Discerning your Vocation?

what do you say to people who are discerning religious life here's the vocation call right now and yeah I mean there is some of that I'm so glad I think I'm too impulsive to remain discerning forever that's why that's like my wife's pretty likes me and no one has ever liked me I need to get on this before she changes her mind and so I proposed and got married at the age of 22 I think 23 but there's a lot of people out there who really are terrified of making a decision what do you say to that I would say first consult your loves because the God who made you is the God who saves you and he made you a certain way with an eye towards your redemption you know your vocation your destiny so as he made you so he saves you creation is a kind of indication of redemption so he's made you a certain way and he's made you with certain desires with certain love's and now mind you some of those are kind of tinged well they're all tinged by sin so we're you know we can be selfish we can be overly self-involved we can be kind of distracted or otherwise alienated blah blah blah but you know if you're living like a kind of ordinary sacramental life you're making use of the sacrament of confession often enough you know like maybe like once a month you're receiving Holy Communion in a worthy state you're praying every day say for at least like 20 minutes you're you've got good friends okay you have like a modicum of discipline in your life like a little bit of mortification maybe you like don't eat between meals or maybe you give up caffeinated beverage and whatever I don't know it doesn't matter you're doing something to introduce a kind of rigor and vigor to your Christian observance right as a response to God's gift then you can actually presume and believe that God is working to rectify your appetites he's purifying your desires he's healing them he's actually growing them in such a way that they're going to come to fuller and fuller expression so like if these things are in place and you're pursuing your passions what it is that you love whether it be like stamp collecting or like entomology you're just like real into bugs or whatever you know like you're actually going to be made more and more known to yourself because Christ and the revelation of the Father makes known man to man himself and so once you have a sense of what it is that you love you'll be spontaneously inclined to what you're made for so I think it's a bad way to approach like vocation like there aren't enough for I am a human body I will be a religious or like this is an objectively higher state which it is therefore I want to be objectively higher holiness you know therefore I will become related those aren't those aren't like good considerations because God has called you personally individually and he's giving you grace for whatever vocation that he has ordained for you historically conditionally personally now you know so like it's by responding to those Grace's rather than like the ones we wish he had given are the ones he ought to give in the future in our estimation that we find what it is that we're made for and if you find that like you have a desire for devotion to be like holy given in a kind of you know like religious way like a cultic way you know you like want to make of your life a whole burnt offering and if you want to do great things worthy of great honors the way that like saints arrest said like I want to do small things with great love there was still a kind of grandeur even in her little way sure and if you want you like your relation if you would describe your relationship with Jesus in spousal terms you know and you find that you're kind of inclined in that way that's good too because like I mean women have an easy time describing themselves as brides of Christ yep but like truth be told like male religious while this sounds kind of strange you know it's not they're always eternal across yeah yeah they're I mean that's it's just it's a similar dimension because like priest I mean people talk about priests being married to the church but like that's kind of weird and doesn't really work you're like effectively you're married to the Lord and you should experience that in a kind of spousal exclusive intimate way so if those like desires are kind of coming together as you pursue your passions I think that it's as worth checking out father Bob the dad who was the founder of the companions of the cross up in Canada said since discernment has become fashionable no one's made a decision since and I think there's some truth to that too and so yeah I think it's important that you just step out and make a decision yeah yeah and it's hard it can be hard too because sometimes you feel like you're getting out in front of the Lord you know because I was sure because like a lot a lot of vocational discernment is patience right because what is vocation about it's about being conformed to Christ who is Christ he's the one who suffered died was buried and rose from the dead so it means like vocational discernment will always entail a little bit of his passion like you're gonna taste is suffering you're going to feel the wood of the Cross and sometimes that means waiting you know because you can't get ahead like you can't get out in front of the decision if it's not actually the Lord prompting if the grace hasn't been given because if you do it will crush you know it really will crush but if it's in response you know if it's really receptive and its really kind of determined by the lord's initiation yeah then it then it will be fruitful but like you just got a patient to be patient as to suffer well it's to suffer with the Lord I remember when I was discerning religious life and I was thinking of the priesthood and was looking into different religious orders as I said to you I felt drawn to the Franciscans but I remember feeling guilty because I was really attracted to the habit and I thought well this is a very super super fishel thing to be attracted to and I was embarrassed to sort of say it out but I remember a Franciscan who became a bishop who said to me not to be afraid of that I'm saying that for those who are watching you might be experiencing the same thing because he said the Lord can call us through those seemingly superficial things because they are an expression of the charism of the order but also we are attracted to similarly seeming seemingly superficial things when we're dating you know I like her ayahs or I like her hair well obviously if that was your sole reason for marrying her that wouldn't be good enough but it's it's it's the beginning of an attraction and don't be afraid to allow that to lead you deeper would you agree with that I would agree with it yeah the Lord uses I mean like yeah there are a variety of things that you could say but habits habits are beautiful in a sense too because we associate them with like public witness we assert the associate them with like gospel radicality but we also associate them with like the cultic you know like people wear strange garments because people here at cultic and i think write of a four-letter word now that's all that's become what does cultic me in the Catholic sense so like koltes in the sense of like worship like dedicated worship something that you would associate with like a holy place a shrine someplace that smells like sacrifices as a CS Lewis describes it until we have faces so like you see somebody in a habit and you realize that that person is set apart for holy things for worship that is the precise reason for which they have been called for contemplation not not to like in contemplation to like accumulate grace points so that they themselves can advance you know it's because God is worthy to be praised and that's it full-stop contemplation is an end unto itself it need not be instrumentalized it ought not be much to analyze yeah exactly it's got this it's got a kind of playful freedom to and so like when you see somebody who is set apart for worship that's why we speak about religious has $10 word eschatological signs right so a scatological meaning like end times are associated with the end the second coming because we see in the religious what we will all be doing in the end which is worshiping the Most High God not in the sense that we associate it with like bad liturgies with bad music and bad seating and like uncomfortable pews but in the sense of like being holy alive firing on all cylinders in the presence the loving vision of the one by whom you are created and for whom you are destined like that is what we were meant to see in a religious like this is one who is neither married nor given in marriage because in heaven we will all gaze upon the unveiled face of the incarnate Lord you know and that's and that's enough we don't need signs we don't need sacraments we don't need mediation we will only need him so yeah like I mean like you have like a kind of faint sense of that in the habit just like even if you can only express it in the sense of like that's different or that's pretty we're like cool you know so yeah yo thanks for watching you can watch the entire episode on youtube if you want you can listen to it at the Matt Fred show by subscribing on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts and feel free to support me patreon.com slash Matt Fred

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 75,516

Keywords: vocation, religious, religious life, priest, Catholic, Discernment, Discerning, philosophy, calling, God

Id: kcvKS5GuWRU

Length: 7min 56sec (476 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 10 2019