Six ways to thrive in vocation ministry

"KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON” is one of those slogans that lingers because it can be applied to so many situations. The phrase originated in the spring of 1939 in Britain as the country anticipated the dark days of World War II. The government designed the famous poster and printed more than two million copies, but according to Brittany Fowler, author of a history of the phrase for Business Insider magazine, “not one of them was posted, as officials had last-minute doubts about whether the content was too patronizing or obvious.”

Most of the posters were destroyed, but more than 60 years later, one of them surfaced when a bookseller found it hidden in a book he bought at an auction. He put it up over the cash register at his bookstore and customers began asking where they could purchase the poster. The shop owner started printing copies, and a craze was born. 

The phrase has been adopted, adapted, and some might say exhausted over the years. But its truth is timeless because it captures an essential quality of faithfulness, steadfastness, and resolve in difficult situations. 

So how do we apply this truth to vocation ministry? I’ve spent time as a vocation director myself, and I’ve given my share of retreats for worn-out ministers. Putting together the wisdom I’ve acquired from these experiences, I offer six ideas to encourage thriving among vocation ministers and other wanderers, wayfarers, and dreamers of God’s realm. I hope these thoughts will help us to keep the faith and carry on when the road seems treacherous and we discover more dead ends than expressways, more roadblocks than rest stops.

1. Live in the now

Thomas Merton once mused, “Time is given to us not to keep a faith we once had but to achieve a faith we need now.” Time passes quickly, and with so much suffering in the world, we are often advised to “keep the faith.” But what faith are we keeping? Is it the faith that served us as children when we were spoon fed without questioning? Is it the faith that leaves little room for doubt and often fails to give others the benefit of the doubt? 

What kind of faith do I need now? The older I get, the more doubt crowds in. I need a faith that leaves room for doubt and gives others the benefits of my own doubt, understanding that the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. I need a faith that helps in those times when fear threatens to get the best of me. 

The kind of faith we need today is one that reminds us that no matter the bitter disappointment or the beauty too stunning to describe, life goes on. Perhaps the work of faith is to simply know and believe that life goes on. 

I once heard an episode of National Public Radio’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. The guest was the late Norman Lear, who is credited with changing television from a “Father knows best” attitude to “Father knows least” through the character of Archie Bunker on All in the Family in the 1970s. The host asked Lear about his longevity. At the time, Lear was in his 90s and still working, still creating. Lear said essentially that he is guided by two words, “over” and “next.” The image he suggested is hanging a hammock between two poles marked “over” and “next.” So how does he remain creative? When one project is finished, whether it is a success or a failure, he moves on to the next. He doesn’t dwell on what happened before; it’s over. It’s on to what’s next.

Then there is the image of the hammock. To some it might be a symbol of a lazy summer’s day. But it also speaks to the creative process. Taking time to listen, to rest one’s mind, to calm one’s heart, to allow the new to emerge in the gentle rocking back and forth allows one to stay focused, stay faithful, remain calm, before carrying on to the next project, the next person, the next possibility.

When we apply this to religious life, and particularly vocation ministry, if we dwell only on our losses, we’ll get stuck. We must allow time for quiet to invite the Spirit to stir our creativity. And then we move on to what or who is next.

2. Keep your eyes on the road

The New York Times publishes a column on leadership called “Corner Office,” which carries interviews with CEOs of successful companies. In one such column, the CEO of a software company says he learned many life lessons from his rowing coach in college who gave him this image: “When you are driving and rain is pouring down, with the windshield wipers going, you can either watch the windshield wipers or you can watch the road. Which is going to be more successful?”

When we are going through difficult stretches on our journey, if we pay more attention to the rain, the storm, and the wipers, instead of keeping our eyes on the road, we’re going to be in trouble. And yet, how easy it is to lose our focus or compromise our vision when the storms of life move in around us.

Keeping our eyes on the road is what spiritual writers call mindfulness. It is the ability to center oneself, to pay attention to what is most important, rather than being distracted by the worries and fears that can cause us to lose our way. We can be “attentive and compassionate toward our own fear without being paralyzed by it,” spiritual activist Robert Gass writes. Awareness of fear “while cultivating … a capacity to think and act with clarity and power” is at the heart of the matter of mindfulness.

Cultivating this inner silence is an absolute necessity when confronted with a culture that is impatient and prone to shame and blame in public ways. Thus, if we are less than enthusiastic about our mission or ministry, we might check the pulse of our prayer life. Keeping our eyes on the road affords us the opportunity to pay attention. Our time in solitude will lead us to connect with others who share a passion for our community mission. 

