Discerning God's Will: A Journey of the Heart
At the beginning of October 2005, I professed First Promises as a 22-year-old postulant for the Christian Brothers. I committed the next year of my life to live according to the vows of a lay religious order and the Rule of its French founder, St. John Baptist de La Salle. A man with an acute sense of God's providence, St. La Salle was not much older than me when he made it his purpose, in the spirit of Christian charity, to serve the educational needs of the poor. Inspired by the possibility of making this call my own as I had seen my teachers, mentors, and friends do as Christian Brothers, I decided to take a chance, to step into what American Catholic novelist Walker Percy coined, the "zone of possibility."
It is in this zone that I have found myself progressing, albeit precariously, into what I'll call a "zone of purpose" or "zone of meaning" founded upon faith. In this exploration of faith, I am slowly discovering that my own will to meaning is nestled deeply within God's will, the God in whose likeness I was made, and whose love I was called to share in baptism with my brothers and sisters in Christ.
To say it simply: I am discerning my vocation, a call that echoed down from the mountaintop of my heart's desire to live fully and travel freely as a Christian pilgrim.
That said, I'd like to share with you my reflection on what it means to discover God's call for all of us to live a life of holiness. My journey to discover, filled with its own set of obstacles, has as its map a set of values I have learned in dialogue with God through people, prayer, the sacraments, and service.
Needless to say, I have much more to learn, and whatever I do say is a mere paraphrase of what has already been voiced by the prophets.
Vocation as journey, journey as meaning
Discerning God?s call for us, as individuals, puts us on the road. We do not have to look too far beyond the signposts of our unique personal experience?or those of the saints?to understand this either.
To quote psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor, Viktor Frankl, "Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment." Highlighting the singularity of our individual calling in life, he adds, "Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated."
Realizing our unique vocations in life requires that we face a certain challenge to journey through pastures of paradox, land marked by mountains of tension that stand between our own weaknesses and strengths, our failures and successes, our doubts and faith, and our suffering and redemption. Discernment makes us treasure seekers who must cross those thresholds of our existence with the hope and peace only God can guarantee as our bounty.
My older brother, who is a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, put it to me this way when I confided in him at the beginning of this semester: "God motivates us with desire, and his will brings peace and joy."
In my own transition to this new life as a Brother, I am slowly realizing that his advice is to be trusted. For the journey of discernment truly is inspired by our restlessness and fueled by our desire. Essentially, our souls will always be afflicted by this longing to understand the ineffable mystery of our merciful God who is both transcendent, yet immanent; beyond us, yet in us.
Ultimately, this adventure makes of us pilgrims set on a path to find God by way of self-discovery, of opening ourselves up to the love within us and the endless possibilities to which that love can lead us. It is this love that gives us a will to meaning, and in that will we find God's. When we finally respond to this love, we experience what St. Augustine meant when he said, "My soul is restless until it rests in you."
A guide for the journey
It is important to remember that, as Christians, we do not enter this arena of possibility alone.
I remember having a conversation over dinner with a priest-friend of mine in Baltimore. Somewhere in the midst of our exchange, he expressed his desire to write a book. And in that book, he would discuss the "the moral imperative" or, more plainly, the Christian's call to holiness.
His overall theme, he said, could be summed up by the simple phrase: "God meets us where we are." I think he is right. For, we have Christ as our constant guide at all stages of life, stages that bring us into relationship with the other.
By actively engaging ourselves in prayer and scriptural reflection we learn what we must do to enter the journey and thus "take up the cross" to follow Christ who meets us in his mercy for us, which is God's. And by the same token, we learn whom to trust in taking up this cross as Christ did with Simon.
A great friend of mine, who is also a Christian Brother, eulogized a deceased Brother with a beautiful poem on the nature of Christian friendship. He wrote, "the weight of his hand on / your shoulder lightened / the weight you carried," adding, "Not a / thing up his sleeve but / Love."
This is a love we read about in the Gospels, written in the words of humans just as vulnerable to loneliness and weakness as we are. It is the framework against which we define ourselves and become scaffolds of support for the other. Love serves as the gauge by which we should measure our existence and by which we are empowered to discover our vocation, which is at once our meaning and our purpose in life.
