"We would like to have more candidates, because we're an aging community," said the Rev. Charles Cummings, Holy Trinity's 60-year-old vocations director, who is editor of a scholarly journal on Cistercian monasticism.
Washi, he told me, was a centuries-old winter vocation of Japanese rice farmers.
I say that as a 51-year-old with a vocation that increasingly leads to self-employment, so take it with a grain of salt.
There are prayer journals for the young and the old, for particular vocations, for specific seasons in the liturgical year; there are journals crafted from the Church Fathers and Church Mothers, from mystics and martyrs, from the famous and the obscure.
Britain, he told his party conference, was rediscovering its global vocation, reviving old friendships in the Commonwealth and the Gulf, re-establishing the trade routes that once connected this island to the teeming markets of the developing world.
A vocation as old as politics and half as dirty.
The benandanti and the táltos were initiated at a certain age into their vocation by an older member of the same group, who visited them in a vision.
The ensuing turmoil would force her to question an old core principle of the writer's vocation, to presume authority, and of woman's vocation, to sacrifice herself for others.
You can dismiss this conception of the literary vocation as pious or old-fashioned, but, if you do, you are dismissing Joyce and much of literary modernism.
She was 68 years old – 50 of them devoted to her vocation – and had been ill for some time.
