© 2003
What is a vocation?
Many parts one body quote.
Just as the Church, the Body of Christ, is made of different parts, you could also say that those parts are the different calls to holiness or vocations within the Church.
Every Christian is called to holiness, and our vocation is our primary means of fulfilling the call to holiness.
A vocation is the main way that a Christian adult makes a full, free, faithful, and fruitful gift of themselves to God. Your vocation is also your primary path to heaven and is how we as His followers give God what is due to him (our lives in service) through our vows.
There are two specific types of vocations. These are marriage and celibacy for the kingdom. Within each of these, there is a number of ways to live them out. Celibacy for males can take the form of bishop, priest, permanent deacon, monk, brother, or consecrated single. For women, celibacy can take the form of a sister, nun, or consecrated single. Each of these vocations can also be broken down by a religious order. For instance, a celibate person might be in the Dominican Order, or in the Franciscan Order with a focus on the virtue of poverty. Many of you may be familiar with Mother Theresa’s Missionaries of Charity or the Carmelites. This list can go on for quite a long time, but I’ll stop here for now.
The charisms of marriage are also diverse. Each marriage has, in a way, its own charism in that each home is called to be a miniature (domestic) Church, and no two homes are quite the same and no two couples live out the life of holiness in quite the same way.
Some vocations are sacraments. A sacrament is a sign on Earth that points to a heavenly reality. A sacrament also makes real on Earth the sign that it points to. Marriage is a sacrament or sign that points to the union between Christ and the Church. Marriage also brings this union into reality here on earth. Celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of God may or may not be a sacrament. Holy Orders which would include bishops, priests and deacons is a sacrament that is a sign of the priestly presence of Christ on earth. Holy orders also brings about what it symbolizes in that the priest stands “in Persona Christi” or the person of Christ in particular while performing the sacrifice of the mass and in reconciliation. Other forms of celibacy are not a sacrament because they are not a sign to a heavenly reality; they are instead a living of the heavenly reality on earth. For instance a sister is in a sense living out the marriage between Christ and the Church here on Earth. How is this possible? “The kingdom of God is at hand”.
Preparing to discern your vocation/Preparing for our vocation
The key to knowing what our vocation is is to become a whole and well formed person. To be a whole or another way to say it is to be a holy person we must have self possession as Annie talked about this morning.
To be a whole person we must have developed both natural and supernatural virtues.
To be a whole person that is capable of proper discernment we must have a solid prayer life.
And, to be a whole person we must be free. Free from the enslavement of sin, free from selfish desires and free from worldly cares such as large amounts of debt that may prevent us from being able to follow God’s will.
When we are free to choose our vocation, proper and healthy discernment always takes God’s will into account and looks for the way He and the Church needs us to serve him in our time.
When preparing for our vocation, we must start with virtue, always striving to be a good Christian.
What this means becomes more clear when we compare it to the mistake of minimalism. Minimalism is when we simply try to do only what is takes to get by. This mistake often hinders people in their discernment. Instead of just trying to get by, we can follow Christ’s example on the cross and give everything even our lives to follow Him.
Second, when preparing for our vocation, we need a solid understanding of what it means to be a person created in the image and likeness of God. By recognizing this we can understand the great dignity that God has given us and then do everything we can to live up to that dignity.
Finally it is important to understand what it means to be created male and female and the purpose of our sexuality. All men are called to be both a father and husband. All women are called to be both a wife and mother. For a married person, being a father and husband or mother and wife are fairly easy concepts to grasp, but how about being a father and husband or mother and wife in a celibate vocation. A priest is called to stand in the place of Christ and be a husband to his Church he serves in which he has many spiritual children. A sister is called to be a wife to Christ and to be a spiritual mother to those she serves.
