Vocation Call is for Us All!

by Admin · April 17, 2016

Good preachers will be tying themselves in knots as they seek to talk to their congregations this weekend on Vocations Sunday. It was much easier in the “good old days”.

A Dominican sister speaks about her vocation to young people in Madrid. The call to vocations is not directed only to those who join holy orders and the consecrated lives, but to everybody in all contexts of life. (Photo: Paul Haring/CNS)

Then a vocation simply meant becoming a priest or a religious brother or sister (although then we were still using the more old-fashioned and narrower terms “monk” and “nun”).

“Do you have a vocation?” was the simple question the priest asked; and the answer was usually an embarrassed “no”; and thankfully in a few cases a tentative “yes”.

But we now use the term vocation much more widely. Going back to the Latin root meaning of “a call”, we realise that all Christians have a call from God, a plan for our lives which God is calling each one of us to fulfil.

As Christians, we have a duty to try and discern this call, to test our professional choices against our sense of God’s plan, and to be accountable for our choices not just to our families or our bank manager but also to God.

That’s a far cry from the kind of careers guidance most young people receive today. Of course, we might not make the time to listen to God’s call or have the courage to respond. But none of us can say that we don’t have a vocation.

God calls us to a wide variety of options for our lives and he is interested in whatever we do with our talents, even if we do not choose to become priests or religious. It also resonates with how people talk about what they do.

I recently spent time with three groups of people whose professions show clearly what difference this fuller understanding of vocation can mean.

One group were experienced teachers working in Catholic schools—some of them Catholics, many of them not. When speaking about what they do and in particular how they treat the young people in their care, they easily used the language of vocation.

Another group comprised young doctors from the UK who had been working with South African doctors in a public hospital here and were impressed by the level of commitment they encountered. The British secular worldview did not enable them to articulate it in terms of a vocation but that was what they were witnessing.

The third was a group of 80 Unisa social work students with whom I will spend time over the next few months. They have had a good grounding in the professional and managerial dimensions of being a social worker. But I have been asked to also help with their vocational formation: what would it mean to regard entering this sector as responding to a sense of call?

While I am not underestimating the importance of professional training and managerial qualifications, I am very grateful that in these jobs there are people who feel they are fulfilling a vocation. Those are the kind of teachers, doctors and social workers this country needs.

But this is the dilemma that ties the preacher in knots. If all lines of work can be vocations, how can he encourage people to sign up to the Church’s specific vocations? Are they better or higher or truer than the other secular vocations?

I have personally travelled through three stages of this journey. For many years I did a job, in advertising, which I thoroughly enjoyed but which at no time felt like a calling from God. I then abandoned that in a Damascene conversion and signed up to the Jesuits — a very clear commitment to the narrower definition of vocation.

I then left the Jesuits but have continued to work for eight years in Church organisations. These roles have been paid (never well) and I have not had to make explicit promises such as poverty, chastity or obedience. Nevertheless, I regard what I do as living out a vocation.

My conclusion from this crooked path is that a vocation is not defined by the job that you do. So it is wider than being a priest or a religious; wider even than being in the caring professions. An engineer or a taxi driver — or even an ad man — could be living a vocation.

Nor is it defined by where you do that job. It is not defined by the social context of the role, though a doctor or teacher who works in the private sector has to prove harder that their role is a vocation. It is not even defined by how committed you are, though this is an important characteristic. We would hesitate to say that the hard-working drug dealer had a “vocation”.

I would conclude that the true test of vocation is to ask yourself: “Whose Kingdom are you building?” Scripture gives many examples of building God’s kingdom, but the best is perhaps captured in Micah: “to act justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly” (6:8).

There are some jobs—and being a priest or religious would be uppermost — which provide activities and structures and contexts which ought to enable one to pass the Micah test. And there are many people in those roles who do and who should be held up as models, not just on Vocations Sunday but all year round.

But simply having that title does not mean that the person is living out a vocation. I have also known priests and religious who are anything but models of justice or mercy or humility. Instead of building God’s kingdom they are more focused on building — or usually defending — their own kingdoms.

And while they might technically live according to their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, the contortions that they go through to explain these to the ordinary Catholic make their lives a poor witness to these great counsels.

There are some jobs, for example in the caring professions or in NGOs, where it is easier to live up to Micah’s words, but that’s still by no means automatic. The context is not enough; what also matters is how generously each person responds to that context. So I must be careful that I do not help myself to the term vocation just because I work for the Denis Hurley Centre.

And there are many jobs which could potentially be vocations — butcher, baker, candlestick maker or even politician. Here though, and I know this from my days in advertising, there is not much help given by the activities or the context or the structures.

So if you wish to work with justice, mercy and humility in banking or in telesales or in real estate you will have to invest a lot of time and effort. But that would be well worth doing. Because no matter how effective Vocations Sunday is in recruiting future priests and religious, there will still always be more teachers and accountants and journalists in this world.

So certainly the Church needs to be recruiting for its historic vocational roles. Each one of us can encourage young people we know to give serious consideration to these.

In addition, the Church could help us all to see how we are to live out our vocations in whatever job we find ourselves. And religious orders in particular have an opportunity to share their traditions and their formation practices and their wisdom with Catholics struggling to live their secular vocations.

In each age the successful religious movements are the ones that have understood the signs of the times and adapted to them. How wonderful it is when we see how the traditions of St Francis or St Ignatius or Catherine McAuley can inspire people who are living out their vocations in the world alongside those who have taken vows in religious life—in fact, more or less the model of the early Church that we are reading about each Sunday.