Dear vocation minister
Dear vocation minister
WHAT I REALLY WANT YOU, the vocation minister, to know is how you dispatch with passion the sacred work entrusted to you. The word passion is what first occurred to me as I pondered my message, and I arrive at that word from decades of observations—from a member’s and community leader’s point of view.
In order to better describe passion, I am using Dorothy Sayers’ description. She writes in The Mind of the Maker from the point of view of the artist who images the Divine Artist. It seems to me that your work is one to which many words can be attached at any given time: feeling, thought, toil, trouble, difficulty, choice, triumph! And sometimes even that last word is real. But always, all of these are captured in the one word: passion. You image through your efforts the Divine Artist, at work with passion for the expression of God’s desire in so many and various human expressions!
This is a letter of sorts to you who are vocation ministers—you who are in ministry to vocation. I address it particularly to you because of the three whom I know. I observe them, listen to them, and frequently interact with them, and I gratefully accept those they point my way as potential candidates and members. Thank you, Dian, Pat and Lorren! You represent for me the hundreds of women and men just like you who go about almost invisibly with admirable persistence, dogged patience, hard-won wisdom, and a lot of good humor of course. You go about the Artist’s work with the energy of your own vocation, the passion for God’s desire, that makes it all possible.
Since there is little, perhaps nothing, that I can say to you that you don’t already know, let me simply hold up for you a mirror in order that you can appreciate yourself and your work more deeply, with all of the awe, humility, and gratitude it deserves. The mirror that suggested itself in my contemplation of your lives and work seemed to form itself around three citations that I paraphrase here:
1. “Live out your whole life with one desire only, that is to be what God desires for you . . .” (from maxim #73 of Jean-Pierre Médaille’s Maxims of the Little Institute).
2. Go gently and courageously about your life: live as a pilgrim making your way from shrine to shrine (from Parker Palmer’s book On The Brink of Everything).
3. Be willing to cut your life to the bone in order to survive what your heart desires (from an author and book long forgotten).
These three, it seems to me, describe in so many words the journey of the vocation minister who accompanies the seeker into the way of life that is to be hers or his. They point the way so that both you and the seeker “should grow in every way into him who is the head, Christ…” (Eph. 4:15).
Let me conceptualize these points and your work. Potential candidates are seekers. Very often they are completely oblivious of the inner journey except for a vague uncertainty about their own search for meaning. Or, perhaps, seekers already have tried multiple paths and are still feeling rudderless. They have experimented with or explored other religious traditions, atheism, marriage, other religious communities, drugs, alcohol, sex, binge buying or traveling, various professions—and come to naught. Some are too young to have been tried by life or have been tried at too young an age. Some are older, well advanced in age, and have seen and done it all—and now suffer some persistent desire they cannot name. Some are suffering what we have called the proverbial mid-life crisis, induced by some tragedy or simply the boredom of life. At any rate, you encounter these seekers mostly by accident, some mysterious happenstance. You are surprised, amazed, and then possessed by the deepest question of all: How can I truly encounter this person where she or he harbors the truth or the reality of this profound desire?
That’s the context for the seeker’s quest. What is yours? Yours, like theirs, is buried in the contemporary culture on the one hand, but it is deeply personal on the other. Your personal development is couched in past experience and your resources at hand. What is your life experience so far? How well do you know your own story? Is your self-knowledge up to date? What’s your take on your own pilgrim life? What do you really desire? What resources do you have at hand, what reservoir of inner and outer strength? Here are some areas in your life you might continuously consider:
Perhaps there is more that you can add to this list. But what all this bespeaks is a real person well conversant with the real world because you live there, thrive there, welcome there, find God there, incarnate the Christ there, and are always alert to learn there.
You are in the here and now of the awesome and awful daily from which a disciple does not desire to flee but rather desires to immerse him or herself more deeply in order to be more radically transformed, more radically effective as a human being.
You are always becoming more and more real so as to meet more effectively real people who search for meaning in a rapidly changing world, a chaotic and dangerous world, a plastic culture that is alluring but meaningless. You, the vocation minister, are yourself attractive because you represent an oasis in what can be a desert of consumerism, a rock of stability in a world in flux, a treasure in the midst of what might be an insipid, cheapened existence, promised communion in the lonely crowd, something worthwhile to be worked toward, the promise of something new emerging and unfolding, a light in darkness.
