Sunday 4 Easter (A -2005): Vocations Sunday
What is a vocation?
A vocation is a call from God to be consecrated for a special mission to build up the Kingdom
of God. Some vocations, like marriage and priesthood, embrace the whole
of a person; others are “partial” or subservient to those greater vocations, such as being a teacher or a doctor.
Most Catholics are called to marriage, though they often do not think of their marriage as a call from God
and as a consecration for a special mission for God’s sake. Those of you who are married (both individual couples and
groups of couples) ought to spend time together and alone, to pray, to deepen your understanding of your vocation, to support
and to encourage one another.
God has called you together. He is the heart and goal of your marriage. He desires of you, indeed demands
of you, that you fulfill your mission for the sake of his Name.
Prayer is necessary to keep alive the spiritual foundation of your relationship. Prayer is necessary both
to seek God’s will for you and to fulfill that will faithfully and courageously.
Marriage is a gift from God, not a human creation. As gift, it calls for self-giving, one to another. Self-giving
is only true if it is total, exclusive and permanent. True married love is self-giving for the sake of the other, not the
taking of the other for the sake of oneself.
Marriage is intended to mirror God’s own life, whereby, as in the life of the Trinity itself, each person
finds fulfillment in giving himself to the other, without conditions.
Just as the fruit of God’s love was his free creation of mankind, so the fruit and mission of married
love is the responsible pro-creation of children, a responsibility to be measured before God, not before social pressure or
personal selfishness. The married are called to give life to sons and daughters who, although theirs, are yet not theirs, since they belong to God.
The married are called and consecrated by a special sacrament to live in total oneness with each other and
with God, and, from that oneness, to bring forth new human life which God will ennoble with divine life in baptism. As a means
to an end, marriage itself will end, but the fruits of marriage, especially children, will endure for ever.
For all this to happen, those who are married must live according to the law of Christ and prefer it to any
human wisdom or convenience. All sins against marriage must be rejected in order to preserve and honor marriage’s integrity.
Above all, those married according to Christ must seek the meaning and the strength of their marriage in the
Eucharist. In it, Christ gives his own body to his bride, the Church, at the price of his own blood. Those called to marriage
are also called to give themselves without reserve to one another, even at the cost of great suffering and death itself. The
Eucharist is the pattern of all marriage; it is its logic and its wisdom; it is its source and its perfection.
Of course human weakness is always present! That is why the Christian ideal must be preserved. It would be
foolish to make of our failures the example to be followed. Mercy and compassion will flow for those who admit their errors
and change their ways, not for those who justify their sins and call them “an alternative life-style.” Divorce
is not the ideal of marriage, nor is infidelity, nor is the deliberate exclusion of children, nor are other types of relationship
which are alien to the mind of Christ and can never be blessed by him.
Marriage is a vocation, a beautiful and splendid vocation: do not surrender it, through a false declaration
of freedom, to the mundane and profane wisdom of egoism.
There is, of course, another type of marriage which we can call mystical or spiritual, and it too is a glorious
vocation from God. I speak of the priesthood.
Called by God through the Church, the priest is, like Christ, married to Christ’s Bride, the Church.
The priest is an “alter Christus”.
The priest, too, is called to give life, to give eternal life in the name of Christ. He is spiritual father
to those to whom he gives life, be it in baptism, in confession or, above all, in the Eucharist.
The priest exists because of the Eucharist and for the Eucharist. When Jesus instituted the Eucharist, he
conferred the sacred power on his apostles to renew it when he said, “do this in memory of me.”
When he is ordained, a priest is told by the bishop as he receives the chalice and paten: “imitate the
mystery you celebrate; model your life on the Lord’s Cross.” The priest, then, gives his own life, his own body,
blood, soul and humanity to the Church, especially in the commitment of celibacy. His very flesh is consecrated by a special
charism to dedicate his whole being, his entire love, his talents and energies, to the Bride of Christ, the Church.
He gives life, not only through the sacraments, but by preaching the Word of Christ as handed down faithfully
through generations by the apostles and their successors. He must not, then, preach his own ideas or his own will; he must
speak the Truth that sets men free, the Truth that must sometimes condemn yet, in doing so, offers at the same time the light
and the consolation of forgiveness to the one who repents.
The priest focuses the hearts and minds of men on Him who is the longing of all hearts and the light of all
minds. The priest is a living witness to the Gospel, to the life and death of the One who is the hope of humanity, the goal
of history, the final and definitive judge of every human being.
The life of a priest is only a waste for those who do not understand the Gospel. Celibacy is only unnatural
for those who do not accept the supernatural. A life lived, and a service given for an other-worldly kingdom is only nonsense
to those whose hearts cannot or will not see beyond the immediate.
Like Christ, the priest stands as a sign of contradiction precisely because he witnesses to the supremacy
of God. Through the ministry of his priests God will reign supreme, when all the clamor and rebellion of history shall cease.
There are other vocations, of course. Men and women may be called to religious life, to be poor, chaste and
obedient. Like and with Christ, they are witnesses to his personal life-style for the sake of the Kingdom.
There are also lay people who live unmarried, consecrated lives in the world, like walking question marks
in the midst of secular life. There are also those who are neither married nor consecrated in any way other than their baptism
and whose personal circumstances (e.g. physical, psychological, moral, spiritual, family, etc.) suggest that none of the traditional
vocations is theirs. Those circumstances, then, become a sign from God that he wants them to live their situation for His
sake, trusting in Him alone and, in the power of the sacraments, giving of themselves to the full in obedience to the great
commandment of love.
I appeal to all of you, married or not, young and old. Listen and discern the voice of the Good Shepherd calling
you.
Do not let your life drift past aimlessly and without purpose. Your life is a gift given to you so that you
may in turn give it with passion and motivation to others for the sake of Christ. Your life not only has an end, but a goal.
Do not let the attractions of self-concern rob you of the Christ-centered meaning of your existence.
And to our young, unmarried men and boys, I make a special appeal: think and pray seriously about the priesthood.
Time spent in working out the Lord’s call to you is not time wasted. Step forward, come and ask about priesthood. You
know where we live. Fix your gaze on Christ, on John Paul II and on the great saints who have been priests. Sure, some of
us have failed miserably, but the failure of some is not the wholesale condemnation of all. It is certainly no reason not
to seek great holiness yourself.
Parents, pray for your sons, encourage them to consider the priesthood. Do not force them one way or the other,
but enable and empower them to listen to Christ’s call. They will probably hear his voice first through yours!
Those who are truly his sheep will hear and listen to his voice so that all of us, priests, the married, religious
and laity may come together into the eternal sheepfold of heaven.
Msgr. Peter
Magee
Sunday, April
17th, 2005: St. Andrew Apostle, Silver Spring, 10.00
St. Mark Evangelist,
Hyattsville, 12.00 noon
