Discerning a vocation.

So there is no way out of self-abandonment; if you are looking for your own fulfillment, you will not find the way in Christianity. You will find your fulfillment in Christianity, but not if you are looking for it.

The question now is which of the three states of life is a person called to? Each of us has a Christian vocation, and it is a vocation to some one of or some mixture of these three and only these three states of life. How do we discover which one the Master is calling us toward?

The answer is not that we are to listen for some mysterious voice whispering to us from the altar or the stained-glass of the church; the answer is within us. What calls us out of ourselves is what is in ourselves. Not that we are to listen to God's voice speaking within us, as if He had a little room there in our brain, and was going to say something that we could hear. No, the answer is within us in the sense that it is our own reality. Our own reality calls us outside of itself in its own special way; and we answer the Christian call to forget ourselves by studying ourselves and our own natural tendencies.

That is, each of us has a nature which, in doing something, tends to become "lost" in what it is doing, so that the action is more significant to us than the agent. Thus, this action, and therefore this type of action, is the one which, if we pursue it, will make it easy and even natural and enjoyable to forget ourselves; and since self-forgetfulness is the negative side of the Christian vocation, then the kind of action that tends to make us forget ourselves is the kind of action that shows which state of Christian life we are called to.

Interestingly, the Religious vocation is found in the person who does not have anything special that takes him out of himself; he has not, as they say, "found himself," which really means "lost himself"; there is nothing special about him by which he sees himself as fitting into the world. He has nothing special that he sees as making a contribution to things; and what this means is that he sees things in the light of the contribution they can make to his own fulfillment.

The world and the things of the world have an attraction to the potential Religious, to be sure; but the attraction they have is not a love of them for their own sake, but a desire to use them for himself. The layman, for instance, can be interested in studying physics for the sake of losing himself in the truth of it, or for what he can do for others either by pushing back the frontiers of knowledge about the material universe or manipulating the material universe to a new shape. The potential Religious would be interested in studying physics because he is good at it, and it is a difficult subject, and so people will recognize him as smart, and because if you know physics you can get a good job and make money and have high status and so on. If there is a contribution to make through his knowledge of physics, the potential Religious is interested in the contribution as a means to the reward that will come to him through it.

Again, the sexual aspect of the potential Religious' life is not one of having some special person that he wants to make happy; he is not in love with some one person. He is attracted, and perhaps to many; but he sees others as fulfilling to himself, and is not in the position where he simply does not care about his own satisfaction, so long as this other person can be satisfied.

The attitude of the potential Religious to those in authority over him is not one of being happy that he doesn't have to make up his own mind about what to do when they tell him things, but a kind of resentment that he has to do what they tell him, and can't do what he wants. He chafes under authority, in other words, and does not find it fulfilling.

I don't want to sound as if I am painting the potential Religious as evil, and the potential layman and priest as full of virtue. This is not the point, and there is nothing evil in seeking one's own fulfillment, as I mentioned. The point is that the potential Religious is the one whose spontaneous relation to things other than himself is not one of interest in them for their own sake, but in terms of their relation to him. That is, the world does not take this kind of person out of himself, it pushes him further back into himself; yet as a potential Christian he has a desire to make some sort of contribution and to do good, to forget himself.

In order to do this, his best course would be to exploit this generic tendency and to unite himself with the world in general by being its voice speaking, not of its relation to him, but of its relation to God. That is, this person who sees the world at first only in its relation to himself does not exactly turn his back on the world, but looks at it in a different way, in its subordination to God. He is already prepared to do this, because he already sees "the world," and all he really has to do is shift what he sees it as subordinate to from himself to God. As in all cases, Christianity is mainly a matter of mental adjustment; and the Religious type of alteration is easiest and most natural for the kind of person I have been describing.

Of course, this implies that he will now have to renounce the world as subordinated to him; he will have to renounce himself as the center of his universe. But that is the case with all Christians. The major task of the Religious, it seems to me, will be in the realization that the Religious, in renouncing ownership, sex and family, and his own initiative, now subsumes within himself the world in a new way, and that this way is the only practical way of accomplishing what he desired to do in the first place. If he can keep this in mind, and discover what it really means, the rest should be not only easy but enjoyable.

