A Theology of Vocation

The word "theology" comes from two Greek words: theos and logos, literally, a word or discourse (logos) about God (theos). The classical Western definition is fides quaerens intellectum: faith-seeking understanding. The hu-man mind applies itself diligently and persistently to the data of faith, seeking to understand it more fully by reflec-tion, analysis, and synthesis. The great medieval summae sought to gather all of theology, an analytic synthesis of the whole of the revelation, into one coherent ordering.

A voice from the earlier monastic tradition speaks a little differently: “The theologian is the one who prays. If you truly pray, you are a theologian.” We immediately notice that the father of the desert, Evagrius Ponticus, does not speak of an abstract science of theology, but of the con-crete person, the theologian. Theology is not primarily something to be written out in books but is a living reality in the human mind and heart. The heart is especially to be emphasized. For theology is the science of God, knowl-edge and understanding of God. And God, like any per-son, is really known only by the one who loves him. Love knowledge, as Saint Thomas Aquinas and William of Saint Thierry - both echoing the tradition and our own personal experience - tell us, goes far beyond the reaches of the analyzing intellect.

The patristic approach also underlines another reality: the real presence of God in all, and everything. We cannot think about or examine God or the things of God as if He were not personally and dynamically present. It is He who personally makes these facts present to us here and now and, from within, enlivens us to respond to them. All is from Him, both objectively and subjectively. Under the impulse of His grace we respond to His Revelation. It should be a response not to His Revelation as something apart from Him, but to Him in His Revelation now presenting Himself to us in that Revelation. In other words, prayer. The theologian, in the truest sense - the one who responds to the Revelation and studies it as it truly is - is the one who prays.

Let us take a few minutes, then, to be theologians in this sense and prayerfully consider some of the data of Revelation, which speak of call.

As mentioned before, our essential and basic call comes in creation itself: God said" Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves." The Fathers have pointed out that we were originally made in both the image, and the likeness of God. The image involves our essential nature, which gives us the capacity to be elevated to know and love God; the likeness is a thing of grace, a participa-tion in the divine nature, by which we actually do know and love God, as He knows and loves Himself, as a friend. The image cannot be lost as long as we exist. The likeness can be. This call to friendship and intimacy, expressed by God in the very creative act (the human race was created in grace) was rejected by the Father of our race. This same call is re-expressed to each one of us in Christ in our baptism, which is both an expression of the call, a re-creation, and a response to it on our parts as we accept baptism. All the rest of our Christian life is a living-out of the response. All other calls to us are calls to live out this call in particular ways.

Adam said "no" to the initial call to the human family to live in grace and friendship with God. His descendants reechoed this "no" again and again in many ways. But an inexhaustible love will not be put off. God called and called and calls again.

Then God said to Noah. “Come out of the ark. You yourself, your wife, your sons, and your sons’ wives with you:”

The human family is called forth out of the destructive flood of sin. Sin is washed away. A renewed life is expressed. We can begin again as a race called to divine friendship.

Yahweh said to Abram. “Leave your country, your family and your father’s house, for the land I will show you. I will make you a great nation: I will bless you and make your name so famous it will be used us a blessing.”

God's calling goes on. He reaches out to particular individuals, but in the service of a people, and ultimately all people. God called Abraham to be in some way a friend. He visited him repeatedly and spoke with him: Shall I conceal from Abraham what I am going to do? And he called him to be the father of his people.

God reached out to a sinful race which was suffering for its sin and step by step prepared the way for not only liberation but a renewed call to intimacy. It was a long slow process where first an awesome God evoked a fearful and hopeful response that enabled His people to break away from their fleshpots.

God called to him from the middle of the bush. "Moses. Moses!" He said. "Come no nearer. Take off your shoes, for the place on which you stand is holy ground. I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." At this Moses covered his face, afraid to look at God.

Ordinarily when we first perceive God in a personal way calling us in faith, we are convicted of our own sinfulness and uncleanness, our unworthiness to approach, to be close, to have communication with the All Holy. The initial experience of God's call usually creates within us a fear. We say with Isaiah:

What a wretched state I am in! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips and 1 live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have looked at the King. Yahweh Sabaoth.

But God, one way or another, reaches out to us, to heal this, to prepare and renew us for the mission and ultimately the intimacy He wants for us.

Then one of the seraphs flew to me (Isaiah) holding in his hand a live coal, which he had taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. With this he touched my mouth and said: “See now, this has touched your lips, your sin is taken away, your iniquity is purged.”

We have then the courage to hear and respond to the call:

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying: “Whom shall I send? Who will be our messenger?” I answered. “Here I am, send me.”

If we are tempted to say with Jeremiah: Oh, Lord Yahweh; look, 1 do not know how to speak: I am a child, yet we begin to realize the truth of the words of Yahweh:

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you came to birth I consecrated you; I have appointed you as....

Divine predilection is evident in the Old Covenant and in the New. Years before God called out from the sanctuary: “Samuel, Samuel,” He spoke through the heart of the Prophet's mother, Hannah: I will give him to Yahweh for the whole of his life and no razor shall ever touch his head; and he confirmed it in the prayer of his priest, Eli: May the God of Israel grant what you have asked of him. As the fullness of time approached, God’s action was more immediate and clearer:

Then there appeared to him (Zachariah) the angel of the Lord, standing on the right of the altar of incense. The sight disturbed Zachariah and he was overcome with fear. But the angel said to him. “Zachariah do not be afraid, your prayer has been heard. Your wife, Eliza-beth is to bear you a son and you must name him John. He will be your joy and delight and many will rejoice at his birth for he will bring back many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah, he will go before him to turn the hearts of fathers -toward their children and the disobedient back to the wisdom that the virtuous have, preparing for the Lord a people fit for him.”

