Hi, my name is Pete and I’m grateful for your presence here. I am the founder of Vocatio, an organization that recognizes character and calling at the heart of human development. It is our belief that vocation, or life-calling, exists as a central dynamic in all human affairs.
Here, we have a keen interest in discerning the ways that vocation best informs cultural and institutional life in any of their manifestations. We work with individuals and organizations to assist them in aligning their inherent gifts and capacities with the meaningful work that these qualities are most suited to engaging.
My interest in placing vocation at the heart of these matters emerged across a number of contexts. I did not excel, either in primary or secondary school academics. Not having come from a family where academics were a routine part of life (I was the first person to graduate from high school in my family), I developed belief that I would have the greatest utility to people in blue collar spaces. I had always been good with my hands and enjoyed carpentry and mechanical work immensely. I apprenticed as a carpenter and entered that work as my initial experience of employment and career.
The experience I gained across jobsites proves to this day to be an invaluable dynamic from which I continue to draw. It is where craft began to emerge for me as a way to understand the human quest. It was in such spaces that I came into practical contact with the host of living dilemmas that show up as familiar fractures in human life: marital disputes among my co-workers, rampant addiction, petty disputes over rank and file, emotional wounding, and the endless quest for meaning and purpose that exists at the heart of our personal aspirations.
I also began working as a volunteer with the homeless population during this season of my life. In that context, I was again confronted by the tender heart of humankind and was brought into more practical connection with the broken systems that surround these living matters—these dilemmas that exist for us all in the territories of our shared human story.
At each new turn in career and life-path, an unmistakable, central, causal dynamic, revealed itself at the heart of the human calamities that I had both experienced and witnessed across these domains: a failure, both to understand and to employ love. This stood as the basis for most every problem that plagued human beings, so far as I could tell. In this season it occurred to me that a profound failure to know and engage love as a living quest, stood as the basis for most every problem that plagued human beings.
One experience on the job site led to another, and along that way (as we tend to be in our emergence into the world) I was exposed to myself in a revelatory way; I realised that more than physical craftsmanship itself, I was compelled by the human dynamics that allowed for a good life to occur at all.
Not merely work as craft, but life-as-craft.
I could sense that so much of the suffering that I witnessed in relational, familial and communal spaces was not merely the product of failed systemic or infrastructural dynamics—as it were, from society. I could sense that the solution to the suffering wasn’t to be found, merely, in a ‘better strategy’, or new set of skills. To the contrary, it was that each societal fracture—in whichever form it existed—was the product of maligned human will.
These were problems nested in the need for the human heart, through appropriate forms of guidance, to find its way back into the dynamics that it was meant to inhabit, where it could finally begin to flourish.
One call led to another, and I was encouraged by my colleagues on the jobsite to pursue a university education. Sadly, upon entry, I witnessed the intellectual and moral chaos that tends to govern the modern university. Once again, I discovered that love itself was lost in the university. And this, not only as a field of study, but as a living principle through which to shape the curricular interests of the faculty members who were there to instruct the young minds and hearts of the students under their tutelage. What I witnessed was therefore an atomized host of subjects, frenetically pursued in the name of ‘research’, while knowledge, as such, seemed to evade the interests of both faculty and students.
Despite these trends in the main, I encountered remarkable people along the way who shared my concerns and were able to help nurture those into the form that my own calling eventually took. I completed my graduate work in counselling psychology and opened a private practice, in which I was grateful to be employed in for nearly 17-years. Along those many thousands of hours, I was gratefully instructed by the beautiful needs of my clients, each of whom remain precious to me, whether in memory or in continued communal dynamics. As we quested together in the direction of healing in their lives, we learned about the utility and the genius of love as the chief aid to them in their plight. Eventually, I had to leave the clinical context in order to answer the next call: sharing what had been learned with a broader population than could be encountered in the clinical format and the office of the therapist. That brings me to how I’ve gotten to meet you here today…
Now, guiding people into knowledge of love to the benefit of human life is my primary interest. Vocation (or life-calling) is the vehicle that I have learned awaits each of us in our quest for meaning and purpose. It is how our love is meant to take shape. It is how we make a particular offering of ourselves to the world. It is the birthright of every person in the universe established for us by our Maker. Whether you find yourself in your early 20’s at the front end of these considerations or in your mid-50’s asking yourself how one could be carried so far away from the bright hopes that once populated your mind and heart, it is my joy—and my partners with me—to join you in your quest for meaning, purpose, integrity and fulfillment. Thank you for paying us a visit. I look forward to learning about how we can be of assistance to you.
Grace and peace to you along the way, friends.
