The Christian experience is, above all, a vocation, a call. It is not we who seek God, but it is He who comes out to meet us.
It is the experience that Sacred Scripture speaks about in the lives of people such as Abraham, Moses, Judith, Esther, Ruth, Mary, the disciples and so many other people who lived the encounter with God in their own flesh and could not remain the same, but that they felt called to announce and make possible the kingdom of God in the here and now. “In that immense cloud of witnesses”, as the Epistle to the Hebrews (11, 2-12,4) beautifully recounts, we are adding our names and, although recognizing the precariousness of our own testimony, we strive to enter into that dynamic to continue building a world from faith, hope and love.
A story of friendship
The response to that call of the Lord is woven throughout life, is consolidated in the fidelity of the day to day and makes us say with the apostle Paul "I do not think I have already achieved the goal, nor do I consider myself perfect, but I continue my career until I reach Christ Jesus, who has already caught up with me "(Phil 3,12). It involves a personal encounter: "Do you love me? Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you" (Jn 21, 15-17). And in that story of friendship, in that shared life, the person is transformed from within. Vocation thus becomes, not something accidental, but constitutive of all being and doing, opening up to the horizon of a mission that demands of us: "feed my sheep" (Jn 21, 15-17).
This call that is experienced as irresistible is what differentiates the Christian faith from any other choice that is made in life. It involves a personal decision, but it is more than that: It is the gift of love that made our hearts “burn when he spoke to us on the way and explained the Scriptures to us” (Lk 24, 31). This experience sets us in motion like the pilgrims from Emmaus who return to Jerusalem when they recognize the Risen One (Lk 24, 33) and makes us announce to others “what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4, 20).
Fall in love
Life lived as a vocation is constituted a that which gives meaning of life. The inner disposition arises in the person to carry out a mission that encompasses his entire being and is confirmed by the aptitudes that the person possesses. It mobilizes personal energies in such a way that absolutely everything that the person does becomes the fulfillment of that vocation. In this sense, the Jesuit Pedro Arrupe, composed a poem entitled “Fall in love” that says a lot about what this vocational horizon implies: “(...) What you fall in love with, catches your imagination and ends up leaving a mark on everything. It will be what decides what gets you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your sunsets, how you spend your weekends, what you read, what you know, what breaks your heart, and what overwhelms you. of joy and gratitude (...)”. Another saint, Pedro Poveda, founder of the lay association Institución Teresiana, from the educational horizon that he proposed as a vocation for its members, said: "Give me a vocation and I will give you back a school, a method, a pedagogy."
The profession lived in this broader horizon, becomes a true vocation. This places us in the same dynamic as the first Christians "who are not distinguished from other persons, neither by their country of origin, nor by their speech, nor by their ways of functioning(...) but, inhabiting Greek or barbarian cities (...) and adapting in terms of food, clothing and other forms of life to the uses and customs of each country, they show a superior and admirable tenor of life and by everyone's appreciation, surprising" (Letter to Diognetus V, 1-4). Here some sensitivities could detect in this phrase a superior tenor of life, a sense of superiority. It is understandable.
The limitations of the language and the uses of the time are always susceptible to change. But let us try to understand it’s deeper meaning: vocation gives our life an inner spirit that is the fundamental contribution that we can offer to our contemporaries. However, what is unavoidable and we have to offer, is a life that is lived as a vocation and where the presence of the Spirit in everything we do is an unmistakable mark. Our profession is the horizon in which we prove our love for God and our fraternal commitment, but if the profession is not informed by the Spirit, it loses its essence, its reason for being, its fruitfulness.
Christian life has no retirement
Ultimately, whoever lives his life as a vocation enlarges the space of his tent and experiences the fruitfulness of the Kingdom. He knows that everything he does has a transcendent dimension. His being and his doing become the action of God himself in our history. In fact, God has no other way of being present among us. Hence the radical nature of the call to collaborate with the Kingdom: "who puts his hand to the plow and looks back, is useless for the Kingdom of God" (Lk 9, 62). Indeed, the Christian experience is the whole life that is passionate about making God himself present in this history and in doing so engages all that he is. When life has been lived in this horizon, the termination of a formal job does not mean the end of a task, but a change in the performance of that very task, which, has been, the one that each person has found where to display the best of herself. For this reason, in the Christian life, there is no such thing as retirement from work, but rather the joy of doing what one knows how to do, with more and more gratitude, more generosity, more passion, more detachment.
Fundamental renewal
And a final note: in times when it is said that "there is a shortage of vocations", understanding life itself as a vocation helps to qualify that statement because it is true that there is a shortage of vocations to religious and presbyterial life, but that does not have to go hand in hand with the lack of vocations to the Christian life. Perhaps what this moment is saying is that these lifestyles are in need of a fundamental renewal so that they can be attractive to the youth of today and, possibly, they have to be understood from the deepest sense that this specific vocation has: small groups, such as It was the small Christian communities, which from their way of life challenge, encourage and give witness to the following of Jesus.
Olga Consuelo Vélez, Theologian. Bogotá, Colombia.
Translation: Pat Stockton.