3. Cultivate community

Author and pastor Rick Warren has noted that most people fall into three categories: caretakers, undertakers, and risk takers. Our communities are filled with people who dwell in each of these categories. Which category do you dwell in?

Most of us are caretakers—that is the nature of religious life. We take care of one another and those we are called to serve. We take good care of those we love and even those we find difficult to love. 

But we also know some undertakers in our communities—those who take us under, whose cynicism and sarcasm serve as sharp shovels to dig a grave and bury us. Sometimes we are the undertakers and we dig our own graves with our negativity. We sense the life drain from us as our energy is depleted by the shadows of doom and gloom that often shroud our world. When we feed on this negative energy of those who take us under, we will experience an acid reflux disease of the soul. Its symptoms are anger and bitterness. 

We need to surround ourselves with people who are not bitter, who do not suffer from lethargy of spirit, with people who remain grounded in hope. We need to surround ourselves with risk takers, people who enlarge our minds, hearts, and imaginations and instill hope.
The biblical tradition is filled with risk takers. From Abraham and Sarah through Elizabeth and Zechariah, from Jacob and Sarah to Mary and Joseph, from the prophets of old to the first disciples and witnesses to the Resurrection, we have numerous examples of ancestors in faith who took the ultimate risk to trust God and say yes to what seemed incomprehensible and unimaginable. 

What allowed them to be risk takers? It has something to do with this understanding that we are formed, known, dedicated, and appointed by God. Those are the verbs expressed in the call of the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 1:5). He could be the patron saint for vocation directors because he thought he was too young to be a prophet. He needed more time in community to understand the history and spirituality, and to deepen his relationship with God. 

In reflecting on the call of Jeremiah, we often focus on his excuse instead of the original call of the prophet. Notice the actions taken by God: formed, knew, dedicated, and appointed. God forms us and has a purpose for us before we are born. Our vocation reaches back to the very mystery of life. We are formed and known by God.

Jeremiah’s call to be a prophet was his purpose in life. Discerning one’s purpose is at the heart of vocation ministry. When times get tough and losses mount, it is important to return to the original source of our call and to ask ourselves: What risks are we willing to take to promote and propel the reign of God in our lives? What risks are we willing to take to make our charism, spirituality, community, and ministry known to those who seek to belong? What risks are we willing to take in calling forth from our congregations a deeper and wider commitment that will shake, rattle, and roll those undertakers in our community who have their sights set on death rather than life?

4. Preserve your perspective

Returning to our original inspiration allows us to preserve our perspective. We keep our perspective by focusing on the question, “Are we living our charism in the most relevant way possible?”

I once heard an interview with a British historian who interviewed a survivor of a Nazi death camp for a book he was writing. After the interview, the historian called a cab and waited on the curb. He had a plane to catch and the cab was late. As he kept looking at his watch and no cab showed up, the historian became increasingly angry. He paced back and forth on the sidewalk, kept calling the cab company and yelling into his cell phone. At one point, the survivor of the Holocaust who had been watching him from her apartment window came downstairs to wait with him. She gently touched his arm and said, “What does it matter? Why worry about missing your plane? There will be another plane. When you have lived in a Nazi concentration camp these daily annoyances don’t matter so much.”

The prophet Micah put our lives in proper perspective when he wrote about what God requires of us. Three things, the prophet said: do justice, love goodness, and walk humbly with your God.

One of my favorite films is The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, about a group of older folks who go to India to spend the twilight of their lives in a sort of resort-like paradise. But once they arrive, the hotel turns out to be less than they expected. Upon their arrival, Sonny, the young entrepreneur who is more of a dreamer than a manager but is trying to save the hotel that his father bequeathed to him, tells one of the guests who finds the accommodations substandard that there is a saying in India, “Everything will be all right in the end. And if everything is not all right, then it’s not the end.”

Life is often a matter of perspective. We keep our perspective by asking the important questions. Since so much in our world doesn’t make sense today, Father Timothy Radcliffe, O.P., former master general of the Dominicans, believes religious life must be the answer to the question, “What is the sense of human life today?” One image he offered that serves as a possible answer is that of a nun in Venezuela singing the “Exsultet” at an Easter Vigil he attended. “People must be able to recognize in our lives an invitation to be human in a new way,” he wrote. For him, the image of that nun singing in the dark to the paschal candle reflects the present and the future of religious life.