All this you have seen and experienced as a vocation minister. Your life is often filled with the consolation, disillusionment, idealism, optimism, crushed expectations, and the bone-weary work that signifies your real hope. Your own personal journey work to which you must be faithful happens in the midst of this as you continue real encounter with others, each of whom is dramatically different from one another and from you.
How do you manage?! Let me return to the mirror.
“Live out your whole life with one desire only.” There is one answer that responds: “The sound of my lover! My lover, peeking through the lattice says to me, ‘Arise my beloved, my friend, my beautiful one and come! For see, the winter is past; the rains are over and gone’” (Song 2:8-11). This is all God desires, that you realize that you are God’s beloved in whatever human way is available to you. You, the authentic beloved and lover, are the message the seeker finds and follows. And God directs the rest as you pilgrim together, listening to one another, carefully alert, directing and following. You hold the journey lightly, following Love’s invitations, not your own egoic demands and commands. Love teaches you indifference, the vocation minister’s virtue: Not what I want, but what You, Love, invite us, both of us, to.
“Go gently . . . live as a pilgrim moving from shrine to shrine . . . .” You seek a gentle, reverent pace; you contemplate how most effectively to companion this person and seek openness to this person’s influence on you and the journey. This is a ministry of personal presence. How do you meet and accompany the prospective candidate except from the depths of your two pilgrim journeys? How else can you consider this individual’s life—and yours—except as a pilgrimage? You, the two pilgrims, embark on pilgrimage. You move from story to story, each a sacred shrine, a stopping place where you take joy in God who is encountered, recognized, reverenced. From unveiling to unveiling, every start and stop becomes a sacred moment where wisdom is revealed, learned at heart as you journey along.
In the end you have grown up yet again into Christ. And more importantly, so has the person with whom you journeyed.
The Way becomes mutual: two together, traversing and exploring foreign land, crossing delicately dangerous terrain, bridging great gaps of misunderstandings and over-enthusiastic judgments. You provide one another with direction, assistance, rest time and sustenance. And you, the vocation minister, turning loose of hopes, expectations, numbers, victory in one new member gained, community dreams—you give it all up in favor of the other’s search for meaning, for real life, for effective and truly affective existence. You leave your own safety and security, control, need for affirmation and success. You go to the core of your own existence.
“Be willing to cut your life to the bone” as you together search for what God desires. You pare away your egoic desire for consolations, for the false or pre-emptive victory. You recognize that a foreshortened journey will not accomplish anything but your own satisfaction. You realize that it will not endure; therefore, you will do all that you can to keep from the false joy of a triumph too soon arrived at. You know in your bones that the other’s life-saving discovery of true meaning and peace—whatever, however, that might turn out to be—is your only true goal. Bone deep you realize that total self-gift for the sake of the other is the only real meaning for you and your work as vocation minister.
In the end you have grown up yet again into Christ. And more importantly, so has the person with whom you journeyed. Together, the two of you, in the consolation of the pilgrimage itself, have shucked off your old selves and have come to know how you have revealed Christ, the true light and life to one another. This transformation is the real victory, arrived at through feeling, thought, toil, trouble, difficulty, choice, triumph—that is to say: passion!
It sometimes happens that the person journeys on without you but better capable for having met you. And sometimes your journeys do converge in some indissoluble way and she or he continues with you and your community. In whatever way it turns out, each of you has become more the real person you’re called to be, the one, the beloved, the friend whom God desires.
And all of this occurs over and over again because of the passion with which you arise each morning, put on your shoes and make one more phone call, one more visit, one more self-gift. You, vocation minister, your passion for God, for an individual’s integral life and for your community’s charism, you are a stunning example of commitment, dedicated service, and self-given love. And, I humbly thank you.
Sister Marcia Allen, C.S.J., a Sister of St. Joseph of Concordia, Kansas, holds a doctor of ministry degree in spirituality and lives and works at Manna House of Prayer, a center for spiritual renewal and material resources for those in need in Concordia. She is former president of her community and teaches in her community’s formation program.
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