But it is not for me to discuss here how to do this, and why the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience are the way to accomplish it. That is for a treatise on the ascetical Theology of the Religious life, and this is a book on lay asceticism.

The call to the priesthood is the call of a man (as I said, it is only to males) who sees what a marvelous thing his faith is, coupled with a certain unhappiness because there are so many who do not have this blessing. It is this discontent more than anything else which is the sign here, because the unhappiness at others' lacking what one has is the mark that one cares about them.

But note that the priestly discontent is not the same as what is called "righteous indignation" at the sinner. One who says, "I love God; I love Him so much that I can't stand the way people are offending Him" had better not become a priest, but a Religious. This is the serpent's good and evil raising its head again. It cannot, as I said, be justified with "But I love the sinner; it's the sin I hate," because the sin defines the sinner, and if you hate the sin, you only say you love the sinner.

Nor is this "love of God" that is offended at offenses against him real love of God, because God is not offended at the sin. What is bad about sin is not what it does to God, but what it does to the person who knowingly commits it. So the priestly attitude has nothing really to do with the eradication of sin in the world.

No, the discontent of the priest is that he sees the happiness, the peace, and the enjoyment that Christianity brings to himself and can bring to anyone who chooses to accept it; and his attitude toward the sinner is not anger, but hope that the sinner will avail himself of Christianity and have a chance to stop fighting himself.

Notice that this implies that the "pure" priest is not a social worker or a marriage counselor, though there are mixed states in which he can be both. He is, as a priest, not concerned with the human happiness of those he deals with, but with their growing in the faith, whether or not their temporal conditions are all that could be desired. Hence, there is no reason for a priest to feel guilty if he does not have any particular desire to better conditions in the inner city.

I might also mention that it is a sophism to say that you can't talk to people about their souls if their bodies are starving, and it is directly counter to what Jesus said. He said that it was a good thing to be poor, to be suffering, to be oppressed, and so on, because then you start thinking about what is beyond this life; and it is bad for a person to be rich and have an easy life (to "laugh now," as Luke puts it), because then this life seems to make sense without any transcendent dimension to it.

The desire to "improve" things is foreign to the priestly vocation as such, because, as I said, the priest is the pure conservative: the preserver of the Truth, and the pure transmitter of it. It is the gift which is precious; it is this gift which makes all the difference to him; it is the opportunity for people to receive this gift which is the only thing that matters.

And if the people don't accept it, if they turn up their noses at it, or presume to give the priest advice on what he should "really" be saying if he wanted to make this a better place to live, how he should "adapt his words to the realities of the situation" and so on; if he finds, like Jesus, that most people can't be bothered with what he says, and those who can be bothered persist in making of the Message the exact opposite of what it is, degrading God's thoughts into their own idea of what God's thoughts "ought" to be--then this does not bother him, because it is the gift that is precious, and the offering, not the acceptance that is necessary.

It must always be kept in mind, especially by the priest, that Christianity is not a form of humanism; it is totally, utterly different in its essence from humanism, even though it is certainly not incompatible with alleviating the suffering of mankind. The humanistic aspect of Christianity, however, is part of the lay vocation, really; the priest's function is to preserve the gift and see that it is offered, to reveal what its acceptance entails and hold it out to people, with God's respect for their freedom.

One reason, perhaps, why the priestly vocation is rare, especially nowadays, is because it belongs to the person who says, "How utterly marvelous that human beings can live the life of God! How can I show them that this is something open to them?" This is the overriding concern for this type of person, not "helping the people," but revealing the truth of what their faith really means.

Again I say that there is nothing wrong with helping people, and that many is the priest who is also interested in helping people in one or many specific ways; but it is the realization of what the gift means that makes such a person a priest; and the helping is secondary to sharing the gift.

