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The hope His call holds for YOU!
Pauline McDougall, from the Emmaus Family of Prayer,
explores the meaning of vocation and the meaning of being called by
God.
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"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you through and through. I chose you to be mine. Before you left your mother's side I called to you my child to be my sign." These words from the well-known hymn by Damien Lundy offer me an insight into Christian vocation. They are based on the call of the prophet Jeremiah, a young man, mystified and somewhat overwhelmed by the awesome nature of his call from God. They describe a God who brought us into being out of His own loving will, to be in relationship with Him, with a plan and a purpose for our lives which would mirror His own. "Vocation?" I grew up with the impression that vocation was to do with role rather than relationship. Sermons on "vocation" seemed to concentrate on ordained priesthood and consecrated religious life and then on marriage. I never seemed to hear anything really edifying about the single life - was there a group within the Church that did not have a vocation, who were not called by God? After my own baptism in the Holy Spirit and subsequent reading of Scripture, my understanding began to change and develop. I see this now to be a foundational experience. As I studied Jesus' own baptism in
the Jordan by John the Baptist, I saw that He was affirmed in His relationship
with the Father, given His sense of purpose in life and equipped by
the Holy Spirit to bring it to fulfilment by revealing the Father's
love to all mankind. His earlier intimation, at the age of about twelve,
of how His life would develop, was confirmed for Him in this experience.
Only then did He begin to discern the "how". Sonship came
first and was then followed by His time in the desert where the way
forward began to crystallise - the way of serving, sacrificial love.
Nowadays psychologists are telling us that true self-esteem has nothing
to do with status, power, profession or possessions, but that it is
an inner sense of the lovability and acceptability of who you really
are. Some years ago, on a silent retreat, I was given these words, part
of a longer poem "No accident my time of birth. The Lord decreed
my arrival on earth. From all eternity I had you in view, You are mine,
He said, I made you you." As my own relationship and image of God developed through personal prayer and studying the Scriptures, I began to understand something of my long held sense of vocation. When I discovered the charisms described in Romans 12, I Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4, I realised that the "how" of Christian living, in the sense of exercising service gifts, was something that the Holy Spirit decided "distributing them at will to each individual" (1Corinthians 12:11). God has a way of taking our personality, temperament, natural talents and life experiences and gracing them in specific ways by the Holy Spirit "for the general good" (1Corinthians 12:7). The understanding of the Scriptures as the revealed word of God, relevant to every area of life, led me into a teaching ministry which has given me much joy for more than twenty years. It has taken me to places I would never have imagined. One such place was one of the biggest men's prisons in this country where I spent three and a half years working with the Chaplain introducing Twelve Step spirituality and the Life in the Spirit Seminars - a very graced experience. It has taken me to Conferences, Days of Renewal and Retreats in England, Ireland and Wales and into writing articles, reflections from the Liturgy of the Word for Advent and Lent and material for bible study. What I do can only flow from who I am "in
Christ". I see the personal call to relationship as the fundamental
vocation, not dependent on life's circumstances, which can change. Spouses
die (as mine did), marriages break down. Perceptions and understandings
of decisions made in the past can change and lead to new life choices.
Illness or injury and old age can limit or even curtail the "vocation"
that defined who you thought you were. In the inconstancies of life
the awareness of the call to be a son or daughter of the Father, a disciple
of Jesus, indwelt by His Spirit, leads us, in the words of St. Irenaeus,
to mirror God's glory, "fully human, fully alive."
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