Second Sunday of 1997 (#2)

Vocation

It is appropriate that the beginning of so-called ordinary time, the standard time of the liturgical year, would choose these readings because they have as their theme a really crucial notion for a religious understanding of one's self. They all have to do with what we used to call "vocation." I say used to call because when I was younger, if someone said you had a vocation, that immediately meant you were going into a convent, or a seminary, or a monastery. It is just as well that that usage died because it is profoundly misleading and inadequate. I'm afraid it is like so many things that the Church has taken and beuraucratized, and so removed from it the depth that it should have. Just to fill that out, we were in the seminary for four years and then one night when you were sitting at your desk, somebody knocked at the door, the rector stuck his head inside the door and said: "consider yourself called," then he closed the door and walked away. You then said: "Oh, that's good, I'm called, I have a vocation." That's what vocation means, it's a call.

Well, what the readings today do is precisely put the skids to that terribly superficial and misleading notion of vocation. I don't think there are many passages better than this one from Corinthians for finding a cue to come to a more adequate understanding about what vocation means. The line here is a most extraordinary one: "you are not your own." For years I heard that and to some extent I am still jarred by it: "C'mon, if I am not my own than who's am I? Of course I'm my own. That's stupid." But that's exactly where the notion of vocation cuts across our normal understanding of things. To be religiously conscious is precisely to say that I am called by God. My very existence is part of a dialogue with somebody who speaks to me, and apart from that I literally have no existence.

Vocation does not mean that somebody files your name under some list according to Canon Law; vocation consists in people coming to understand themselves more and more profoundly: "Oh my God, that is who I am, I am the one who is called by God." That is vocation. To repeat, to be religiously conscious is simply to understand yourself in that way. This is really important because most of us are so inundated by so many calls: you're called to be on the faculty, you're called to be a priest, you're called to be a husband..., and you're called to do this in a particular way. TV has much more impact on the normal notion of what we're called to than God does. It is the noise of so many calls, and so many conflicting calls that makes taking this stuff seriously very difficult. Yet, until we understand ourselves as called, we really don't have much to do with religion in any really serious way. So there are a bunch of implications that follow from that and we can get some from these other readings. To be called is not a once in a life-time experience or a single understanding of that. In our readings, Samuel, the last of the judges, described himself as waiting and listening. You have to listen constantly. Attentiveness is the normal consequence of this sense of being called by God. Called to what? God calls us to our lives. All you have to do is look at historical figures: Albert Shweitzer kept popping into my head as an outlandish example of a guy who attempted to be faithful to his sense of being called by God. He went through major changes in his life. Who was Albert Schweitzer? First of all, Albert Schweitzer was one of the greatest Scripture scholars in this century, he wrote a book that is ninety years old that still resonates the quest for the historical Jesus. Schweitzer was also one of the primary Bach interpretors for organ, his organ recordings are still classic interpretations of the music of J.S. Bach. How did Albert Schweitzer end up his life? Living in the boonies of Africa as a medical doctor at a little bitty hospital that he founded. What I'm getting at is that to be called is to enter onto a way. To be called is not to arrive at a destination, it is to enter onto a way, to enter into a life-long conversation with the mysterious other that we call God.

Finally, what another implication involves, certainly this is not the only one because this an extraordinarily rich reality to think about and to pray over, is the notion that to be called by God is also to be called to the Kingdom of God, which is to be called to each other. What does this mean? Well, most of us have fairly functional relationships with each other, that is to say that I am a teacher, I am a consumer, I am... But that's not what we're ultimately called to. Those functions are not ends unto themselves if I understand call in the Biblical sense of building a life with other people. This is really crucial because I think that most of us have a largely functional view of, not just ourselves, but of everybody as jobs. People are not jobs; people are people. A job is only a certain way of being a person, and a job is a way of creating one's personhood. Yeah, but a job is the means, not the end.

Considering ourselves in terms of being called by God, to God, for God... draws us closer to each other. So as we begin ordinary time, this is not an ordinary notion, even for me who has been called to the priest-hood. This is an extraordinary notion that I need to keep going back to over, and over again, just as I think we all do.

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