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Faith Alive!
A Weekly
Adult Education Series
Faith Alive!
is a weekly adult education series published by Catholic News
Service and distributed by Catholic newspapers throughout the
United States. In the Archdiocese of Dubuque, Faith
Alive! is printed each week in The Witness, the
official newspaper of the Archdiocese.
Faith Alive!
examines a variety of current issues from the perspective of
Catholic faith. It provides a variety of viewpoints on
these issues each week and offers Catholic readers an
excellent resource for personal reflection or small group
discussion. Faith Alive! is a convenient and accessible source of
continuing adult faith formation on a regular basis.
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This Week's
Faith Alive!
September 5, 2010
Summary
Any work that serves our neighbor
can be a calling from God.
The Second Vatican Council affirmed
the vocation of the laity alongside vocations to consecrated
life and ordained ministry, calling them complementary ways of
responding to Christ's universal call to holiness and Christian
charity.
Vocations can be multiple and
overlapping in any one person's life.
While commitments can change as
people grow, the ultimate, unchanging commitment must be to a
relationship with Jesus Christ.
• • •
The Glue Binding Countless
Vocations: The Call to Christian Charity
By Edward P. Hahnenberg
There are days when I
feel like I was born to teach. On those days, it's hard to
imagine doing anything else or enjoying anything as much as
seeing the light go on in a student's eyes, finding just the
right example to illustrate a point and spending my days
discussing things I find interesting and important.
What a gift to have discovered my calling!
But can I talk about my work as a calling? Can I consider it a
vocation?
Catholics have long limited the word "vocation" to the call to
priesthood or religious life. (The root of the word vocation
means "call."). It is our Protestant brothers and sisters who
have always been more comfortable talking about a career as a
calling.
The reason for this difference goes all the way back to the time
when Martin Luther, the German priest and professor of theology
who initiated the Protestant Reformation, argued that God calls
everyone -- merchants and mothers, princes and peasants,
magistrates and milkmaids -- to serve him by loving others. Any
type of work, therefore, no matter how humble, could be
considered a calling from God.
This was a new way to talk about vocations. It radically broadened
the concept. But it also focused it.
How?
It underscored the reality that all genuine vocations are held
together by one thing: the call to Christian charity.
Christ commands us to love our neighbor. But who is my neighbor?
Our neighbor is the one we meet in and through our daily lives and
work in the world. The mother meets her neighbor in her
children, the farmer in his coworkers and the shopkeeper in his
customers.
We don't have to go looking for our neighbor. He or she is usually
right there in front of us.
Because every work offers the opportunity to serve our neighbor,
every work can be considered a calling. We respond to God's call
where we are -- by being a loving father, a generous friend and
an honest worker.
Initially Catholics reacted against this broader notion of
vocation. But in recent years, we have come to embrace what the
Second Vatican Council called "the universal call to holiness."
In doing so, Catholics have affirmed the wideness of God's call
-- but in a way that differs from Luther's approach.
What was helpful in Luther was the way he celebrated ordinary,
everyday life as the place where we respond to God in love.
In a beautiful sermon on the Christmas story, Luther pointed out
that after meeting the baby Jesus, the shepherds did not run off
to the monastery. They responded to God's call by returning to
the fields and serving God there.
What was less helpful in Luther was that this affirmation of the
lay vocation came at the expense of the vocations of the monk,
the priest and the nun.
Vatican II took a different approach. Rather than lift up the laity
by putting down the clergy, the council raised up all of these
vocations as various and complementary ways of responding to the
one universal call to holiness.
The council affirmed the vocation of the laity alongside the
vocation to consecrated life and the vocation to ordained
ministry. Pope John Paul II later called these three vocations
paradigmatic, insofar as all particular vocations "are in one
way or another derived from them or lead back to them, in
accordance with the richness of God's gift" ("Vita Consecrata,"
No. 31).