The priest lives poorly, not because he is "detaching himself" from worldly things, but because his poverty is a sign to others of the transcendent value of the gift; he renounces a wife and family, not to make a sacrifice of his sexuality to the love of God, but as Paul says, " I would like you not to be worried. An unmarried person is concerned about how he can please the Master; a married man is concerned about this world, and how he can please his wife--and he worries." He can pay attention to the gift first and last, and has a freedom to do anything in sharing it that family ties make difficult. And, of course, obedience to the Bishop, the Pope, the College of Bishops, the tradition of the Church, and so on is simply that the gift is so tremendous that it must not be adulterated and "humanized" into a program of "advancement of the Masses." (This, by the way, is the essential heresy in that "Liberation Theology" which is a quasi-Marxist class struggle choking on a Roman collar.)

The priest's attitude, in other words, toward poverty, chastity, and obedience is quite different from that of the Religious; for the Religious, these virtues are ways of reorienting himself to the world and to God; ways of seeing the world in its relation to God, not himself. For the priest, they are practical matters which enable him to do his work of conserving and transmitting the gift of truth most efficiently to the people.

The lay vocation, by far the most common one, belongs to the person who feels that he has something specific to offer the world: something that he can do that will make at least one small corner of the universe a better place to live in. This need not necessarily be a grandiose desire or a remarkable talent that he sees in himself; it may be nothing more than that there is one special person in the world for him, and that he feels he would like to try to make her happy--not "better," happy. Remember, the primary example of the Christian layman is St. Joseph, who is only distinguished by the fact that he loved Mary (and so was willing to put up with what had happened in her), and carpentry.

Of course, it is possible that the potential layman sees some great rift in the social structure that he would like to mend, some contradiction in scientific theory that he would like to see if he could solve, some new planet he would like to explore.

The point is that the potential layman is interested in something or someone; something other than himself fascinates him, and makes him want to find out about it, to improve it, to build it. And thus the layman is the builder; not the builder of Christianity, but simply the builder, the improver. The vocation to build or improve is already generally half-Christian, because it takes the person's interest away from himself, and is not so much a question of self-expression or gain, but the desire to see whatever it is done (by someone).

And so the sole remaining task of the layman is just like that of persons with vocations to the other states of life: to shift his mental ground so that he consciously becomes the vehicle by which God performs his re-creative activity on the world.

It is not surprising that a person with this orientation should be looked on as "not having a vocation." Even though we are constantly told that it is false to identify the supernatural with the anti-natural, we persist in thinking this way; and since the lay vocation is the most "natural" (in the sense of common) of all, we find it hard to see it as particularly Christian.

But even though the layman does not have God as his goal, even though he is attached very passionately to the world, even though he is not interested in making the world more Christian and preaching the Gospel, he is still as Christian as anyone else, because he is interested in making the world more Christianly. We must keep in mind the Christianity is really a question of adverbs.

The paradox of Christianity shows itself most clearly in the lay life, and produces the layman's greatest temptation. The good Christian layman is not tormented by the lures of the world anywhere near as much as he is by this thought: "There are billions of souls to be won, countless prayers left unsaid, starvation and injustice all over the world, the morals of everyone are falling apart, and am I to devote my waking hours to a study of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter?"

This is good and evil again; the temptation that the "good" (by which is meant the preaching of the Gospel or the alleviation of suffering) must be done, and to do something that is "a little good" and to leave these evils uncorrected is somehow sinful.

This is, of course, not just a temptation for the lay life. The person who wants to enter the Religious life because it is "objectively better" has fallen into the same trap; and once he gets there, he will say to himself, "There are abortions killing people by the millions, and here I am saying the Divine Office and farming inefficiently." The priest has the temptation, "Here I am preaching sermons that no one wants to hear, sitting in a confessional that no one comes to, and the people outside my Rectory haven't got enough to eat because the government programs aren't working! What am I doing?"

This guilt assumes that Christianity is a way of getting something done, that God is calling us because he wants to use us as tools for some objective purpose he has, which, of course, is producing something good or eradicating some evil. But good and evil are human ways of doing things, and purposiveness is a human way of approaching things. There is nothing wrong with purposiveness, but this is not God's point of view; and so it has nothing, really, to do with the call God is giving us to our Christian state of life.

