Second Sunday, 1997 (#1)

Vocation

To begin this so-called ordinary time, it is appropriate to have these three readings because they deal, each of them in somewhat different ways, with a notion that used to be very big in the church, but is not so any more, and this is the notion of vocation. Maybe, like a lot of things, the notion of vocation had to die in the signification that it had, at least when I was growing up, in order to be rehabilitated in a larger and, I think, more authentic sense. When I was a kid, "to have a vocation" meant, very simply, that you were going to go into the convent, or the seminary, and that meant that for sure God was calling you--and it was all very certified. In the seminary you sat in your room after three years and somebody knocked at the door and the Rector stuck his head in the door and said: "consider yourself called, then he shut the door, and that was that--case closed. It was wonderful, tidy, and absolutely certain. The readings for today can be seen as the very soul of the notion of vocation. There is this interesting line from Paul when he says: "we are not our own." I still can't hear that without being jarred. Of course I'm my own, who else's am I? Nobody else is looking out for me. I have to be my own, and that's the beginning, the middle, and the end of it. Everything else is extra. This is where the notion of vocation is really crucial because the notion of vocation in its deepest meaning is this way of undertanding myself so that I can hear, without being jarred, that I am not my own... that I am with the other, and that other is God. And so vocation is not this kind of bureaucratic process, as is so much in the church, where somebody says: "Trojcak is hereby called on June second, blah, blah, blah..." Rather, it is this transforming sense of myself and that my life is lived in this dialogue with this mysterious other. And that is holus-bolus who I am. I am who I am with that mysterious other. And this is a transformation of consciousness that the old understanding of vocation did not have. Everbody knows that people who fill these bureaucratic positions in the church seem to have no sense at all of the depth of human life that religion is supposed to open up to us.

I think that that's the crucial thing about vocation and everything else is extra. To know myself, to believe, that's the way it's structured, to believe that the normal sense of myself, which is one of solitude, of being a nomad along with so many other nomads, like a bunch of billiard balls on a table, is not really who I am, and to grow up is to grow in this awarenes of that. Then a whole bunch of stuff falls into place. First of all, vocation is not a once-and-for-all thing. Vocation, as we get in this passage from First Samuel, is a state of continual attentiveness. This is very difficult too because there is so much noise in our world, so many voices saying who we are or how we're supposed to be. It is very hard to be attentive to this other who never speaks noisily, at least hardly ever does in any kind of overt and unmistakable fashion. And that too is very much a part of vocation; the state of constantly responding to that other.

The point of vocation also makes clear that we are called, not just to the sense of having my life given to me, receiving my life, moment by moment, but that the point of this reception, the point of everything I am and everything I do is to open me further to that other and to all the others. In other words, we are called to the Kingdom of God, we are called by God to the Kingdom of God. Everything I do, and this is the last thing I want to say, has to be hierarchized in that fashion. If everybody in this room was to sit down and give job descriptions of their lives we could probably fill a couple of pages: I am consumer, I am salesperson, I am teacher, I am learner, I am mother, I am son... etc., etc., etc. All these things constitute me, and the thing that holds them together, and this is why this notion of vocation is so important, is that no matter what I do there is this articulation of the fundamental fact that I am called, that my life is not my own, and that I am being called constantly to God and to the other. That's the criterion whereby everything else is supposed to be understood and worked out.

So... ordinary time. Is it so ordinary? No, to have this consciousness is precisely extraordinary. And it's interesting that they should choose these readings on a day that we also have a Baptism because it seems that if there is one job, and many of us in this room have this job--vocation, to be parent. We are called to be parent, and because we're having this Baptism here in this room with everybody, we are all called to be parent to this child. All the kids who have been Baptized in this room, we're supposed to be parenting all those kids. Which means that we know those kids are really not our own and that to truly parent those kids is to create an environment for them to discover that they too are called, called in this deepest, profound sense. That their lives too are with God, from God, toward God, for God..., and for everybody else. So I'm happy that we have a Baptism today and I hope that it will remind me again of my vocation.

To other sermons