the time of year when the task of packing up your room seems much more inviting than studying for your finals, and when you look back upon the year to see what gains you will be taking with you and what losses you will be leaving behind.  For seniors, both physical and mental packing have been stepped up a notch.  We have had to decide which pieces of shoddy dorm-room furniture will make the move to our first apartments.  While packing our physical belongings, our minds may wander over the past four years to see what we will be packing up to take away from this place in a less concrete sense.  While we will all take away a tremendous amount of academic knowledge and memories of wonderful times spent with friends, what I would like to share with you today are the two spiritual gifts that I have gained at St. Olaf, which I will be packing in my spiritual trunk.  These two gifts are a stronger sense of my own spirituality and a deeper understanding of what vocation means for my daily life.   

The first thing I will pack to take with me is a firmer grasp of my own religion and spirituality, along with a better understanding, greater curiosity, and tremendous respect for other religious traditions and Christian denominations.  I was born, baptized, raised, and confirmed as a member of the Roman Catholic Church.  I attended Catholic schools for twelve years, and all of my friends, except one, in grade school and high school were from Catholic families.  Since Catholicism was what I was surrounded by, it was all that I knew.  Being Catholic was a variable that I did not have to think about.  I do not want to make it sound as if religion was not important to me at that time because it was.  I was involved in my church and enjoyed the religion classes I took in high school.  However, the point I want to make is that being Catholic was a part of who I was that I simply accepted in the same way that I accept being a Caucasian female.  My faith was of the a priori nature, and I was never in a position for it to be challenged.      

Things changed when I came to St. Olaf.  For the first time in my life, I felt as if I was in the minority for something.  I had a sense that there was something different about Christianity here.  When I went to Boe my first weekend on campus for Sunday service, it did not feel like home, like worship.  I was confused by all the talk of cool camp memories it seemed that every St. Olaf student beside me had experienced.  This sense of being an outsider led me to be quiet when the topic of religion came up because I wanted to get my bearings.  And get my bearings I did.  I began to hear comments from other students, and I got the sense that a lot of other Christians had been raised to think that being Catholic was about the worst thing you could be, maybe even worse than being nonreligious.  A student in one of my religion classes came right out and said that he did not like Catholics.  I was not naïve about the shortcomings of the Catholic Church; I recognized them as much as anyone.  But it hurt to hear other people speaking about a group I identified with as if we were not a part of the same family of Christian believers.  

As I became more vocal throughout my sophomore year, all of the negativity around me led me to defend my faith tradition.  I wish I had kept track of the number of times people asked or implied “Why?” when they find out I am Catholic, as if this is no longer a viable religious option.  In my special education class this semester, we have heard the stories of special education students who say they get sick of explaining their disabilities to people.  I can empathize with those students because I reached a point where I got tired of being on the defensive all of the time.  I began to wonder whether there was something profoundly wrong with Catholicism that made other Christians see us this way.  My first encounter with feminist theology also led me to question whether the Catholic Church could still be a place for women to experience God.  When I went to mass at my home church over fall break my junior year, I almost had to leave the service because I was so frustrated.  That semester was a time of intense spiritual struggle for me.  I was angry and also terrified.  I felt like Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, alone and praying for help. 

The answer to my prayers came in the form of Professor Marshall’s Roman Catholic Theology class, which helped me in two ways.  First, this class reminded me of positive traditions in the Catholic Church, such as its commitment to social justice, and gave me my first real opportunity to examine the reasoning behind many beliefs central to the Catholic Church that I had never understood.  While in the end I still did not agree with the church’s stance on all issues, knowing that logical and consistent thought had gone into these decisions helped me to respect these teachings more even if I could not agree with them.  Second, I was helped immensely by some advice that Professor Marshall shared with the class.  He tells the numerous students who come to his office asking about switching denominations that the denomination or religion we were raised in is a part of our circumstances, and that as long as we can find God in our own churches, then we should stay where we are, promote inter-denominational and inter-faith dialogue, and work for positive changes within our denominations.  After more prayer, I realized that I still found God in the Catholic Church, so maybe there was a reason I was there.  I realized that instead of being frustrated I could work to change the things I did not agree with, and I could promote positive exchanges among people of different faiths.  Two ways that I have done this is by studying in depth the Catholic Church’s position on women’s ordination and by talking with many individuals here on campus about differences in religious traditions. 

Now when people ask me why I am still Catholic, I make an analogy to being a citizen of the United States.  There are a number of state and national laws and policies that I do not agree with, but that does not lead me to move to another country.  I know I would find other problems in other countries and leaving would not help change the situation here.  In the same way, I am still a member of the Catholic Church because I can find God there, and I feel that I can help to make changes from within.  Because we are fallible beings, no denomination is going to have the perfect version Christianity, so I feel our job is to work within the denomination we find ourselves in to make them better places for people to find God. 