Discerning your vocation
Once we have striven for holiness, though cultivating virtue, and we have come to understand our call to image God and to understanding who we are as a male or a female then we will find ourselves in a position where we long with all our hearts to give ourselves to God in service in whatever way we can. The love of God that helped us desire virtue in the first place will have grown so much that we will just want to serve him in any opportunity He gives us. When you find yourself in this state my advice to you is “Be not afraid”, be willing to take risks for God and just go for it! Start moving down a path that leads to a vocation you think you may be called to and know that God is all powerful and has no trouble communicating. If you are not going down the path that God has planned for you, he will demonstrate this to you by closing doors and putting obstacles in your way. If you run into a door or obstacle that seems insurmountable, take a step back and consider if God has opened another door that he wants you to follow. Most often, when you are ready to serve God however He wants you to, which means you are open to all vocations, God will reveal the vocation you are being called to through the opportunities he offers you in your life. Ask yourself what doors God has opened for you through the talents and circumstances He has presented to you, and ask yourself am I standing still or am I moving so that God can steer me in one direction or another. By moving I mean, am I going forward in service to God through the opportunities (doors) that He has put in my life. If you feel you are standing still for any reason, it is a good idea to return to striving for virtue and praying and reflecting on becoming a person who is less afraid of what you have to lose and more willing to sacrifice everything for God, trusting that His sole aim is to make you happier than you can imagine.
When discerning our vocation, the quickest way to make sure that we will not find it is to not look. Let me try to give you an analogy. Let’s imagine that each of our lives is like a ship in a vast sea. We are the captain and we control the ship’s rudder, but unfortunately we are not quite sure where we are going and what direction to sail to get there. The Holy Spirit is the wind that pushes us along our way. The first thing we need to do is examine our ship to make sure that we don’t have the anchor down. Many of us go through life with our anchor down expecting God to “hit us over the head with a 2x4” if we are going to follow him in one way or the other. This tends not to be the way that God communicates with us. So first things first, let’s make the conscious decision to lift up our anchor and set sail. Once we have the breeze in our sails we can start steering in one direction or the other, in other words, towards one vocation or the other. But how do we decide which way to go? With prayer, we can check the prevailing winds and see which direction the Holy Spirit is trying to lead us through the arrangement of our lives and steer the rudder as best we can in that direction. Let me give you a real life example. Let’s say you have an inclination that the Holy Spirit may be calling you to the religious life. You can steer your ship in that direction by contacting the order you are interested in to see if you can visit them for a weekend discernment retreat. If you get told they are not accepting new vocations at this time you can reevaluate and try a step in another direction.
Do not be afraid that the discernment process is not an exact science. Many people are distraught that they are not 100% sure of what there vocation is. Again do not be afraid! You will only know 100% what your vocation is once you have taken your vows. This can be scary; don’t some people take vows and find out that they choose wrong? To put it frankly, no. Many people struggle to trust their own discernment process. But if you have been sincere in your discernment then you will not choose the wrong vocation because God who loves us so much, will not let you fall into a trap when you are seeking with all your heart to serve him. The only way to fall into this kind of a trap is to willfully avoid God’s will by throwing away the opportunities that He gives you to follow Him down the road of service. Remember God has no trouble communicating and will close the open doors if you are going down the wrong path. God is beyond time, he will not allow you to miss your vocation due to time constraints. Many people also struggle with the idea that they have somehow missed their vocation. Let me put these concerns to rest. You do not have a small window of time in which you must act or you are sunk forever. God’s plan for you existed before you did and He is a patient and powerful God always waiting for your love to grow to the point where you throw your fears at the foot of cross and follow Jesus wherever He will let you. You can know that his will for your life will not change and you can be sure that once you have taken vows that fulfilling that vow is God’s will so don’t look back. It is always helpful to keep in the front of our minds when discerning that God loves us and just as we would never do anything but help those that we love, God always does everything in His power to help us get to heaven. It is also good to remember that God is not hiding from us but that it is rather our own sin, our own lack of virtue, and our lack of fervent love that makes Him seem far away. He is always there for us.
To close I want to summarize that your vocation will be your path to heaven and your path to the greatest happiness possible for you on earth, but at the same time, your vocation no matter what it is will require sacrifice. I encourage you to practice sacrificing your will now so that you can complete God’s will when the time comes in the future because each little step that we take in the right direction makes us more and more able to make heroic gifts of ourselves to Him when the time comes to commit to a lifelong vocation.
Let us pray…
Steven Vining can be contacted at
svining@tobet.org
The Theology of the Body Evangelization Team can be reached at
info@tobet.org
