Posted on 05/26/2006 11:40:33 AM PDT by Teófilo
How does receiving "the call" feel like? How does one know this is "the call"?
As many of you know already, I have been admitted to the diaconate program in my home diocese. I'm not even yet a "candidate," not a "student," perhaps the right term would an "aspirant" or "discerner." Call it what you want, what it is an open door to something Big. How did I get here? The deeper question is this:
How do I know that God is calling me to serve him in formal, active ministry?
I need to answer this question to myself and in the process, answer it for all of you. I feel I can't do anything else until I do.
People want to know about the "mechanics" of God's call. They are curious about it. What's the form and shape of this "call" that moves the receiver to respond to it without delay?
I reason that there are four principal components of this "call" and they are: aptitude, discernment, conviction, and confirmation.
Aptitude
"Aptitude" may be further broken down into ability, skill, talent, gift, capacity, fitness, propensity to do something. These all proceed from God, either directly from him through infusion, or through secondary causes such as design, upbringing, study, and experience.
"Infusion" means that God himself may instill, impart, fill, and suffuse his elected soul with the actual or sanctifying graces necessary to the active ministry. These gifts or charisms God grants freely to the soul he calls to the ministry. Most of them remain hidden in potency in one's inner spiritual and psychic faculties, blossoming only when the elected servant recognizes God's call and responds to it.
Central to this "infusion" is the supernatural gifts of faith, love, and charity. Their cultivation by parents and, when grown, by oneself, is central to the elected soul's ultimate orientation which is to God and to His service.
"Design" refers to the natural abilities that we inherit from our parents, such as intelligence, stamina, personality. "Upbringing' is tightly tied to these natural, inherited abilities since through education and the instilment of values our upbringing shapes and form the direction of our personality and activates our "goal-seeking" consciousness. Lastly, once the elected soul has become an adult person, he or she may rely on further experience to increase their spiritual, intellectual, or material reservoirs in order to build one's own faith in the service of others.
Discernment
"Discernment" is the process to answer the question: What do I do now? The elected soul understands that she has been adorned with a series of supernatural and natural gifts, asking herself what good they are for if these gifts are kept hidden, underutilized, or denied. The discernment process may be long or short, depending mostly on one's response to grace and on God's own "schedule" for a given person. For me, it was long and painful, because it entailed the partial purification of my judging faculty from several sinful distractions. These "distractions" tend to bury one's judgment under several layers of conflicting "passions." In close cooperation with God's free grace, one has to work clear these layers of ashes, enough to uncover one's hidden attributes, talents, graces, and spiritual powers that will help the intellect to judge.
Discernment ends at the moment one is ordained, or made perpetual vows in religious life. Yet, in the course of the process, discernment slowly yields to conviction and conviction to confirmation.
Discernment is a group effort. The purpose of the group effort is to help the elected soul to avoid self-delusion. There's nothing worst in the quest for discernment than to convince oneself that one is being called by God to do something when, in reality, He isn't. Sometimes we confuse our own voice with God's; sometimes the Devil, the enemy of God and of every human being poses as God. To fall in either trap presupposes a lack of honesty, self-introspection, and an attachment to conceit.
Hence, it is imperative that a supporting, discerning community forms around the elected soul in order to "discern" together. This discerning community acts on behalf of the Church and in the Church's name, to the point that it will not be wrong to say that the Church is the one "discerning" the elected soul's calling. Without discernment, there's no conviction and no confirmation. Discernment flows through these to the final attainment of holy orders or perpetual profession.
Without discernment, a religious vocation, once formalized, could turn itself into a veritable torture for the person who attempts to live it outside of God's call. It might devolve into personal sin, scandal, or separation from God and others, if not detected early and not prudently guided by prudent spiritual directors.
Conviction
If there's a moment in which I could say "I heard the call" that was the moment of "conviction." Or may be we could call it the moment of "recognition."
"Conviction" doesn't occur in a vacuum. At increasingly conscious levels one may have been thinking about it for a long time. Then, as it happened to me, everything came together in one single, "luminous" moment of certainty.
