Soul, Vocation, and Sacramental Seeing
Pixar’s Soul explores the concept of vocation and what it means to live a fulfilling life.
Review by Alex Sosler
The idea of vocation has a rich history in the Protestant imagination. The word vocation stems from the Latin vocare: to call. It is what life beckons you to do. Many Christian thinkers have defined it in slightly different ways but with a central theme. Martin Luther King Jr. talks about three dimensions of a vocational call: length, breadth, and height. The length is your personal, inward passions. The breadth is an outward concern for others. And the height is your upward responsibility: duty to a higher being. A complete life needs all three. Tim Keller provides a similar take: A vocation is where affinity, ability, and opportunity line up. What needs do you resonate with? What gifts (and limits) do you have? What does the community affirm or offer you? Answering those three questions will give you a sense of vocation. And, of course, there’s the popular quote from Fredrich Buechner: vocation is that place where your great passion meets the world’s great need.
The idea of vocation takes center stage in Disney’s new film, Soul, released on Christmas Day and directed by Pete Doctor (Monsters, Inc., Up, Inside Out). In Soul, Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx) is a middle-aged black man who experiences a sort of middle life crisis. He dreams of being a jazz pianist, but for now he’s teaching band part-time to indifferent (and untalented) middle schoolers. He’s offered the stability of going full-time, but he is hesitant. Is this an end to his dreams?
While he’s considering the job and being urged by his mother to do the “responsible thing,” Joe finally catches his big break: a gig with the famed Dorothea Williams (voiced by Angela Bassett). On the way back from his audition, he’s skipping through the streets in exuberance, chatting away on the phone and… falls into a manhole. This misstep takes him on a journey to another world, to the place where souls separate from bodies and the dead are absorbed into the greater light. Joe slips out of his impending annihilation to a place where new souls are developed and nurtured before they enter existence. Here, he meets an emerging soul known as “22” (voiced by Tina Fey). She’s been trained by the greatest minds to ever live, but she just doesn’t think life is worth all the effort. She would rather drift back into non-existence.
According to Saint Augustine, evil is non-being: not a thing in itself but an absence. As such, any existence—no matter how depraved or wicked or ugly—has some element of goodness and beauty, because to exist is tinged with goodness. The evilest thing is not to exist at all—and that’s what 22 seems to want.
I fear we’ve oversold vocation as a sort of golden ticket to a meaningful life.
As Joe is helping 22 find her desire to live, he has a chance to review his life, and he begins to realize that it has all been meaningless. He hasn’t made a difference. He was made for music, but he hasn’t pursed it or found fulfillment. He hasn’t accomplished his vocation.
In the film a constant refrain is finding one’s special “spark”: everyone needs to identify the thing that makes their life worth living. Of course, the idea of a spark subjectifies the concept of vocation: rather than an external call, a spark is merely a subjective feeling. Music is Joe’s spark. It’s been his passion since he was 12 years old. It’s what he lives for, what he gets lost in. As he realizes this, Joe is also out to help 22 discover her own spark, even though she would rather not. This pursuit takes them on a journey that I won’t spoil for you.
One of the things that Soul demonstrates is Joe’s (and our) overemphasis on vocation. In Christian communities as well as in the secular sphere, I fear we’ve oversold vocation as a sort of golden ticket to a meaningful life—as if we can just pick the right career that inspires our “spark” and we will be happy. But what if life is more than a job? What if there’s more to fulfillment?
Joe comes to his senses in a strange way: he achieves everything he dreamed. He gets to experience the perfect gig with Dorothea Williams. Here’s his big break. He gets everything he wanted; he’s lifted toward transcendence. As he leaves the club, he asks, “What now?” Dorothea responds, “Come back tomorrow and we do it again.” Joe walks away disappointed. That’s it? That’s what he’s been longing for?
The bodiless 22 teaches Joe something in their travels together. It’s that Augustinian secret: being is a good in itself. Life is a sacrament—we can see through ordinary events to a sacredness that lies behind. What gives 22 her “spark,” and what wakes Joe up, is seeing one of those helicopter leaves fall from a tree. This recollection ignites a trip down memory lane for Joe: eating pizza, helping others find their sparks, sand between his toes on the beach, fireworks, breathing fresh air on a bike ride. He remembers something 22 said to him, “Maybe sky watching can be my spark… or walking! I’m really good at walking!” To which he replied, “Those really aren’t purposes, 22. That’s just regularly old living.”
Just living. Perhaps because it’s regular and old, we tend to forget about it. But isn’t that what makes life meaningful? It reminds me of a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead: “It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life…. But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only who could have the courage to see it?”
Perhaps what we do is less important than how we see.
Soul encourages the viewer—imperfectly yet resolutely—to embrace a holy indifference to what we are doing in a given moment or season, and a divine passion for simply being. What we do is important—profoundly so. But perhaps what we do is less important than how we see.
To say I love what I get to do during the day is an understatement. I can’t imagine truly flourishing doing anything else. For me, educating college students aligns with all the ways of defining a vocation. I have a passion for it. There’s a need. There’s communal affirmation. I feel called to it. But if I’m surveying the landscape of small, Christian liberal arts schools, the clock is ticking. More than likely, there will be a time when my vocation, the thing that gives me meaning and purpose and “spark,” will be ripped away because of budget cuts or closure or a pandemic. In that moment, I can wander like a lost soul (another feature of the film) and wonder, “What kind of life is this?”
Or I can look at the world and see my exhausting but joyful kids, or my lovely wife, or the mountain views from our backyard, or the taste of pizza, and think: “What kind of life is this?” The first is a question of despair; the second is a question of grace. How I answer will depend on what I want to see, and on what kind of training my eyes have received.
Soul beckons us to ask the second question.
Alex Sosler is Assistant Professor of Bible and Ministry at Montreat College near Asheville, North Carolina, deacon at Redeemer Anglican Church, husband to Lauren, and dad to Mariela, Auden, and Jude. His writing has been featured in Front Porch Republic, Fathom Magazine, Mockingbird, and Christ and Pop Culture.
Soul was released by Pixar on December 25, 2020. You can find it streaming on Disney Plus here.
