Can there ever be such a thing as having a vocation to choose the wrong vocation? A man adopts a career only to discover too late that it is the wrong career; marries a woman only to find too late that she is the wrong woman; settles down into a fixed, narrow groove only to find that at heart he is a wanderer. Perhaps we should see these errors of judgment as being no more than permitted by God; what is certain is that, the false situation once established, the frustration set up, the sufferer must surely see his vocation as being not at an end but at a beginning: something of value has to be made somehow out of the muddle.

There are of course many other types of frustration, and they are tragically common. There is the outwardly successful marriage which in reality has become empty of meaning: the husband and wife continuing—for the sake of appearances, or from a sense of duty, or because of the children— to act as a happy couple while in reality there is no longer any real communion between them or any hope of any. There are the men and women who long for married life but never achieve it. There are those who have a deep desire to become this or that, to achieve this or that, but have in the end to admit that they lack the necessary gifts. There are those who long for friends, for companionship, but are condemned to loneliness; there are those who never seem to be able to make a real success of anything to which they put their hands. In the moral sphere there are those who long to make something worthy of their lives but who feel hopelessly defeated by some vice which they lack the strength to conquer; there are the cases of undeveloped conscience or deep character defect where a vague desire to ‘be good’ is at times of emotional exaltation raised to grandiose heights of resolution only to be dashed again into the depths of despair when the next defeat occurs.