Call

A Grace for This Week:

 To respond enthusiastically to Christ’s call to join him in building up the Kingdom of truth and love, justice and peace on earth.

Call

Opening ourselves to gratitude shows us that there is a call built right into our human being, as children of God, formed in God’s own image and likeness, in community with one another as brothers and sisters, and charged with stewardship for our world.  Opening ourselves to healing shows us how, at some long past time in our history, that call was frustrated, and the power of its attractiveness became lost on us.  Developing a relationship of friendship and love with Jesus enables us to rediscover God’s image and likeness within ourselves, and this leads us to want to share God’s love with others.  Turning to our fellow human beings in solidarity reawakens in us the gift of the other and the joy of working with a shared purpose toward a common good.  It is within the framework of these experiences that we seek to be able to look and listen for—and hopefully respond generously to—a possible new call of God coming to us today in the course of our lives and work.

The call has come down through the corridors of our faith history, from Abraham, Moses, and the prophets through John the Baptist, Mary, and Jesus himself, through the apostles and saints, down to us.  Many of these calls, as recorded in scripture and tradition, were accompanied by signs and wonders: voices from heaven, a burning bush, seraphim, angels, the Holy Spirit appearing at Jesus’s baptism, St. Paul temporarily blinded on the road to Damascus (being knocked off his horse comes from popular lore but expresses the sense of disruption that the one called often feels).  Yet the voice of God can also be intimate.  Perhaps we might consider the first call to have come as soon as humankind took the first step away from God.  After eating the apple and rupturing their seamless relationship with God, Adam and Eve hid from him in shame and fear.  But God came looking, calling out to them, “Where are you?”  God called the first humans out of their sin to lead productive lives in the world—despite their sinfulness.  And he has never stopped calling people to the work of caring for his creation and building the loving and just global society that will be the Kingdom of God on earth.

The call asks for a response.  Some say “yes,” some resist it, and some actively oppose it.  Those who say “yes” find that it gives their lives meaning and fills them with the quiet joy of living fully.  Though it may not be immediately obvious to us, God’s call is always aligned with our deepest desires (since he placed those desires within us to begin with).  Howard Thurman, the Black Baptist minister who mentored many in the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King, Jr., put it this way: “Don’t ask what the world needs.  Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.  Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”  This does not mean that the call leads to a life of pleasure without pain.  Because of the counteraction of sin and evil in the world, the work of building the Kingdom always requires some sacrifice.  It might be the sacrifice of potential wealth or power, for example, or of expectations of what your life would be like or of the approbation of others.  The sacrifice might be to face some fear.  What we can be sure of is that whatever difficulties we encounter in following the call, it will both animate us and, in our deepest selves, give us the “peace that passes all understanding.”

God’s call is offered in and through the historical and social needs and opportunities of a given day as well as through our individual needs and opportunities.  As circumstances vary, so does the call and so too must the response.  Discernment is the process by which we, like Jesus, recognize the voice of God and learn to let it guide us.  In this time of Lent, we pray with special attention to Jesus’s call, because his call is our call.  Different though his historical circumstances were and so the concrete features of his response and mission, the underlying dynamic of the struggle of good and evil for the soul of the world is the same today as it was in first-century Palestine.  In Christ’s role in this struggle we see, we hear, we feel, and we long to embrace the call that God, in Christ, addresses to us today.  Jesus remained true to his call unto death.  As we accompany him to the cross, we are challenged to consider our commitment to our own call.  Entering into Jesus’s passion, we encounter the great love with which he sacrificed his life for us and we pray for that love to form us more fully into loving disciples who seek justice and mercy in our lives and the world around us.

—Christine Szczepanowski, based on A Year of Prayer Guide Book produced by the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus (2005)

A Prayer for the Week:

Divine Instrument

Choosing carefully from among
Several worthy candidates
See how the Master Crafter’s hand
Skillfully balances a wooden reed
Feeling for faults and imperfections
Eying first one side, then the other
Before hollowing out a tube
And repeatedly puncturing holes
To make a flute.

Surely the reed does not appreciate
Being so chosen, cruelly cut and hollowed out
Vainly protesting its suffering and sacrifice
Until that magic moment when
Lifted by gentler hands and held
To gifted lips, the very breath of life
Rushes in to fill an overflow with
Sublime melody.

And so at times it seems with us
When unseen forces strip away
Our dreams, our hopes, our plans
Our deepest selves
And we wonder why and what
It’s all about when even
Prayer itself rings hollow.

But then, ah then, the Spirit
Rushes in to fill our void
Transform our pain
Restore our life
And both music and musician
Dissolve, combine, unite
In God.

–Joseph R. Veneroso, M.M., Maryknoll Magazine (July/August 2018).  Used with permission.