If old Zachariah had his doubts hearing a prophetic word, even in hearing the very call, we too can have difficulty in discerning the Lord’s voice.

Once again Yahweh called. “Samuel! Samuel!” Samuel got up and went to Eli and said. “Here I am since you called me.” He replied. “I did not call you, my son; go back and lie down.” Samuel had as yet no knowledge of Yahweh and the word of Yahweh had not yet been revealed to him. Once again Yahweh called, the third time. He got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am, since you called me.” Eli then understood that it was Yahweh who was calling the boy and he said to Samuel. “Go and lie down, and if someone calls say, ‘Speak, Yahweh, your servant is listening.’” So Samuel went and lay down in his place. Yahweh then came and stood by, calling as he had done before. . .

From this passage we learn a number of things. If we are rightly disposed, like Samuel, to respond to all legitimate calls from the Lord, whether they come directly or indirectly, even if we repeatedly seem to make mistakes or actually do make them in the process of discernment and turn even repeatedly in the wrong directions, an untiring God will keep calling until we find our way. God called Samuel four times! This passage also highlights the importance of the role of the spiritual father. Even such an obtuse and poor man of God as the priest Eli was in the end, by God’s grace given in response to the humble faith of his disciple, able to help Samuel to discern and respond to his call. He gave Samuel the necessary direction so that Samuel was able to respond to God.

The calls we find in the Bible include two dimensions: First, there is the call to “the individual which is meant to lead to a growing personal union with God. Abram became Abraham from whom God could not conceal secrets, whom God will love forever. He was called the friend of God. Moses, if at first awed and stripped before God, was led up into the cloud and was allowed to see the very glory of God even if only in passing. Yahweh would speak with Moses face to face, as a mall speaks with his friend. Again and again God defended him against the jealousy of the others, and eventually took him mysteriously to himself. David, despite his repeated sins, was God’s beloved and Yahweh his God was with him. In the fullness of time God-become-man would speak to us all as friends: To you my friends, I say. . . I shall not call you servants any more, because a servant does not know his master’s business; I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have learned from my Father.

At the same time, the call to friendship, to intimacy, is also a call to be one with God in the work of salvation, to be with Him in bringing his people to fullness. Abraham was to father them, Moses to liberate them, David to shepherd them, the disciples of Jesus to fill up what is wanting in the passion of Christ for the redemption and glorification of all. We are called to serve. No servant is greater than his master, no messenger is greater than the man who sent him. The Son of man came not to be ministered unto but to minister. We are called to serve. Yet god does not merely use us as servants, as instruments. In the serving we find our own glorification. Christ descended for us and for our salvation. For us He died and rose and ascended. Yet no one received as much glory from His mission as did He Himself. We are called to serve that we might be glorified. It is because we are friends that god wants us to be partakers in His salvific mission and glorification. Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, so that they may always see the glory you have given me.

Another aspect of vocation, of being called, that is very clear from the Scriptures is our freedom to say “no.” Adam and Eve said “no” to the exigencies of divine friendship. Repeatedly their descendants were slow or remiss in their response:

I hear my Beloved knocking.
“Open to me, my sister, my love,
My dove, my perfect one,
For my head is covered with dew,
My locks with the drops of night.”
“I have taken off my tunic.
Am I to put it on again?
I have washed my feet,
Am I to dirty them again?”

When Israel was a child I loved him, and I called my son out of Egypt. But the more I called to them, the further they went from me. . .

The Son of God filled with maternal compassion would lament: How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you refused.

God calls and we are free, free to follow:

“Come and see” Jesus replied; and so they (John and Andrew) went. . . .

My Beloved thrust his hand
Through the opening in the door;
I trembled to the core of my being.
Then I rose
To open to my Beloved. . .

And free to refuse:

. . . then come, follow me (Christ Jesus). But when the young man heard these words he went away sad, for he was a man of great wealth.

There is certainly a sadness in saying “no.” There is a sadness for the one saying “no” to something beautiful. This is true even when it is to embrace something else even more beautiful. It is all the more true when it is said in order to retain something less worthy or the choice of material goods over a special expression of friendship with God. It is sad, too, for Jesus who looked steadily at him and loved him.

But the Lord, our God, is persistent in His call. Right up to the end, in the very last book of the Revelation, the Amen, the faithful, the true witness, the ultimate source of God’s creation says: Look, I am standing at the door, knocking. If one of you hears me calling and opens the door, I will come in to share his meal, side by side with him, the meal of our love. For He wants to share with us ultimately his very oneness with the Father:

Those who prove victorious I will allow to share my throne, just as I was victorious myself and took my place with my Father on his throne.

Thus we hear in listening to the Scripture that God does call each and every one by creation and that we remain radically free to refuse or accept his call. Not put off by our refusals, God repeatedly calls us to re-creation. This call of His is always a call to both intimacy and service so that we might more fully share in His glory.

And thus His call is always present. If anyone has ears to hear, let him listen to what the Spirit is saying. . . .