The professor stood in front of the seminary classroom. “Picture this,” he said, “you’re a pastor, and your adult son or daughter comes home and says, ‘Guess what, I’m getting married! Will you do our wedding?’ What would you tell them?”

He allowed the class to discuss this for a moment.

Then he bellowed at us.

“People! Do you really want to be the one to do pre-marital counseling here? To your adult kid? To your new in-law? Refer! Refer! Let someone else hear about their sex and money problems! Let someone else hear how you screwed up their childhoods! That counselor should not be you! Maybe you officiate at the ceremony. Or maybe you just get to be Mom or Dad at their wedding. With family and friends, you have to decide. Are you the pastor here, are you the friend, are you family? What is your role? You have to decide.”

Naming and understanding your roles can give you a sense of direction. Or, as another seminary professor put it, "When I know what my role is, I have a rule to follow — and that can keep me out of trouble. It is important to understand my role, and what the rules are."

A lot of the training I received focused on roles and relationships in life (though in my tradition the wording is often about your various “vocations,” or callings). But most people in secular settings rarely receive formal time or training to think about their roles.

So how can we identify and use our roles to make decisions and set boundaries? How can we understand what is — and just as importantly, what is not — ours to do?

We all have many roles. The first step is to figure it just how far a given role goes.

Is it a role related to a specific outcome? Or does the role cover a broader range — relationships, professions, perhaps even spiritual callings?

The broader and more complex the role is, the more of an opportunity you have to bring your personhood into it: meeting the role with your own particular temperament, your own gifts and limits, and allowing the role to shape you as well.

Simple Roles Give You Simple Rules

To see how our roles give us clarity and direction, let’s start with two straightforward examples. Roles not only give us our rules, they also give everyone a territory, an ownership stake in a project:

Project: Make dozens of Christmas cookies as a family, to share with elderly neighbors living alone

People: Five young children and their mother.

Five young children? Making dozens of cookies? I mean… think about how this could go sideways.

Their mother certainly did. She began the project by assigning each child a highly specific role.

Roles: Their mother read the recipes and called out ingredients. The oldest child measured ingredients. The second oldest child broke the eggs and checked them for spots. The next two children alternated adding ingredients. The youngest tasted the cookie dough to make sure there was enough cinnamon. Everyone had a role. Everyone knew what was — and what was not — their part to do.

Project: Wallpaper a kitchen together without getting a divorce.

People: Two spouses who both had leadership roles at work

Roles: Dana had never put up wallpaper; Henry had. Henry measured. Dana cut. Henry pasted it up. Dana smoothed it out. “It took us the whole weekend,” Dana said, “but it looked wonderful in the end.”

Simple roles, simple rules. The more specific, contained, and concrete the action is associated with your role, the clearer the rules are. In the examples above, in a sense, the roles ARE the rules: The egg breaker, the wallpaper measurer.

But many of our roles are ongoing, relational. The more complex the role, the more your knowledge of yourself and your understanding of the real work of the role matters.

Consider your own complex roles. Did you understand it before you actually did it? It’s one thing to measure flour for cookie dough. It’s quite another to learn to be a teacher, or learn to be a small business owner.

Sorting Your Signals with Complex Roles

How do you know if you are looking at a complex role? Two markers:

• Other people, outside the actual role, have all kinds of expectations of what the role is

• In the paid labor force, the role requires an apprenticeship (internship); if the role is outside the formal workforce, it has a long learning curve.

Complex roles still have rules, but the path winds uphill, and it is covered by a thorny hedge of others’ opinions.

The Expectations of People Outside Your Role Do Not Define Your Role

Yes, other people’s expectations matter, because you will have to address how you handle them.

Ethics matter. Standards matter.

Yet at that same time, people outside a complex role rarely understand what is required from the inside. (Parents, do you remember what you thought about parenting before you had children?)

You’re wrestling with a complex role when everyone has an opinion on what you should be doing, and how well you are doing it. You’re wrestling with a complex role when it might also be described with words like “office” or even “archetype”: The office of the President, the office of the bishop; the archetype of the artist, the archetype of the father.

If I am a small child and my role is breaking eggs for cookie dough, the expectations are clear and fairly simple. (”Hey, don’t wave that egg around, you’ll dr…! Drop it. Oh that’s all right, honey, don’t cry, here’s how we clean it up…”)

Consider your own expectations about others’ roles. What are your expectations of the President of the United States? What are your expectations of an investigative journalist? What are your expectations of what makes someone a good teacher, a good mother, a good manager, a good CEO?

Are your expectations about those roles universally held? (Hint: nope.)

When you are holding a complex role, a role about which many people have many opinions, you’ve got to sort your signals from the noise — sometimes a lot of noise — to grow into that role.

Defining and understanding your role, and how you as an individual are living that role out, is the best way to an inner sense of peace about it: even with a lot of external conflict about what that role means.

But it takes time, often years, to grow into complex roles and learn what is really involved.

Internships and Learning Curves: Understanding What Your Role Actually Is

All roles and rules have learning curves. If it’s a complex role, the learning curve is more of a twisty path.

Apprenticeship is an old-fashioned word, but many careers require them. Substitute the modern terms “internship” or “field work” for “apprenticeship.” You cannot absorb the norms, standards, values or practices — in other words, the rules of these kinds of roles — without actually doing them. Any career path that requires some kind of formal internship is a career where you learn by doing, from others who have been doing it longer: medicine, scientific research, teaching, the clergy, the trades.

