What is Your Vocation?
What is Your Vocation?
As we consider how our Lord calls us to participate in His kingdom by following Him in the work that He wants us to do, we are then called as Thomas Merton reminds us, “Every person has a vocation to be someone. But you must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation you can only be one person: yourself.”
As Vincentians, in the Rule of our Society, we are reminded that our Vocation as society members, is to follow Christ through service to those in need and so bear witness to His compassionate and liberating love. Vincentians show their commitment through person-to-person contact. Vincentians serve in hope.
All of us, in our mission in Christ answer our vocation as we follow a path of holiness in our lives. At it’s core, holiness is experiencing, in union with Christ, the mysteries of His life. Christ’s whole life is a mystery of redemption as He enables us to live in Him and as He lives in us. The Father’s plan is Christ and ourselves in Him. In the end, it is Christ who loves in us, for holiness is nothing other than charity lived to the full. As a result, the measure of our holiness stems from Christ in us as we model our lives in on His. We see the entirety of our life as answering our vocation and we listen to our Lord in prayer in recognizing His will in how we follow His call in our vocation.
Vocation is not simply about what one does with one’s life; it is about what God’s will is for a person. This is an important distinction for us, as our culture assumes that a person’s identity is almost exclusively defined by what someone does or is doing rather than who they are.
It is the divine will that reveals who a person is to the depth of their being, which is why to miss one’s vocation is no small thing. It means that one misses their purpose, and that despite all kinds of accomplishments , one will remain unfulfilled. This is also a great cultural challenge, because the prevailing understanding of a fulfilled life in our times is based not so much on the fulfillment of God’s purpose for our lives but on our own decisions and the need to have “experiences.”
Therefore, what Christ reveals as vocation-Vincentians called in service to our neighbors is an illumination of the purpose and meaning of our lives. In our vocation we become who we are meant to be in response to this Divine Call from our Lord.
Fr. Richard Hauser, Milwaukee Priest, died on April 3, 2018. Here is the last paragraph in his last homily that he wrote on March 11, 2018:
“The way I look at finding your vocation is by listening to your heart and not your head. Your head will tell you everything that society has conditioned you to think, but God touches your heart. When you listen to your heart, you’ll hear God’s voice. When you follow your heart, you follow God, and you’ll find your path to your own deepest peace and happiness.”
St. Vincent DePaul, Pray for us. Amen +
