There is a popular myth among devout Catholics (mostly women volunteers doing church work) that if you are single, intelligent, devout to some extent, and interested in the church activities, you have a vocation as a priest or religious. These vocation hunters (vultures or some other predatory noun may be too unpleasant to use) think they are doing the Holy Spirit's good work as they rant about and gossip about one or another's sons or brothers, boyfriend or stranger they just met, and astutely believe they can smell when one has such a vocation or not. It is a mystery of contradictions that in the same breadth or a few conversations later, they could abrogate their earlier confession. Very Islamic theologically, and less Christian influence of sort.
The truth is that vocations being a very personal call from God to the individual is both pre-destined as well as the co-operative action of human free will. And even if one's soul received that grace of God's primitive voice harking into the depths of the human heart and mind, as if haunting the spirit of the person until one yields, there are just very few such pre-destined souls even in Scripture to speak of. Remember that the Psalmist is certain about the pre-destination of God's grace, but not of man's response.
The idea of finding's one voice (voce, Latin), and the real root of the word (vocare, to call, in Latin) harked to Jesus inference in the Gospels of labourers being called to the fields by the Lord of the harvest (Luke 10:2). I like to think that it is both voce and vocare, the call and the voice that seeks to respond.
One responds according to our humanity, whether this is strengthened by upbringing and fervour, or because one asks the question interiorly and then seeks out the answer. My own upbringing did not lack fervour, but it lacked emotional stability from familial strength. The relationships I witnessed from my earliest youth was that of estrangement in the family: an abusive father, a distressed mother, and brothers who for the most part abandoned any interest in their siblings. Certainly I found strength in personal independence, but there was always going to be a longing for dependence, the affirmation of friendship and acknowledgement of giftedness and ability.
Therefore, I was not to know then - but understand it much now with the clarity of hindsight - that these were instigated in my soul by God to draw me on a spiritual journey because of the errors and other failings that were to alay my path in the decades ahead. In that sense, I can appreciate the pre-destination of a higher power. I can imagine my life if I was brought up atheist, or Buddhist, for example, and of the sort of ideas which would have enveloped and shaped my approach to life and interaction with the world. I could not imagine the violence that would have precipitated, though.
I cannot say that my own disquietened soul benefitted in such a way that I was to be wholly peaceable and gentle; no, I think that my person was bred from some sort of violence at conception and throughout my own rearing, there was always abuse and physical violence. There was just a great deal of unresolved distress which permeated the environs; of course, that exists because of the denial by those involved in its creation in the first place, even to this day.
Therefore, the call I received was to a personal relationship with God in an intimate way, rather than those who's call was a gift of the grace of charity, where they could instinctively see Christ in the person of others as a reality, as Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola and Catherine Laboure, and all the saints did. I think anyone who receives this grace of charity is called to serve the Lord in a sacramental as well as missionary way, within the actual life of the Church. For me, it was like wearing the inside of the garment outside. I was called to love the Lord, in order that I would stay alive within the Church. I was called, to be saved.
Protestant Christians have completely misunderstood this particular difference in how the Lord called for labourers and the call for sinners to repentance and salvation. They defined incorrectly that the garment of salvation is the same garment of priesthood of the victim. The garments washed white by the blood of the Lamb is what we all professed Christians wear; the office of the apostles is not preached by any of the apostles as the good news per se. Instead, what was preached, was the message of salvation, not of priesthood, which is that of Christ, shared by these apostles by their appointment (laying of hands).
It is that presbyterian and espiscopalian office which I never had to aspire to, or feel it was to be worn by me as if destined by some divine order. It could have been a choice, but not one which instinctively I would be drawn to because of grace. Never for one moment in my life can I say that I see Christ in my neighbour with that sort of clarity the saints describe. Instead, I can say more easily when the face of that which is unspeakable makes its presence felt before me. (This is true for instance when a mentally unstable man appeared in front of the school chapel and as he cursed, I felt the need to hold fast to faith. I was 15 then. And as I flipped the Bible at the Chapel's entrance open, it fell on Jeremiah 31:33-34, and those words I read aloud where permanently imprinted on my mind.)
I find it inspiring to read of Mother Teresa of Calcutta who finds Jesus in those desolate and inconsolable, abandoned and in the nadir of life. To that end, the reflection of Catherine of Genoa's life as meditated on and preached by the Pope on 12 January 2011 makes particular sense to me: "We must never forget that the more we love God and remain constant in our prayers, the more we will truly manage to love those around us, because in each individual we will see the face of the Lord, Who loves without limit or distinction".
This mystical awareness of purification of the soul on earth, as experienced by Catherine, expresses the very nature of my own relationship with the Divine Light. She did not see Purgatory "as a place of transit in the depths of the earth: it is not an exterior fire, but an interior fire". Speaking of her experience of Purgatory, Benedict XVI continued, "the soul is aware of God's immense love and perfect justice; as a consequence, it suffers for not having responded to that love perfectly, and it is precisely the love of God Himself which purifies the soul from the ravages of sin".
I did not see Purgatory as a place where souls transit between death and heaven, or limbo as a place either, but a special state of awareness - not intellectual alone, but in spirit - where one senses the perfection of God's Love, and being aware of one's less than perfect state, experiences that Perfection erasing and polishing away the rusticles of imperfection, not just on the surface, but through the whole self.
Yet, in this life, those rusticles of sin grow back fast - especially in those imperfections of habit and associated with the deepest human needs and desires. It is as if the DNA of our spiritual selves have mutated as well. It will take much more than a dousing of love to heal such agonies.
Purgatory therefore was already something the spirit experiences when the soul is not affixed to God by consent and affection. I think the sick and dying experience that sort of purification, which sweetly is often accompanied by consolation at the final moments. In some cases, perhaps not, and one does not know the Divine Mind well enough to guess where such destinies lie.
So, I want the matter to rest. I never had a sense of my vocation being directed towards the professed life, or I would have proceeded out of my own will. Instead, the call I felt was that of God saving me from any despair a soul might feel if it was abandoned by its Lover. And as for the current trials in my own life, these are part of my own mystical joy too - knowing that only through the intensity of absence, and of spiritual trust, can I find the sweet assurance of Providence at work in my life.
