My Fat Vocation

How I live and move and have my being in the world

I remember the first time I heard someone speak seriously about my vocation and what it should be—I was in college, and a professor spoke of vocation as something bigger than just a career choice.

“Vocation comes from the word vocatio, which in Latin means ‘called out’,” they told me. As a student at the world’s largest Baptist university, I was clear on who was calling me—God—but I didn’t know what God was calling me to. My faith looks different now than it did then, as twenty years have passed. But I still believe that there is a Higher Power calling me to something, and I believe that it is particularly embodied.

So often, the conversation around vocation is either very academic and intellectual or very spiritual. Rarely is it embodied. The question tends to be very task-oriented— “What am I called to do?”—versus what I think it needs to be, incarnational, which asks, “Who am I called to be?” We have to make room for weakness when we talk about vocation.

An embodied, incarnational view of vocation enables us to think about being fully present in our bodies, no matter how strong or weak they are. This is the first step to truly fulfilling our vocation. If we’re not fully present in our bodies—if our vocation exists solely in our minds—we will not change the world.

And that’s the purpose of one’s vocation, isn’t it? To change the world, to make the place we inhabit better for the sake of our neighbors and ourselves? Only an incarnated, embodied sense of vocation can do that.

Frederick Buechner says this: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

How can we find our deep gladness if we are alienated from our bodies?

How can we find our true vocation if we hate our bodies?

How can we change the world if we ignore our bodies?

I am fat and disabled. Among other things (being white, female, educated, and privileged), these two traits mediate how I see and experience the world. In my life, I have had huge dreams of changing the world, making it more just and kind and inclusive. These huge dreams usually involved me in perfect fitness and health and ability, though. So what do I make of my vocation in my weakness?

This is embodied vocation, a calling lived out in weakness.

I can’t take on poverty like Dorothy Day describes in her book Loaves and Fishes. I can’t be the president of our country or even of a small university—my body is too weak.

But in my fatness and my disability, I can see the margins better than my thin and able-bodied peers. I can feel the pain of rejection because of my body. I can feel the isolation of being left out due to my disability. And I can use my voice and whatever platform I have to speak out against these injustices.

I can teach my university students Spanish from a fat and disabled perspective. I can bring to light the stories of other marginalized people for my students to read.

I can write and teach about fat liberation on The Fat Dispatch.

I can love my kids and husband in this frail and weak body of mine.

I am called to be fat and disabled and to love my neighbor as I love myself.

All of these are my embodied vocation.

What is your embodied, incarnational vocation?

Peace,

Amanda Martinez Beck