"From the Office of Bishop Raymond J Lahey, Diocese of Antigonish, NS"

You Have a Vocation

In April 2002, the North American Congress on Vocations to the Ordained Ministry and the Consecrated Life met in Montreal. Laypeople, religious, and clergy from Canada and the United States gathered there to consider a pastoral plan for vocations in our own situation. This conference created a whole new energy regarding vocations awareness, and some of its directions deserve to be widely known.

A central theme of the Congress was that if we want to promote vocations to the priesthood and to the religious life, we need to promote also a more general “culture of vocations”. This is the recognition that “vocation” is not restricted to clergy and religious, but is something given to each of us.

This is no broad generalization. Clearly every Christian receives a Baptismal calling as a follower of Christ in God’s world. But each of us also has a more specific vocation to serve God in a particular state of life to which God calls us: as a single person; as a married person; as a religious brother or sister or in another form of consecrated life; as a bishop, priest or deacon. The vocation we have is not our job description or “status”, but the particular way in which God invites us to live a holy life day by day.

Some have a vocation to the single life. In that vocation many people care for sick or disabled relatives and friends; some devote themselves to religious works or to the cause of justice and peace; widowed persons care for children and grandchildren and involve themselves in community service; many gay persons aspire to live in holiness according to their state; young people live out temporary vocations in the single life while they discern what God has in store for them in the longer term. The upright lives and dedication of single people provides incredible example and strength to others.

Others are called to live as husbands and wives. In their vocation as married persons, by their partnership of life and love and their commitment to each other, they grow in holiness together, and give witness to others to the love that God has for each of us. If they have children, their married love and their care for the young gives them a particular share in God’s great work of creation and salvation.

The vocation to the religious life allows one who is a sister, a brother, or a priest, through their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, to give witness to the great truth that in the life of each of us God is the ultimate reality. By their community life they testify to the bonds that unite us all as God’s children. By their dedicated lives of service they follow God by hearing “the cry of the poor.”

Deacons, priests and bishops live out their vocation as ordained ministers in the Church. The word “minister” means to serve, and the service and witness of the ordained particularly involves the teaching of God’s word, the sacraments, and leadership within the Christian community. Thus the ordained live out their own call to holiness by “pastoral charity”, in serving their brothers and sisters like Christ, who came “not to be served, but to serve.”

When we understand that there are not some who have a vocation and some who don’t, but that each person has one, then we will realize why a “culture of vocations” is so important. In that culture, every person will see their state of life not as something accidental, but as their conscious response to a call from God. They will know that this is their particular path to holiness. They will recognize that by living their vocation well they give great witness to others.

Against this backdrop we will understand the “problem” of vocations much better. We will readily see that every young person needs to better understand that he or she has a special call from God. What must be discerned is not whether they have a vocation, but what is their vocation. We need to understand that young people need the support of the whole community, and our prayers, in responding to any of these vocations, whether it is to the single life, to marriage, or as a priest or sister. And we will appreciate that a vocation is something important enough that we should never be hesitant to dialogue about it with young people, or in the words of one participant at the Congress, to “invite, invite, invite.