In most families there is a regular call that the younger members try to avoid - “Clean your room”, “Do the dishes” or perhaps today “Empty the dishwasher.” When we are young we often try to avoid these calls and think about ourselves and what we want. We tend to forget about how these calls invite us to be more of a family where everyone has a part to play to make the family more united and harmonious.
When you think about it, life is ultimately a being “called forth.” When we think of our self-understanding when we were small compared to now, our whole self-understanding has changed. We might have understood ourselves as a son or daughter of our parents… now we might be parents ourselves.
Our two great life forces, our sexuality and our spirituality, remind us that we are not an end in ourselves. These two great gifts of our humanity need to be kept in a healthy balance. A person who spiritualises everything lives in an abstract world and can end up moralising and viewing people in “how they should be”, in their view, and missing the person before them. A person who sexualises everything is looking only for what satisfies themselves. In our time there is a rather unhealthy balance between a strong trivialisation of sexuality and a weak sense of the spiritual.
When there is a healthy balance between our life forces, we notice within ourselves that we are drawn towards others and it’s in giving of ourselves to others in friendship and relationships we discover more of who we are and who we are called to be. In this way we are always arriving at who we are.
The word “vocation” comes from the Latin word vocare, which means “to call.” St John tells us God is love. So, as human beings made in the image and likeness of God, our first vocation is to love. When we reflect on the Scriptures, we see that it is the account of God revealing himself and his call to humanity, as humanity struggled to understand and live that vocation, that call to love.
In a similar way God’s call unfolds in our life. God always calls us, even if we are not listening or recognising God’s voice or signs, and even if we choose not to obey. Jesus came so that we might have life, and have it in abundance (cf Jn 10:10) and he is faithful in his loving outreach to us. His call to us shapes not only who we are but what we do, how we live and how we love. But being the face and love of God made visible, Jesus can only whisper in the depths of our hearts. He can’t force us to love him.
God’s call always takes us beyond ourselves, we always have to put out into the deep. In our days, when the Christian faith and the Church seem to be under attack, it takes courage to seek, to listen and to respond to God’s call and to follow. Why? In the marketplace of today there are many voices saying, come this way or that. In the midst of these we need to ask: is this voice true? Is this voice calling me to God and the fullness of love in my own self, in my family, my community and the world?
One of my great joys as a priest, as a bishop, is hearing how God is calling forth people in their lives and how this is reflected in what they do. And who knows, perhaps God is calling you or someone in your family to the religious life or to the priesthood? Would you have the courage to answer that call? Would you encourage such a call in one of your children? God is calling. Are we listening?
