Vocation? Life choices?

Tags: vocation, life choice, career, saint

The beginning of any year and the three-quarter mark seem to be points when people think of making a new start, changing jobs or thinking about starting one, or the course of studies they'll take up, which may well influence career choice. A friend of mine has made the law her career and it is also her vocation. Listening to her talk of what she does for young offenders convinces me that the law is her vocation also. Vocation (with its Latin root in call) is somethiing more than a career.

Perhaps we could  think of vocation as the who I am with and how, two questions underpinned by a why. The what of our lives might well be the job or the career, as well as and the when and how the particular vocation shape is expressed in action. For me, being brother is the who and how of my vocation. St Marcellin would say to his early disciples (brothers only at that time) that to become a brother is to become a saint. A daunting challenge indeed.

I like to phrase it a little differently: to become a brother is to walk alongside the saints! Most of the saints I know are not popes or priests or religious. No, they are widows or widowers made so by death or separation; parents struggling with adolescents becoming adults; young people struggling to stand up for the values learned in their family against peer pressure to conform; single people wondering how they fit in a church so focused on family; public servants faithful to their baptismal call in systems that ridicule faith, especially if it is Christian. These are just some of the saints I know. To be brother then, for me, is to be like Jesus: intent on the God-search (with all people of faith), living in community which supports the God-search and encounter, and that spills out, for Marist Brothers at least, into compassion and love for young people, especially those on the edges.

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