Living My Vocation Every Day
Mark Goodyear responded to my last post (hey, thanks Mark) with a great question.
I like this idea that there is only one calling–to Christ. How do you avoid letting that concept get twisted, though? People read Merton and think life has more meaning if they stop everything and pray. Or if they go work at a church.
Unfortunately, western spirituality has created a false dichotomy that says spiritual and secular are two separate entities. Under this mistaken theological perspective a person must withdraw from the world to be spiritual. The jobs we hold and the tasks of our lives become necessary evils that keep us from pursuing spiritual realities. Under this duality, ascetics, ministers, and other “holy” people are the only ones really capable of achieving any kind of perfection in Christ.
Over the years I’ve come to reject this dichotomy completely. I am called to live my vocation in Christ every moment of every day in all that I do. It involves withdrawing from the world for a while every day to converse with God, and it involves entering into the world in ways that transform the people and the systems around me.
In one of Karl Rahner’s prayers he says,
Only through Your help can I be an “interior” man in the midst of my many and varied daily tasks. Only through You can I continue to be in myself with You, when I go out of myself to be with the things of the world.
In that same prayer, Rahner tells God how easy it is to lose God in the midst of his daily routine. Then he realizes that he can also find God in every place and in everything he does.
I have a choice everyday to either lose God in the routine and busyness of my activities, or I have the opportunity to find God in those things. When I choose to find God in everything, I am choosing to live out my vocation. If I never live out what I learn in my moments of withdrawal, then I will never realize my vocation. I perfect my vocation only in my living in the world.
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