No, I heard no voices, at least not externally. There were no "lights," angels singing, levitations, nothing preternatural or supernatural occurred. As it happened, I was driving. Yes, I had religious music playing in the background, a tune by John Michael Talbot but I don't remember which. The "experience" eclipsed it. There are no words adequate to describe the "experience" but I shall give it a try.
It was a moment "frozen" in time, a second that lasted hours and yet it was only one second. It was a moment of complete certainty and oceanic understanding of everything. It was an immersion in a Presence whose words reverberated through my inner being, saying, "Yes, I am calling you to serve me as a deacon, now, and every mountain shall be flattened and every road straightened until you achieve. Do not be afraid, for I am with you." In that second I had the certainty that everything was possible, that solutions existed for every problem, every obstacle to the goal, that the universe was harmonious from the largest conglomerates of galaxies to the most hidden atoms and quanta and that in that ocean of creation I was loved, uniquely loved.
I had entered kairos, God's moment, God's time, God's will that this was bound to happen "now" and, like He had already demonstrated, not before, and definitely not outside the Catholic Church. The last embers of self-will regarding the matter of timing and location of my religious vocation have been extinguished by God. A new fire was to be set off, by His hand.
Some of this I knew at the time, some of it I didn't, but the awareness developed later.
The "experience" yielded to a "feeling" of joy and warmth that slowly dissipated as the weariness of my travel set in. Then it was gone. Though I was not utterly "transformed," say, like Saul of Tarsus was on his way to Damascus, I was left with the distinct conviction that something was not quite the same within me, that a line against evil had been clearly drawn within my soul, but not by me, not through my own will. Someone else drew that line within me between darkness and light.
All this happen in that "one second," and I assure you that it did happen in space and time. The date was December 2nd, 2005. I recorded the event in my personal journal four days later, on December 6th.
Now, I am not claiming any special revelation, nor any special status for myself. All I am saying is that this is what happened, this is how it felt to me. Its authenticity still needs to be examined, tested, evaluated, not only by my team of "discerners," but also by myself. What I have is a quiet, joyful confidence that everything will turn out right, however it ends.
Confirmation
"Confirmation" is the perception that every event, every road, every person leads me toward that goal. It is the thoughtful, happy nod the elected soul gets from her spiritual advisers; it is the pleasant interaction one gets from friends, acquaintances, and evaluators; it is the "I will follow you wherever you go, whatever you do" one receives from one's spouse; it is the enthusiasm with which the "discerners" bestow on the candidate that tells the elected soul that someone else hears God calling her for service.
"Confirmation" is the food of faith; as the word means "to strengthen," confirmation consists on those events, big or small, that the Lord sets on the road to completion which the elected soul, now more attuned to God's will, recognizes as milestone on the way to answer the call. For those of us who are weak in faith, little "confirmations" occur almost every day; for those more advanced souls, more experienced in the life of faith, these little external remainders do not occur as often and yet, these souls remain happy, serene, at peace with themselves and the world, confident of their call, having abandoned themselves to the Lord's will with full, childlike confidence.
That's where I find myself, in the threshold of that stage yet it still feels far away. This is the stage in which the whole thing acquires a super-reality to me, where I have become conscious of my complete unworthiness. I am standing at Mount Nebo, looking into the Promised Land, afraid the suffering that future combats will bring me as I conquer this new land of the spirit. I have crossed the Red Sea and the desert; is there more desert, thirst, and suffering ahead? Probably. Am I ready to face them? No, but in Jesus I can do anything.
Pray for me that I can come from the mountain and walk, without fear, decisively, to the Promised Land of my diaconal vocation.
Thank you all for your prayers and best wishes so far.
PING!
great article -- and Congratulations!
I added the following lines to the "confirmation" section of the post:
Finally, "confirmation" is to hear the bishop's voice saying "yes, indeed you have a vocation." The voice of the bishop is the voice of the Church saying "yes, you're called." Without the bishop's "yes," there's no call from the Lord to serve the local Church in this capacity.
It was an unintentional oversight!
-Theo
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