Whether we find this purpose in the single life, vowed religious life, or the married life we are all called as Christians to live within the same framework of holiness bestowed upon us by Christ in the Beatitudes.
For instance, my own experience of love has aroused in me a greater appreciation for brotherhood and camaraderie as a family member, classmate, teacher, friend, boyfriend, and co-worker. These relationships subsequently sparked my desire to embrace the mission instituted by a young French priest over 350 years ago in France. It is a mission inspired by Christ's Gospel message of love, a love that asks us to be an advocate and brother.
It is our ultimate vocation then, with whatever we decide to do, to act out of charity, of compassion, and of peace. And when we pray, when we participate in the sacraments, and when we read from scripture we must interpret these events through a theology of love that understands the reality of war, of violence, and of poverty but chooses to act on it in a spirit of peace, of nonviolence, and of generosity to the less fortunate.
God's call brings us into service and is answered by our lived response to those challenging questions of faith and identity: Who am I? How can I come to know myself? In trying to know myself, what can I pinpoint as the greatest of my heart's desires. Then, how can I grow beyond myself? And how can I be a model of Love?
Living an imaginative reality
When I was on a vocation retreat back in January of this year, a fellow Christian Brother told me that my goal in discernment should be this: to live by way of an imaginative reality. By this he meant that our imagination teaches us to visualize how we see ourselves and others in God. Really, how we see God in everything.
Imagination is the key that opens the doors of our hearts to the sacramental life, a life of poetic vision which sees all things through the lens of Divine Providence. It is this sense of imagination that led St. La Salle to proclaim, "God be blessed!" and, "Lord, the work is yours!"
Our imagination also engages our ability to be creative as God is and thus let God work through us. Through our human creativity rooted in imagination, we find the means of conceptualizing God through language and metaphor so that God becomes less of a divine abstraction and more of a human reality. It is through this imaginative reality, that God's will becomes real in our own lives, and we can thus concretize the stuff of visions and desires.
In my own visions, I often saw myself teaching in front of a classroom (even wearing the religious habit) or praying in community. In order to make them a reality, or see if they could become a reality, I decided to take the next best step, relatively speaking, and join the Christian Brothers, a community of teachers whom I have always admired.
Imagining myself as one of them led me to enjoin the possibility of the future with the reality of now and therefore transform my vision into something more tangible.
The uncertainty of the future is both a source of anxiety and excitement as I plan for what could be. As far as joining the Christians Brothers is concerned, I feel as though I need to try things out. There's no use musing about the future anymore; it's time to live in the certainty of the present despite the general ambivalence I may feel.
I know that my vocation, more than any set mode of living, is that life which will allow me the freedom to be of greatest service to God's love in and through myself and others. Right now, I feel a desire to enter into community with other like-minded men in the spirit of Christ nurtured by the tradition of St. La Salle.
It is my hope that I find happiness as a Brother in community with other Brothers. It is my hope that I might serve the needs of those less fortunate than me though this way of life. It is my hope that I find some virtue in all that I do.
In looking back and moving forward, it is easy to get caught up in how we want to, or thought we had been able to control our own reality in order to achieve greatness. But the thing to remember is a phrase I stumbled across in a novel: God is the sole worker of realities.
Understanding and living that idea has been the biggest challenge for me along the way. This is especially true in light of all the pressures to succeed in society while discerning a vocation to a life lived in a liminal space, anchored to society's periphery.
And so here I am, trying to piece together all of the random thoughts about a life of Christian holiness, a life to which I aspire because, like the rest of us, I want meaning. I want purpose. I want to know that my humanity stands for something greater than myself.
Answering God's call is ultimately an acceptance of this humanity, a brokenness mended by the strands of meaning and purpose we find in each of life's concrete situations. In the end, it is this fruitful sense of meaning sewn and reaped in the rugged terrain of our existence which gives us the power to say, I believe or better still, I love you and will therefore dedicate my life to you.