The one, in whatever state of life, who succumbs to the temptation above, in fact, misses the one criterion we have to decide on a state of life: our vocation comes, not from what "has to be done," but from what we are. And many is the person who has messed his life up because he chose based on what he thought had to be done, not on what he was. Those who become Religious because this is the "more perfect thing" find themselves, years later, chafing under constraints they don't really understand, which to them in fact make no sense, realizing that they aren't more "perfect" than they were before they entered the life--and certainly no one else is better off for their being there. Yet, with this mentality, they are afraid of "rejecting grace" if they leave, and so they stay on, discontented, disoriented, disdainful of their way of life, and a disaster to all concerned. Or they leave, thinking that they have failed God, and consequently give up, disgusted with all religion in general and the institutional Church in particular.

The priest who yields to this temptation is the person who becomes a priest to seek holiness--not to share the gift, but for his personal sanctification, since the priesthood is the way you go when you want to be holy. And we see these priests everywhere. They didn't make it, because the priesthood is the way of holiness only when you don't care so much about your holiness as you do about the means for others' being holy; so these priests turn themselves into half-baked marriage counselors and armchair psychologists, or worse, social-working zealots--anything, in fact, to conquer the unutterable boredom of the life of the rectory. If only they could marry, they think; then they could have a family life to comfort them and free them from this tedium so that they could do some real good. Some have tried this--of course, having left the priesthood to do so--and have discovered the truth of Paul's statement. The family is fine, but it doesn't free a person; just the opposite. The wife of a man who has married to be free from care has a fool for a husband.

We see laymen with this same fungus upon them; they are the pathetic ones who seek their "perfection" in what they call "involvement" in the Parish Council, in the liturgy commissions, in the trendy causes that blow them hither and yon. They are so interested in updating the institutions that they have no time for uplifting themselves; as far as their religion is concerned, it is one long complaint at what Rome has to say that stifles "true reform," what the Bishops are up to now, the stupidity of the parish priest who won't listen to their plans for increasing membership, and on and on. Their Christianization of their home lives consists in turning it into a miniature monastery, and pestering the members of the family into practices of prayer; their Christianization of the work they do is nil, except perhaps for some embarrassing proselytizing of their colleagues.

Now there is nothing wrong with most of what the people in each of these states of life want to do; but the point is that they are not part of the vocation to that state of life; they are part of the attitude that "the good must be done"; they are the imposition of one's own goals and values on others, and not a respect for reality--least of all a respect for one's own reality.

And this is by no means to say that there can't be people who have vocations that include as part of the vocation what I have said are temptations for the person called to the "pure" state of life. There are Religious who primarily are the type whose happiness comes in contemplation of God in the world and praising him for his marvelous creation, but who also see the potentials in that world by which it can help itself manifest its share in Divine Being more fully. There are priests who care desperately about the gift of revelation, but also see that this can promote and be promoted by psychological stability. There are laymen so filled with wonder at God's creation that, though their lives are primarily involved with an improvement of his world, they want time to contemplate it as his. And so on. There are, as I have said so often, mixed states of life, and each person is called by his own nature to some sort of mixture of the three attitudes, which means that no one will be the "pure" Religious, priest, or layman, and each will emphasize different things in his own life; so that it is not possible to judge from outside whether a person has missed his vocation or is fulfilling it--except content or discontent.

One of the real problems with the "good and evil" way of looking at religion is that "contentment" is apt to be a dirty word. If God has as his "purpose" for us infinite satisfaction, then there is a moral imperative to be discontented with any satisfaction we might find here and now in this life. Hence, the Christian is apt to feel guilty if he feels fulfilled, and feel virtuous if he is miserable. To desire the unattainable is supposed to be what Christianity is all about, and happiness is to come only after the pigrimage. But then what about the hundred times as much here in this life? If fervor means discontent, it is not Christian fervor; the Christian is relaxed.

And there is the point, really. The Christian call calls a person out of self-centeredness; but it was given for the Christian, not that he be used for the sake of something else. And so, the fruits by which you shall know of the vocation is basic contentment. God loves a cheerful giver, not because he wants you to give and then work at being cheerful about it, but because the giving, when it fits your personality is cheering, and the cheer is a sign of God's vocation.