Clergy are primarily called to church service. Religious are
primarily called to an evangelical witness. Laity are called to
life in the world. But this hardly captures the diversity of
vocations that constitute the body of Christ.
Pope John Paul II would go on to recognize the callings of mothers,
fathers, workers, youth, theologians, political leaders, the
sick, those who suffer, the elderly, those who care for them.
The list goes on.
And it doesn't stop there. For even
if we think of a vocation as a relatively stable state of life,
we have to admit that there are often callings within a call:
The priest can also be called to be a writer or a missionary.
The wife and grandmother can also be called to serve full time
as a lay ecclesial minister.
In any one life, vocations can be
multiple, interrelated and overlapping.
What stands as the common
denominator to all of these vocations is love. Insofar as we see
what we do, whatever it might be, as a response to Christ's
command to love our neighbor, then we are embracing a vocation!
In my own life, it is this command
that helps me to see my work as a teacher as not only a chance
to do something I love, but also an opportunity to do something
out of love. It is a way to serve others for the sake of the God
who calls us all to holiness.
Hahnenberg is associate professor
of theology at Xavier University, Cincinnati. These reflections
are developed in his latest book, "Awakening Vocation: A
Theology of Christian Call"; Liturgical Press, 2010.
• • •
Laity Living Out Their Vocations
By
Maureen E. Daly
Jack Gohn, a member of St. Vincent
de Paul Parish in Baltimore, is both a lawyer and a writer for a
legal newspaper.
Faith, he said, affects his views
about the law, but the law also affects his views about faith.
"Most faiths teach that ... the
divine plan and destiny is for a better" world, more just and
safe, he said, adding that the task for "lawyer-believers" is
"critiquing our world and trying to improve it."
He said he found the "biggest
disconnect" between the ways lawyers and believers think, for
lawyers look for "something objectively verifiable" to prove
their cases while believers "intuit God in a chain of events."
But Gohn feels believing does change
how lawyers act. For example, to him the church's teaching on a
"preferential option for the poor" compelled him as a lawyer to
try to steer social policy in the direction of alleviating the
burdens of the needy.
For a lawyer that means doing
"representational pro bono work," he said, and donating to
charities. It also means addressing the causes of poverty that
call for political action.
"Each of us believing lawyers needs
to break off a chunk of the laws that are responsible for
poverty and try to do something about it," Gohn wrote on his
blog, "The Big Picture and the Closeup."
Mickey Fenzel, associate dean of the
School of Education at Loyola University in Baltimore, examines
social justice issues in classes where his students hold
master's and doctoral degrees in psychology.
Fenzel said he was inspired by a
speech given in 2000 by Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, former
superior general of the Jesuits. Father Kolvenbach told
administrators and faculty from Jesuit universities across the
United States that they must teach "faith that does justice" by
putting faith in what they do as researchers and teachers.
"He issued a challenge," Fenzel
said. "I take it very seriously." His recent research focuses on
the NativityMiguel schools as a model for middle school
education.
An accomplished musician, Fenzel
plays with the choir at St. Vincent's in downtown Baltimore. He
has led trips to El Salvador, Mexico and Jamaica for students
who volunteer their service and get to know the respective
cultures. And as a father, Fenzel said he tries to "set that
example of a faith that works for the improvement of society."
Audrey Rogers is a retired
epidemiologist for the National Institutes of Health where she
managed large research and policy projects. She is a wife,
mother, grandmother and now a student in the graduate program of
theology at the Ecumenical Institute of St. Mary's Seminary and
University in Baltimore. She is also vice president of St.
Vincent's parish council.
"At this stage in my life what I am
trying to understand is that religion isn't about information;
it's about relationship, a deep encounter with God," she said.
"Once that happens, you can't be the same person."
Maria Rosario Inurritegui, who is
called Charo by all, is a mother and grandmother from Lima,
Peru. She works full time doing pastoral work with the Hispanic
immigrant community at Our Lady of Pompei Parish in Baltimore.
