11 January 2021
Monday of the First Week in Ordinary Time
When a person enters religious life, a normal question everyone asks is, “when did you hear the call?” I have told my vocation story so many times and heard others’ that I have reached one conclusion: no vocation story is quite the same. When we hear our call, it might have been proceeded by a radical change in our choices or understanding. The call can be one more step of a path that was slowly revealed in time, yet clear in its trajectory in hindsight. What unites every vocation story is the attentiveness to grace that we can no longer resist.
As much as I have prayed with the call of the first disciples, its strangeness has not worn off. Someone walking by calls out to you to join him in his mission, and you drop everything in order to follow. They create no positive or negative charts, or postpone the invitation to see what other options might come. They leave their profession, their families for a time, and their homes with not much afterthought in the moment. Comparing ourselves to the first disciples has its fruits and difficulties. They model for us the interior freedom to respond with generosity to the Lord’s call. The difficulty comes from the fact that God has a unique relationship with each of us. God’s activity in our lives is beyond our imagination and the limited categories in which we tend to think. As I said before, no vocation story is quite the same, yet each involves a response to a grace received.
The disciples show us a model of attentiveness we need. They could have easily ignored Jesus that day; they could have not met his gaze. The encounter with Jesus in the way the disciples experienced is different for us. We have an even closer experience of Jesus dwelling in our hearts. We have to pay attention to our thoughts and feelings, our daydreaming, the people who accompany us in our daily life, in scripture and the sacraments, and the sacred moments of both silence and communal prayer. In the milieu of our daily experience, the Lord speaks to us. Attentiveness to God’s voice reveals the ways as well we try to muffle God’s voice (significant screen time, over-working, etc.). Regardless of the ways we resist, the Jesus gazes upon us with love and invitation, patiently waiting for us to follow him.
What are the ways you are attentive to the experience of grace in your daily life? What are your unhelpful habits of distraction?