Career-Free

It is not for everyone, that's for sure!  We are a rarity, an elite, a remnant. To be career-free is a kind of a poverty or deprivation, but is also a blessing, a charism, and a mission.

A career is, of course, a good thing. It is the way our complex, technological/scientific, bureaucratic, professional, managerial world works. A career is a lifelong occupation that requires education, credentialization, progression upward in responsibility and renumeration, social status, and economic security. It often entails a valued human service to the community so can be an expression of altruism. It is usually situated within a large bureaucratic network. It becomes a key aspect of one's social identity.  It draws upon a deep, broad body of knowledge, technology, beliefs, ideas and practices.  My seven children and their spouses all have careers: I am proud of them and happy for them and their families. 

But...within the Catholic economy it is very good for some of us to be career-free. This for many reasons:

Careerism is the belief that one's personal identity and worth flows from career status. Imagine a 20 or 30 or 40 year high school reunion: be honest...we size each other up on a scale of achievement, income, and status. This is normie, bourgie mediocrity at its worst. Some of us have to step outside the paradigm and simply say: "Career wise, I am nothing. I am a loser in that game. I am career-free and proud of it!"

Bipolar Class Structure.  In my lifetime, our society has become increasing polarized into the upper and lower classes. The upper class is professional, educated, successful, economically secure, more liberal (politically and religiously) and inbred as they marry their own. The lower class (of diverse races and ethnicities) is career-less, unschooled, financially precarious, MAGA-inclined, and more vulnerable to social pathologies of addiction, single motherhood, unemployment, homelessness, mental illness, crime, and violence. A blessing of being career-free is a certain transcendence of this divide: ideally, one is not entrapped within either world but free to navigate back and forth, a dual-citizenship of sorts. Such a person need not be a Trump-fan, but will sympathize with the motives of those who are.

Identity.  Unbound to a profession, one enjoys the liberty to explore identity in many alternate ways: faith, family, art, culture, service, study, and other. For the Catholic, one is free to explore and deepen one's relationship with Christ; to surrender to serendipitous movements of the Holy Spirit outside of the protocols of "normie-ness." Discipleship in Christ can, of course, entail a profession. But the Spirit does like to act in creative, transgressive ways as well.

Intellectually one's thinking is not pre-structured by some dominant academic paradigm so one is free to roam in and out of disciplines, movements, schools of thought and especially personal and communal encounters. This makes for creativity, cross-fertilization, synthesis, breath and depth of thought. 

Catholic Priesthood. In our Church, the priesthood is clearly a career. It requires extensive training across a variety of disciplines; it entails very particular capacities including prayer, pastoral-emotional intelligence, acceptance of celibacy, and a minimum of organizational and academic ability. Obviously, the cleric is part of a brOoader, indeed global institution. It is also a hierarchy involving higher positions. In this it can incline to a corrupt clerical careerism. Readers of this blog will know that the author has a special fondness for "maverick priests" who do not fit into the program, who fail in competence in some way, but often compensate with intuition, compassion, charity, holiness and eccentricity, as they give headaches to their ecclesial authorities. 

Religious Life by contrast is inherently, in form, career-free. Many religious are in fact professors, teachers, doctors and so forth. But that career or ministry is subordinate to the primary focus of the vowed or consecrated life: intimate surrender to the person of Jesus Christ. This takes a variety of forms, including the solitude of hermits and consecrated virgins, but more frequently it entails participation also in a community of prayer and charity. Normatively, the specific service or ministry of a professed person (teaching, care for the poor, etc.) is tertiary: flows from the primal union with Christ and the secondary engagement with a specific community.

Lay Movements. It is worth noting that contemporary lay movements differ in the value they place upon career, secular or religious. Opus Dei and Communion and Liberation see great spiritual value in ones profession or career. By contrast, the Neocatechumenal Way is more working/lower class and focuses upon family and Church and devalues career. Other radical, anti-bourgeois Catholic groups include Dorothy Dayu's Catholic Worker and Madonna House with Catherine Doherty's "little mandate." St. Charles de Focauld, in his imitation of the simple life of Bethlehem, has been an inspiration for Kiko Arguello and Catherine Doherty and others in their embrace of simplicity, humility and praise and detachment from the benefits of career profession.

Conclusion

Life in Christ is a descent...down into our baptism, into poverty of spirit, into humility, simplicity, service, charity and praise. A holy woman said: "I want to go to the poorest nation; find the most destitute province; identify the most deprived town; ask for an extremely suffering family...and serve them." 

The normal middle class career trajectory is different: upward...greater education, credentials accomplishments, status, celebrity, financial security and wealth. It is possible, but not easy, to pursue such a path and yet answer Christ's call to humility, simplicity, and praise.

But it is good for some of us to remain unprofessional...professing simply the love of Christ for those who are simple, poor and faithful.