On Vocation

By Brother David

 

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

  I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

  Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

(from “The Hound of Heaven” by Francis Thompson)

 

When I was a child, my aunt Mary gave me a copy of The Way of a Pilgrim.  I was 9 years old.  I read it and knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Then I forgot about it.

 

When I was in junior high at St Sebastian’s Catholic School, the good sisters asked us to pray for vocations and to pray that we be given vocations to the priestly or religious life.  Now what was interesting about being asked to pray for religious and priestly vocations – and especially to pray that any one of us might be given such a vocation – was how those ways of life were presented as “better” than what was lived “in the world.”  Anyway I thought that I wanted to be a priest – maybe even a Franciscan – but I also knew that my grandmother was a saint and she had been married and a mother, not a nun. And I did not want to be a priest because I was better than the people I knew – in fact I knew myself well enough (OK, as well as a 13 year old knows himself) to know that I was not in any way better.   After all, I smoked and got into fistfights.  I knew that Fr O’Toole smoked (in the 60s it seemed everybody smoked), but I suspected that he didn’t get into fistfights.

 

I went on to minor seminary at St Fidelis – essentially a boarding prep school with the stated purpose of preparing students for religious life and priesthood.  The school I went to was affiliated with the Capuchin Friars, a branch of the Franciscans.  I spent three years there and very much loved the sense of community, the round of services, my studies – I loved everything about the life except that I felt that somehow I really was not called to priesthood or religious life.  I did not hear the call – I did not have an experience that told me that God wanted me as a priest or friar: I did not have a vocation.  (Listen, I was also still pretty young – around 16.)  So I left St Fidelis and finished high school at the local Catholic high school where my siblings studied. 

 

I studied philosophy at Duquesne University, a Catholic university, where I became an atheist, then a Christian, then a Buddhist, then a Christian, then an atheist again, then a Christian – again.  (It was a very confusing time.  I was also protesting Viet Nam and worried about being drafted.)  But in that time I also met a monk, Fr Richard, a Trappist from New Melleray Abbey in Iowa, who was studying at Duquesne in a graduate program, and we talked.  A lot.  We talked about God and Marx and prayer and Buddha and sex and rock and roll and The Doors vs Led Zeppelin.  (Okay, this was the late 60s and early 70s and he really had no clue about the Doors or Led Zeppelin, but he listened.)  We talked about everything.  And when he talked about his life and the quiet (which scared me) and intimacy with God (which baffled me), I was more convinced than ever that I did not have a vocation. 

 

I worked “in the world” and spent a couple years in graduate school, where I re-encountered something I had experienced in a Medieval History class: the Apophthegmata Patrum – the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.  And something clicked.  I still did not have a vocation, but at last I knew what a vocation was.  (I was a 20-something academic – and we all know what they’re like.)

 

But something was happening to me.  I had both my thesis and my dissertation already planned.  I knew that I loved teaching.  And I looked around at my life and I was unsatisfied.  I realized that all of this – teaching, spouse, the white picket fence, and a couple of cats (okay, I was a cat person at the time) – everything that I could see as my future, everything that I wanted, everything that all my contemporaries (good people, admirable people) strove for: it was not enough. 

 

My advisor was a very wise man.  In preparation for my MA exams, he had me do my reading hours in early Christian monastic literature – the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and the monastic writers John Cassian and John Climacus, among others.  He told me it was an understudied area.  So I read.  And thought.  And read (re-read!) The Way of a Pilgrim.  And remembered what I wanted to be when I grew up.  And I still didn’t think I had a vocation.  But I knew it was not enough.

 

And I went to New Melleray to visit Fr Richard.  And he smiled and nodded.  And he told me about New Skete.  And I drove up for a visit.  And now it is 36 years later.  Sometimes I still think about vocation.  And sometimes I still think that it’s not enough.

 

See, I think everyone has a vocation.  I think that, put simply, a vocation is nothing more – or less – than God’s invitation to life in Christ (i.e. to full human life).  So there is no one who does not have a vocation since we are, each and every one of us, called to greater and deeper life in God through Jesus Christ.  But I don’t believe that one vocation is better than another.  I know married and single people who are far better than I.  I know people “in the world” whose sense of God leaves me in awe.

 

St Thomas Aquinas once wrote in his Summa Theologica: Whatever is received in someone is received according to the modality – the condition – of the receiver (omne quod recipitur in aliquo, est in eo per modum recipientis  Summa Theologica,  Iª q. 76 a. 2 arg.3).  Our knowledge of God’s call to us and our response to that call is moderated by how we are in the world and how we are within ourselves.  It is because of this “modality” or “condition” that, while the call to every human being is the same, the answer to that call is unique to each and every person. 

 

In a very important sense, vocation is a dialogue between the individual and God -- one started by God but meaningless without our participation.  And any movement we make towards God is always in response to that ever-present call from God.  So when, in our prayer we say, “I love you, God,” the reality is that we’re really saying, “I love you, too, God” because our profession of love is always in response to God’s prior profession of love to us. 

 

The Scriptures say this so beautifully:

 

The Lord called me from the womb; from the body of my mother he named my name. … Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion for the child of her womb?  Even these may forget yet I will not forget you.  Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands. Isaiah 49: 1, 15-16

 

And our cry to God:

 

O Lord, I cry to you; Hear me!  Hear my voice when I call to you. Psalm 141

 

With all my voice I cry to the Lord, with all my voice I entreat the Lord for mercy. … I cry to you Lord; I have said it: You are all I have left in the land of the living. Psalm 142

Then the Lord came and stood there, calling as at the other times, “Samuel! Samuel!”  Then Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”  1 Samuel 3: 10

God calls us.  God calls us each by name to God’s self.

 

So why am I here?  Why do I stay?  Somehow my modality is monastic life.  Maybe it was set by my receiving The Way of a Pilgrim at age nine.  Maybe it was set by my being a failed atheist in college.  I don’t know.  As I grow older I think that I stay because it is not enough.  An anonymous Carthusian wrote this:

 

One of the most beautiful definitions of a monk is that he is a man of desire.  This restlessness does not allow him to be content with what is created; the thirst for the absolute, this hunger for love, is the wellspring, the impetus for his search for God.  The day he feels full to overflowing, he ceases to be a monk – and is living an illusion.  God never surfeits us with the gift of himself but creates in us an ever larger capacity for love and, having done this, he replenishes us with a desire, a thirst, more ardent still.  And it will always be this way with God for eternity without end, because God is without end.  If we arrive at the end, it is not God.  (The Way of Silent Love: Carthusian Novice Conferences, p 28.)

 

I think we are all called to this.  I get to do it here.