For more than three years she has lived at the parish house and
volunteered along with her husband, Jorge Silva.
The couple had volunteered in a poor
village in the Andes of Peru until they were recruited to come
to Baltimore and work on family issues, marriage and baptismal
preparation, and adult and children's catechism.
She said her work teaches her about
immigrants' personal and pastoral needs, and that it "makes you
see yourself and what you need to change."
Charo said that she and her husband
chose to do this work "to give back what life gave to us. With
our children raised, we decided to make a gift of this time."
Daly is a freelance writer in
Baltimore.
• • •
Commitment's "64 Shades of Gray"
By
Father W. Thomas Faucher
Thirty-eight years ago I taught a
high school course on commitment. I was a new priest and teacher
then. At the end of the semester a student said, "Commitment
comes in 64 shades of gray."
What he meant was that there are
many types of commitment, such as permanent, temporary,
life-determining or even destructive ones, depending on the
challenges or realizations met along the way. And as a person
continues to grow, the reality and consequences of what it means
to be committed change as well.
That is a great way to express this
most complicated reality.
Our personal history is a factual
record of the commitments we have -- or have not -- made. For
example, I made a commitment to live out my baptism and be
confirmed. I also chose to become a priest.
The sacramental and vocational
commitments -- baptism, confirmation, marriage, ordination --
give us the privilege to reflect the faithfulness of God. As
such, they are occasions for great grace from God.
But God's grace can also lead to the
decision not to get married or be ordained, committing to a
single life.
To make a sacramental, vocational
commitment in our lives is a deeply serious moment. It also is
incredibly mysterious because, even though it gives us the
freedom of having a firm foundation, we never know exactly where
that commitment will take us.
From the foundation of a commitment,
each person has the responsibility to grow and change.
Most of the time, the grace of God
enables us to grow and change within the commitment we have
made, and in the process deepen that commitment.
But sometimes the process of growth
takes a different turn. What might have been or seemed to be a
good commitment at one time may need to be re-evaluated later
on.
As a canon lawyer I deal with people
who truly thought they were making a lifetime commitment in a
marriage, only to discover that the relationship they were
living in was not what the church considers to be a valid
marriage. Arriving at this painful realization is usually the
result of a great deal of prayer and God's grace.
A number of my best priest friends
have left the priesthood. There was a time when this action was
seen as "abandoning their commitment." However, the church no
longer sees leaving active ministry this way. It gives weight to
the reasons why a man discerns that he no longer can be what a
priest needs to be.
If done with God's grace, changing
commitments can be a true step forward.
The ultimate, unchanging commitment,
therefore, has to be a relationship with Jesus Christ, whose
grace will guide us to make commitments, to live up to our
commitments, to grow in our commitments, and maybe sometimes
change our commitments.
If we are living with God's grace,
we will be able to do that and constantly become more and more
holy.
Faucher is pastor of St.
Mary's Catholic Church in Boise, Idaho.
• • •
Food for Thought
Pope Benedict XVI chose a one-day
visit in July to the Abruzzi region of Italy to respond to youth
there who had previously asked him how a person can recognize
God's call.
"The secret of the vocation lies in
the capacity for and joy of distinguishing, listening to and
obeying his voice," the pope said at the cathedral in Sulmona.
"But to do this it is necessary to accustom our hearts to
recognizing the Lord and to having an awareness of him as a
person who is close to me and loves me."
It is likewise important to "learn
to live in our days moments of inner silence in order to hear
the Lord's voice," he added.
If they do this, the pope continued,
following the Lord's voice with generosity, "we have nothing to
fear, we know and feel that God is with us, that God is friend,
father and brother."
In summation, the pope said, "The
secret of the vocation lies in the relationship with God, in
prayer that develops precisely in inner silence, in the capacity
for listening, hearing that God is close."
-- Carole Norris Greene Associate
Editor, Faith Alive!
Posted 09.01.10 |