“If you see your way clearly, follow it.” (Saint Josemaria, “The Way”, 902).
I have been thinking about vocations over the last few months.
A vocation is more than a job, it is a calling, to do something or live in a certain way. A religious vocation relates to an individual experiencing a call from God to live their life in a certain way and then to follow that calling.
While I do not have a religious vocation myself – being a wife and mother – I have read many stories about this calling and the experience of this calling in others. Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta experienced this calling while she was a nun in her initial order. At that time, she heard Christ call her to serve the poorest of the poor. And she worked very hard to establish her order of missionary sisters so that she would be able to fulfil this calling. Saint Maria Faustina experienced a similar calling but in relation to the Divin Mercy. She was a sister in an established convent (after experiencing many rejections in trying to enter a convent prior to joining her convent). During this time, Christ told her that He wished her to start a new order for the Divin Mercy. And Saint Faustina too experienced a great many challenges in this regard. It is – after all – no easy thing to establish a new religious order, and it is even more difficult when the person who is tasked with starting this was supposed to have their vocation already established.
And yet, Saint Josemaria – who founded Opus Dei, and also felt the call to live a vocation where ordinary people could achieve sanctification by living lives of holiness devoted to God – said, “If you see your way clearly, follow it.” (“The Way”, 902).
And I have been thinking about that today because it is a form of cowardice for me to think that everything is just too hard for me to manage. Because I am called to a life of holiness. I may not be a nun or religious. My work may be in the world where others were called to work that is away from the world, but this does not mean that I have no vocation.
For a long long long time – many years in fact – I kept silent. I felt the call to write, but I would never write about God. That was politically incorrect or embarrassing, or downright pushy. At least that is how I thought of it. And then – suddenly and without my understanding or worthiness – God called me out of my grief for the baby who He took to Heaven to pray for me eternally.
And now, I write my words for my God. Because that is my vocation. And I am tired of the cowardice that holds me back.
After all, my Beloved will mould the words as He sees fit and He will send them to where they need to be. And if my words are misinterpreted or misunderstood, then at least I can always say that I am safe in the vocation that my Beloved sent to me, because He will re-direct me, as He redirected Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Saint Faustina.
And I am confident in that because I can see what He wants for me…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.