Susan's Musings: Embracing Our Life Call

Before we came to be, God called us by name (see Isa 43:1). This mysterious calling continues to call us over a lifetime to live in fidelity to the unique-communal direction God ordains and to be as faithful as possible to our Divine Caller. Vocations may change (a spouse passes away and suddenly a married person is a single widow or widower) but our call continues to call us. In other words, our calling in the Lord embodies itself in a vocation and in the many avocations in which we put to good use our gifts and talents.

A vocation is the most fundamental expression of our existence as called, committed, and consecrated to God. Avocations may fluctuate as various needs for service announce themselves (a teacher of mathematics may have to coach the high school soccer team to replace an ailing coach), but to vow our life in a certain direction (clerical, religious, single, married) marks the end of the exploration period characteristic of adolescence.

A freely chosen vocation represents our response to the way in which God’s call addresses us in a specific time and place. We receive from the Lord the vocation that best enables us to be who we most deeply are and to love and serve others in accordance with our commitment to him.

            If our call covers the entire spectrum of our life from birth to death, then our vocation brings this call to bear in our finite, temporal, and concrete situations. That is why our vocation, faithfully lived, enables us to fulfill our fondest hope and to remain open to the inspirations we receive from the Holy Spirit.

            Having been called and chosen by God leads us to the realization that the meaning of our life is not ours to control but ours to pursue. Each encounter with others, each timebound situation, can then be seen as an epiphany or a manifestation of the overall mystery of our life call.

Day by day, we come to see that everything that happens to us is woven providentially into the tapestry of our essence in God before we came to existence in time. Even when we do not fully understand that to which we are being called, we try to live in humble openness to all disclosures of its meaning.

We accept both its clear and its opaque revelations as welcome signs of just how deep and dynamic our call is. Its unforeseen expressions may surprise us, but in the end they help us to be more faithful to our chosen vocation and to tap anew into the rich mine of avocations given to us by God.

            This experience of open-endedness may at times be unnerving due to the fact that we cannot manage what we do not yet know. We must learn to accept such uncertainty because it is impossible in advance to define every detail of God’s plan for our life. Could the Blessed Mother cradling her baby in swaddling clothes ever have imagined that she would hold his lifeless body in her arms at the foot of the cross?

            Were we to try to manipulate our life’s unfolding in an egocentric, functionalistic fashion, we would only succeed in canceling the possibility of enjoying the surprises of God. We would delude ourselves into thinking that it is better to be safe than sorry. The attempt to align like ducks in a row all the details of our life may end up in our being unfaithful to the invitations, challenges, and appeals sent to us by our Divine Caller.

            Sadly, we may become paralyzed by the outline of existence we have so painstakingly fashioned. To define our call as if it were a problem to be solved rather than a mystery to be lived is to adopt the illusion that we are like pawns on a chessboard to be moved at will.

            When “control-center-me” takes the lead, not only is it we who suffer but also everyone around us. Another unwise course of action would be to delude ourselves into thinking that a mere change of vocation would cancel all limits and create only blessings. In reality, what results may be only a fantasy life of boundless freedom, which is nowhere to be found.

            Though vocational choices may have to change for legitimate reasons, we must never underestimate the lasting value of permanent commitment in response to the command of Jesus to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him (see Mt 16:24).

            Although terminal illness plunged Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897) into the midnight moment of naked faith, she had absolute confidence that the sun still shone. Dense as this inner darkness was, it deepened her conviction that Christ, who called her, would never abandon her. The more faults she found in herself, the surer she was of the mercy of God. She did not waste time in an exhausting search for human perfection; she simply accepted her mistakes and continued to operate from the fact that her loyalty belonged to God alone and to the Church she had been called to serve as a Carmelite sister.

            The brevity of her life served as a reminder that longings as infinite as hers for union with God can never be satisfied here on earth. In the words of the apostle Paul to the Ephesians (1:18), “May the eyes of [your] hearts be enlightened, that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call, what are the riches of glory in his inheritance among the holy ones, and what is the surpassing greatness of his power for us who believe…”