Inevitably, the apprenticeship teaches people that what they thought the role was about from the outside, is not actually the case when you take it on for yourself. Mari Andrew writes about this learning curve:

I spent January-May of 2021 working as a chaplain in a hospital—in modern terms, that’s someone who provides emotional and spiritual support to patients regardless of any religious inklings. I joked that I was “the cool chaplain,” one who could easily minister to atheists and agnostics and Wiccans and Orthodox Jews alike. I came into the role with a good amount of arrogance about what I could offer: empathy, understanding, open-mindedness.

But my supervisor told me again and again and again: “You actually don’t know what the person is going through. You might have shared their exact same illness, and you still don’t know. You might understand their issues with their father, aspects of their identity, the specific things they miss about wellness. You still don’t know. You have nothing to offer except presence. Just be a person.” … My supervisor reminded me, “The patients are your teachers. You don’t know more than they do. Other way around.” … Chaplaincy humbled the hell out of me because the hospital is a place where nothing makes sense. There’s no wisdom in a hospital room; there’s just lonely beeping and chaos. Good people can pray really hard and never see a miracle; others get out easy for no apparent reason at all.

It would be intoxicating to offer wisdom, room after room. And, yet, when we offer wisdom or insight, we take away agency and grace. (Andrew 2021)

You Get to Choose Whether Your Role Becomes a Practice

In intentional religious communities that require high commitment like monasteries, a lot of thought has gone into how roles can shape us as persons, and how we can choose to grow spiritually through our roles. Any role can be grown into a spiritual practice.

At the same time, this process of growing into a role and allowing it to sculpt your approach to life is not necessarily linked to religion.

But it is — always — a voluntary choice. When you allow a role to become a personal practice, this is your choice. It is about you deciding that you will allow the role to shape you as a person, and to shape your approach to the world.

You also volunteer for whether or not you will pursue excellence in your role. No one can force you to strive for excellence. That too is a voluntary commitment.

It is useful to learn from religious communities about this process, whether or not we are involved with formal religions. For thousands of years these communities have thought specifically about how your roles can grow you as a person by teaching you about facing limits, growing in compassion and service toward other people who need your efforts, and striving for inward and outward excellence.

Two examples, from East and West:

In Japanese Zen Buddhism, the head of the kitchen, or tenzo, held one of six high offices in the monastery. A Buddhist monk in Japan named Eihei Dogen in the year 1237 wrote about the sanctity of the cook in a treatise called Tenzo Kyokun. “Instructions to the Tenzo,” as the title translates, described the tasks of this priest/chef — a post to which Dogen believed only the most masterful monks should be appointed — and the importance of order and cleanliness in the tenzo’s work. On a deeper level, Dogen displays how the work of the cook can instruct anyone outside the kitchen on how to approach all kinds of worldly work with reverence. … “The tenzo must be present,” Dogen writes, “paying careful attention to the rice and soup while they are cooking. … Presence manifests for the tenzo as focus and commitment, turning work into a form of meditation. When sitting, just sit. When cooking, just cook. Care for nothing but the work when you work. “My sincerest desire,” Dogen writes, “is that you exhaust all the strength and the effort of your lives . . . and every moment of every day into your practice.” Dogen saw this form of complete immersion as a connection with the Divine: “To view all things with this attitude is called Joyful mind”—a curious juxtaposition of exhaustion with joy that resonates with modern chefs and cooks. In the end, Dogen saw the tireless work of the tenzo as a gateway to personal growth. In serving others with magnanimity, joy, and with the care of a parent, he counseled, you are working to better your self. (Charnas 2016, pp 14-16)

Many Western monasteries run businesses to support themselves. Here is an account of how a 21st century monk who manages a brewery in Europe sees himself in the ancient role of the “cellarer,” as described in the 1,500 year old Rule of St. Benedict:

N. considers himself first and foremost a cellarer. In the Rule of St. Benedict (RSB), the cellarer is the one who distributes the food to the monks, handles provisions and procurement, and who is responsible for the economic management of the monastery. He says that this is a service he has been “entrusted” with. It is ultimately the position of servant. This is the “portrait” of this role. Each Benedictine monk can identify himself with one of the portraits given in the RSB. This is more than just a role model. It is a specific spiritual way. What strikes him most about what the RSB says about the cellarer, is the imperative of foreseeing, preventing, and assuaging any lack of material (sustenance, food, tools, clothing, etc.) which the monks may have. Ultimately, he is there in a facilitating role. He is there to help the monks to be, and to work. The cellarer’s role is one of paternity towards the community (he uses the expression “managing as a family father would”). Paternity is referred to also in the sense that he is supposed to find the right words. In a situation of want, or need, or when faced with a fellow monk having a problem, even if the cellarer cannot always provide material help, he is meant to always find a word that points to continuation, towards something positive, “to life” as he puts it. This requires a spiritual and human attitude. (Kleymann and Malloch 2010)

If your role becomes your spiritual practice, you don’t just grow into the role, you allow the role to grow you. You look for ways this role can help you grow in wisdom through managing the realities of your circumstances, and in service to those affected by your role.

And you look for ways to strive for excellence in the role, inwardly and outwardly.

Finally, if you do this, it is indeed a voluntary commitment.

We have all filled roles where we were phoning it in, and few of our roles in life are completely autonomous choices. But taking on a given role as an intentional practice, a path, is your choice.

No one else can make you do this.

References

Andrew, M. ‘It’s unfair, and it doesn’t make sense’, Out of the Blue (27 July 2021). Available at: https://mariandrew.bulletin.com/320408766396131 (Accessed: 11 November 2021).

Charnas, D. (2016) Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind. New York, NY: Rodale Books. Kindle Edition.

Kleymann, B. and Malloch, H. (2010) ‘The rule of Saint Benedict and corporate management: employing the whole person’, Journal of Global Responsibility, 1(2), pp. 207–224. doi:10.1108/20412561011079362.