Book Review: You Have A Calling by Karen Swallow Prior
Karen Swallow Prior. You Have A Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2025. 146 pp.
If you have grown up in or around the Church, the topic of God’s calling on your life has, at some point, weighed heavily on your mind. Especially in the fervency of youth, it may have felt like a ticking bomb: you have only so much time to figure out the vocation God created you for, or all the years you spend searching will be wasted. Perhaps you already have a number of years to look back on and wonder whether you have done all God made you to do.
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Author and speaker Karen Swallow Prior addresses these existential challenges in her latest book, You Have A Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful. In the natural, friendly voice of a mentor, she invites her readers to pause and consider what it really means to be called by God. Through personal stories, she shares her experience of the often indirect journey toward finding and fulfilling a calling, noting that callings may change across different seasons of life. Drawing on her extensive literary knowledge, she also brings us into the minds of figures such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dorothy Sayers, and Wendell Berry, using their poems, novels, and essays to explore the human desire for meaning in work.
Defining the Terms
Though less than 150 pages, Prior’s book is far more than a simplistic skim over our place in this world; it unabashedly dives into the brilliant waters of the Imago Dei as the central theme of our work and calling. There is no question about this premise, as she explicitly states that “As creatures made in the image of God, we are each called to pursue truth, goodness, and beauty in all of life.” Her book is a conversation, not a self-help manual or a list of steps for finding your spiritual gifts. The first third of the book establishes the meaning of the terms calling, passion, and vocation, and sifts through modern assumptions and developments regarding the nature of work. She writes that the “key to knowing how they are being used is context,” noting that these words have changed in meaning over time and are often used interchangeably.
Discerning a Calling is Relational
The readability and topic of this book assumes the practicality of placing it into the hands of a high school or college graduate, but a better approach might be to let any reader, whether parent, priest, or friend, use it as a guide in conversations stemming from the inevitable question: “How do I know what God is calling me to do?”. One of the tendencies in our modern world is to search for vocation as an individual affair, even though, as Prior points out, it is not about the self at all.
How can we, through prayer and discernment, encourage others in the use of their gifts and talents to help them find their calling? Likewise, when trusted individuals ask us to step into a role, how can we discern whether it is a true calling? Even then, we must avoid self-fulfillment, recognizing that not all callings exist for our worldly success or satisfaction.
Prior centers on the true, the good, and the beautiful. She asserts that striving for truth is to strive to be like Christ; to do good is to do all things well; and to desire beauty is to desire that which is outside ourselves, often for the sake of others.
Rejecting Idleness
Despite the relational aspect of calling, we are never to remain passive or idle. Though Prior writes from an evangelical perspective, her understanding that God can use our work for his good purpose, in whatever capacity that may be, and regardless of how equipped we feel, is a universal truth. Working in a place where we feel unsuited is not a failure to achieve God’s purpose; when done well to do good for others, it instead serves as an opportunity to learn wisdom and, more importantly, glorify God. Prior succinctly erases the pressure we place on ourselves by reminding us that a calling is not something we conjure up from within but must come from without, often through the wise discernment of others.
For The Beauty of It
Some Evangelical circles elevate the value of truth and goodness above beauty, treating beauty as a superfluous decoration to the Christian faith; it is encouraging to see Prior holding all three in equal measure. Her description of beauty strides hand in hand with the Anglican faith, distinguishing beauty as a quality, an experience, that takes us outside of ourselves.
We know that the greatest example of beauty within a service is in the Eucharist. While Prior describes the taking of bread and wine as an aesthetic experience and a remembrance, as Anglicans, we aim to participate fully in its glorious mystery, in the Presence of Christ. As we partake, there is an imparting of grace that awakens a sense of the divine, which is where true beauty comes. We long for it. We desire that divine beauty to spill out into all areas of life, even in the mundane work that our jobs and homes often require. But like so many paradoxes of our faith, we find it not in serving ourselves, but in loving and serving our neighbors and families.
Karen Swallow Prior’s literary and spiritual insights gently challenge our presumptions about work and calling. Her words echo the familiar prayer spoken in Anglican churches across the globe: “And now, Father, send us out to do the work you’ve given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.” Whatever work lies before us, whether as teachers, students, parents, waiters, or repairmen, may we have a sincere desire to reflect the nature of God in it through truth, goodness, and beauty.
Image: You Have A Calling © Brazos Press.
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