Now of course, there is another sense in which the vocation of God is your actual choice, especially an irrevocable choice; because God's will for you is what you actually choose. In this sense, there is no question of having "missed a vocation"; that vocation was an abstraction, like the perfect being you would have been if you had not sinned.

So the priest who thinks he has missed his vocation and should have been a layman is deluding himself--especially if he sincerely, though perhaps ignorantly, chose to enter the priesthood to "serve God." A good deal of any Christian's vocation consists in making the best of his limitations; and a great many of our limitations are brought upon us by choices we made in the past. This is not just something that belongs to the priesthood. We all wonder "what would I be if I hadn't done . . ." If I hadn't married, if I hadn't entered the convent, if I hadn't taken this job, if I hadn't been sent here.

We all, from time to time, think that we could have been happier if we had chosen the other branch at some crossroad; but the point is what difference does it make? We chose what we chose, and what does our happiness matter anyway? We could have been happier, perhaps if we were taller, more brilliant, more athletic, not Black, or whatever; but these are limitations built into our genes, and our respect for our own reality means acceptance of ourselves absolutely.

It is a little harder to accept absolutely what we have made ourselves, because we think, "Yes, but I didn't know all the facts, and I should have been more careful, and I should have waited before I decided, and I should have done this and I should have done that . . ." You are a fool. Of course you are a fool. So what?

So, given that you are in a state of life, this is your vocation. The question is not how you got yourself into it; the question is what you do with your life now that you are in it. What is your reality now? Where is your contentment within the context of what you are, your commitments? That is your present vocation. Choosing a state of life is for those who have the options open to them; for those who have already chosen, the question of the vocation to a state of life is already settled.

This again is not to say that there can't be vocations out of one state of life to another--always supposing that irrevocable commitments haven't been made. Priests who think they have a "new vocation" to the lay state (especially the married lay state) are almost certainly deluded, just as married men who fall in love with someone and think they have a "vocation" to divorce and remarry are deceived. In very rare instances, a priest might actually be called away from the ministry, just as in really exceptional cases, a man who falls in love with someone might have his wife die and leave him free to marry his new love.

Of course, if a priest, say, follows his delusion and leaves the ministry and gets married, or if a layman gets divorced and "marries" again, then each of these people has now a new vocation of finding a way to Christianize the state he has got himself into--which may be far from easy.

But it is possible for a person to be called to the Religious life, say, for a number of years and then be called out of it; it is possible for a person to be called to the lay life and then called to another state. You can't tie the hands of the Holy Spirit. Your commitments do not commit God. Even if you take perpetual vows, as I did, it does not follow that the Holy Spirit can't be giving you a temporary vocation to the Religious life. My vows, for instance, included the proviso that they were perpetual if the Order saw fit to keep me as a member. When I wrote to the Provincial after a retreat about my vocation he asked me to make and gave him the evidence that seemed to indicate that I was now being called to the lay state, he did not see fit to keep me as a member any longer. I had thought that this question of my state in life was settled forever once I had taken perpetual vows; but the Holy Spirit is not bound by our commitments.

This is not to say that we should regard all commitments as provisional; it simply means that the Holy Spirit is absolutely free, however bound we might be. I am now committed to a marriage partner until--when? Tomorrow? As far as I am concerned, we are together forever and ever, even into the next life (though there will be no "marrying" there in the sense of "rights of sex over each other"; but this certainly does not mean that death severs companionship). But we can certainly be separated at any time in this life by an Act of God. The point is that I can't effect the separation.

And, of course, the upshot of all of this is, first of all, that your vocation depends on what you are; and so to find the true vocation you have here and now means studying yourself with God's eyes on your reality--as objectively as you can possibly do it--and considering the direction your nature tends to lose self-interest in; and then following that direction. Self-abandonment is then identical with self-fulfillment, and you once again live the Christian paradox.

And since God is running the universe, and is running your own life too, don't worry about mistakes. You look at yourself as objectively (Divinely) as you can, seek advice from those you think are intelligent, and make your choice in faith; and your Master, who has chosen to call you His friend, will see to it that his slave will have chosen to step upon the road that will lead him through the green pastures, the still ponds, and the banquet with the brimming goblets. There is nothing to worry about. Nothing.