The Root Of Vocation
Jesus Shows Us The Root Of Our Vocations
(By Fr. Dexter Brereton)
The first time anyone called me “father” was not after my ordination to the priesthood but during the period before joining the Holy Ghost Fathers when I worked as a civil servant at the Ministry of Agriculture. Knowing that I was going to enter the seminary, it was natural that all the office staff gave me the nickname ‘father’ and brought to me all their religious questions. What I remember most about this time was that most of these questions put to me revolved around sex, especially sex in its most problematic moments. The most popular of these questions went something like this: “ Fadda,(Father) I have a girlfriend/boyfriend…how far can we go before we begin to commit sin?” or “Father…is ‘such-and-such’ a sin?”
The common thread running through most of these questions is that God’s law is seen as a restriction on human freedom and the Church as God’s ‘policeman’. What were ignored were the deeper more substantial questions about the purpose and meaning of human sexuality and how someone could grow as a loving person. In the question put to him by the Pharisees, Jesus faces just such a situation. The story begins: “Some Pharisees approached Jesus and asked, ‘Is it against the law for a man to divorce his wife?’” The problem of the meaning of fidelity between the spouses was one of the most difficult issues facing the early church, and this situation continues up to our own time. Today this problem causes no end of anguish in the contemporary Church and the upcoming Synod on the Family in the Catholic Church will seek pastoral solutions for dealing with the relatively large, and growing numbers of divorced and remarried Catholics, in a way that is both merciful yet faithful to Christian tradition and insight. Like many people today the Pharisees had somewhat reduced expectations surrounding marriage, so that in a way, they are really asking the wrong kind of question.
Jesus in his answer to them, outlines his own interpretation on the nature of marriage which is rooted in Gen 1: 27 and 2: 24: “ …from the beginning of creation God made them male and female. This is why a man must leave father and mother, and the two become one body. They are no longer two therefore, but one body. So then, what God has united, man must not divide.” One may detect in the Pharisees some of that attitude toward marriage which looks at it as a “ball-and-chain”, something from which one may wish to easily escape. Jesus replies by situating marriage as a vocation, a vocation rooted “in the beginning of creation.”
The story, at another level is also a powerful teaching about what happens to some institutions or vocations as human life becomes watered down. A priest stops being a shepherd and becomes a moral policeman, religious life stops being an adventure with the Lord and becomes instead a badge of prestige. A politician stops being a servant of the people and becomes a kind of ‘Santa Claus’ giving out political patronage. Marriage itself instead of being forming a community of “life and love” becomes a restriction on our freedom and something we must always be concerned about getting out of.
From time to time, we encounter people like Jesus who point us back to the roots of our vocation “to the beginning of creation.” By their word and example they remind us of our high calling. In his recent apostolic visit to the United States the Holy Father Pope Francis did just such a thing in addressing the U.S. Congress. He said to the American legislators: “Each son or daughter of a given country has a mission, a personal and social responsibility. Your own responsibility as members of Congress is to enable this country, by your legislative activity, to grow as a nation. You are the face of its people, their representatives. You are called to defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good, for this is the chief aim of all politics.”
The Holy Father lays out a vision of politics that goes way beyond the normal partisan divisions, a vision that seeks to answer the questions we should truly ask. We pray therefore that all of us, whatever our vocation, may allow the Spirit of God, working in us or through others to lead us back “to the beginning of creation”, to the very roots of our vocation and our activity. May we find there the inspiration to strive bravely to fulfill the deep and wonderful calling that God has given to all human beings.
