Vocations: A Family Matter

By Don Paglia. Reprinted  from the Journal of the National Association of Catholic Family Life Ministers (NACFLM).

What if all parents were “deputized” to be vocations directors? And what if we as a Church really took on the belief that each and every baptized person is “called” to live a life of vocation? And by vocation, I mean the call not only to priestly or religious life, but also to marriage and single life.

Here’s the reasoning behind such questioning: All of us are called by God to do God’s will rather than our own. This requires discernment. It requires that each of us enter into an on-going process of discovering the will of God for us and for our life.

Each of us would have to listen to the voice of God within ourselves and within the faith community to discover this vocational calling. Of course there are hints along the way. The gifts and talents we possess are usually pretty good signs that point us toward how we are to live out our life. The parish community can also play an important part in how we uncover this sense of call.

But there is a key element that plays a vital role in this discovery process—family.  And here’s the connecting point to why I see family as the locus for vocations—good priestly and religious vocations basically come from good Christian families.

The sisters, brothers and priests, as well as deacons, I talk to, often stress how important their family was in helping them shape and nurture their eventual vocation into church ministries. It’s not that their parents necessarily talked to them about becoming priests or religious. It was that their parents gave them an over-arching understanding of God’s call—that no matter what they did, it was essentially about responding to God’s call.

Yes, these parents also encouraged the possibility to priestly life and religious life. But it was often in the context of the singular belief of vocation being the larger context. So, they may have easily said to them when they were children things like, “eat your vegetables, Johnny or (Mary), because some day you’re going to grow up and be a doctor…or a teacher… or a priest, a brother or a (religious sister).”

They made it clear that God indeed had a plan for them. They listened to their children and reflected back what they saw as the child’s “God-given” gifts and talents.

They also let them know these gifts were not for themselves alone, but were meant to be given back to the world. .. In other words, these parents fostered vocations by instilling in their children that each of us is here to make a difference by discovering how we are to best reflect God’s love. We are to be a contribution. We are to change the world. To put this in church language, we are to become Christ in the world.

With this kind of thinking there is NO shortage of vocations. There is a lack of awareness of them.