5. Embrace imperfection

As we seek to stay calm and carry on in the work to which we are called, we need to avoid getting caught in the roundabout of perfectionism. Or else we will just be going around in circles.

We confuse perfection with holiness or wholeness. It is easy to do since so much of our religious training has focused on perfection. That word, perfection, occurs early in Matthew’s gospel when Jesus talks about discipleship in the Sermon on the Mount. In the context of loving one’s enemies, Jesus says we must be “perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.” (I prefer Luke’s version where he says we must be “compassionate as our God is compassionate.”)

The pursuit of perfection can stifle our growth and development as a human person because we are called to be human, not perfect. We must be who we are and stop trying to live up to an ideal that we or others (parents, family, church, society, profession, and our own false self) place before us. In her book, Being Perfect, Anna Quindlen reflects on her desire as a young girl and high school student to be perfect by living up to the expectations of others. “Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and its good opinion,” she writes. “What is hard, and amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”

Helping a candidate to religious life become him or herself within the parameters of a congregation’s charism and spirituality is at the heart of the process of discernment. If we are still living up to the expectations of others—of church or family or community or Wall Street or the people down the street—how can we help candidates discern their place in religious life if they are dealing with the same issues? It is important to ask ourselves if we are still trying to shape our lives in response to what other people think of us, of how they define us, of who they want us to be. Are we still trying to be perfect in an imperfect world? Or are we seeking to be whole and holy?

 In discernment with potential candidates for our communities, we must pay close attention to this question of perfectionism because, as Quindlen points out, one of the many downfalls of pursuing perfection is that it “makes you unforgiving of the faults of others.” But the main reason to avoid the path of perfection is that moment in our lives when we fail at something we truly wanted to succeed at, or we’ve lost a loved one who meant the world to us, or a dream has turned to dust—then “you will fall into the center of yourself” and “will look for some core to sustain you,” Quindlen writes. “And if you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where the core ought to be.”

6. Practice kindness

Embracing our imperfections reminds us that we are not invincible and teaches us to be vulnerable. When we are in touch with our own vulnerability, we learn a little more about compassion. Creating an environment for discernment where the candidate experiences a compassionate presence and feels safe enough to share his or her story is one of the most important gifts a vocation minister can give to a person sensing a call to religious life.

To be a compassionate presence in a world where there is so much apathy and indifference, to practice such kindness, we must first go inside and sense the fire of God’s love burning within us. This is where compassion begins because as Henri Nouwen wrote, “When I really bring others into my innermost being and feel their pains, their struggles, their cries in my own soul, then I leave myself, so to speak, and become them; then I have compassion.”

Kindness is born when we learn compassion. And we learn to be compassionate from our losses. Not long ago I met the widow of a 50-year-old man who died suddenly of a heart attack. She and her two children, one in high school and the other a freshman in college, were devastated and grieving this most unacceptable loss. To help with her grief, she came to a retreat I was leading. She told me the story of her son, the freshman in college, who at his father’s funeral said to the brokenhearted congregation, “Dad, you gave me your name. It is the greatest gift you gave me. I will do my best to carry your name with the integrity, compassion, and love that you lived.”

 That young man is farther along the path of compassion than most. What will keep him going in the aftermath of such a great loss is the memory of his father’s integrity, compassion, and love, and the desire to live up to the name his father gave him. 

The memory of those who have loved us, encouraged us, and challenged us; the love and compassion we have experienced with God in silence and prayer, in the faith communities we serve, and in the people we have met along the way; and the name we carry that expresses the charism and spirituality of the life to which we are called—these will keep us going in our vocation ministry as we seek to create safe places for those we accompany. 

As we journey forward in faith, may these six points fuel our souls to keep the faith, stay calm, and carry on.  

A version of this article originally appeared in the Summer 2017 edition of HORIZON.

Father Joseph Nassal, C.PP.S. is a Missionary of the Precious Blood currently serving as vice provincial of the U.S. Province and living in Berkeley, California. He has worked in retreat, renewal, and reconciliation ministry since 1988. He also has published eight books and has served in justice and peace ministry and in formation, vocation, and leadership ministry for his congregation. 
 

Related articles

“Finding strength to uphold the dream of religious life,” by Brother Paul Bednarczyk, C.S.C., HORIZON, Fall 2022.

“How I stay healthy and hopeful as a vocation minister,” by Sister Renée Daigle, M.S.C., HORIZON, Fall 2006.

“Hope in an anxious age,” by Sister Doris Gottemoeller, R.S.M., HORIZON, Spring 2011.