Even though there have been times of tremendous struggle, I feel that I am leaving St. Olaf with a stronger faith and sense of myself as a religious person than I came here with, and I attribute that gift directly to the interactions I have had with people who questioned me.  Their questions gave me a chance to see my denomination from the outside, and this in turn forced me to think about my faith tradition, to question what I believed in.  I would encourage every religious person to seek out interactions with people of other faith traditions because my experience at St. Olaf has led me to value cultural and religious interchange as an important tool for expanding knowledge and strengthening one’s own faith. 

The second major spiritual gift that I will pack to take with me is a changed understanding about what the word vocation means, and why this word is important for my everyday life.  In my Catholic upbringing, vocation meant something very specific; it meant a calling to serve God through religious orders.  Since I was a female, I knew I could not be a priest, and since I loved kids and wanted to be a mother someday, I knew I could not be a nun, so I figured vocation was something that I did not have to worry about.

As I came to college, I focused on a second definition of vocation: paid work in service professions or the classical professions such as law and medicine.  I thought that I wanted to be a physical therapist, and even though I enjoyed working in that setting, I had a nagging sense that this was not what I was supposed to be doing.  This sense continued until I took sophomore j-term class, Jesus with Professor Hanson.  I took it because I wanted to get my BTS-T out of the way so I could concentrate on all the science classes I would need to get into physical therapy school.  But somewhere in the middle of the term, I came to a third understanding of the term vocation that changed my life.  While in the class, it hit me that I really liked reading and writing about Christology, and I remembered that I had really enjoyed studying religion in high school.  I realized that my enthusiasm for and talent in theology probably meant something, that this was where I was supposed to be.  In a way I had never felt before, in an instant, I knew that I was doing the right thing with my life.  After that moment of recognition, I played around like I still had a decision to make, but it had already been made in that one instant when I realized that I could serve God in my daily life by studying and teaching religion because it was what I loved to do. 

While I believe that this Calvinistic understanding of vocation is valid, I have to admit that it gave me sort of a big head for a while.  I looked at people in other classes and wondered what they were wasting their time on.  I would be serving God in my chosen profession, and they would just be doing work to make money.  Then I took another religion class in which we studied the ideas of calling and vocation.  Professor Schurman differentiated between calling with a Big C and calling with a Little C.  We all have individual callings with a Little C but we all share a calling with a Big C, to love God and our neighbors, to serve Christ, and to be stewards of the gifts God has given us.  We can fulfill our calling with a Big C through our callings with a Little C.  As Luther emphasized, all spheres of life are holy and therefore any significant relationship, be it as a worker, parent, or friend, signifies a calling.  So I have come to understand vocation not solely as doing what we love but as any calling that we have to serve God in any part of our daily lives.  There is no clause in that definition that says intrinsically religious professions serve God any better than any other professions, or that a profession is the best way to serve God at all.  The two “any’s” makes all the difference in this definition, and they led me to realize two important things.  Teaching can be a vocation because you have the opportunity to serve God through serving the young, but a teacher who does not treat students with respect and who does not take the job seriously is no more living out a vocation than a business tycoon whose only goal is to make more money.  The humbling realization I had is that it is your attitude toward and within your work that makes it a vocation.  Any of us can find ways to serve God through our paid work because vocation implies an attitude, not a particular field.  Any employee can help to make sure that his or her company has just employment standards and worker-friendly policies, and surely any of us can simply treat our fellow employees as we would wish to be treated.  It is the responsibility of each of us to figure out how we can live out our vocation by serving God in our own chosen professions.

The second “any” is even more illuminating.  A vocation is any calling to serve God in any area of our lives.  Our vocation is not lived only solely through paid work, but through any of our significant relationships as children, siblings, grandchildren, spouses, friends, parents, coaches, volunteers, neighbors, and citizens.  All the ways we serve God, while strategically more or less important from the human perspective, are equal in God’s eyes.  What is important is that we dedicate ourselves to serving God in some area of our lives.     

While this way of thinking about vocation has been liberating for me, it is also a bit scary.  None of us can get off the hook when it comes to vocation; I think God has callings for each and everyone of us, and it is up to us to discern what those callings are and to act on them as God would want us to act.  We have no excuses, save human fallibility.  Vocation is something that I continue to pray about because it is something that I always seem to be falling short on, yet at the same time, I try to remind myself that it is something I can succeed at by doing something as simple as thanking a professor who has helped or being there to listen when a friend has a tough day.

So as I pack my spiritual trunk to leave St. Olaf, I do so thankful for the new additions I will take with me.  I take with me a stronger faith that was fostered by being among those who are from different faith traditions than I am, a confidence that there will be future times of spiritual hardship and an equal confidence that I will emerge stronger on the other side, an incredible interest in and respect for other denomination and religions, and an understanding of vocation that I hope will inform my work as a middle school religion teacher next year, my future jobs, and my relationships with the many wonderful people who I am blessed enough to consider a part of my life.  I hope that all of you have gained from your experience here on this campus spiritual gifts to put in your trunk and that you will use them and teach others about them throughout your lives.  God bless you all.