Discernment is always grave…

Julie at Happy Catholic points to two discernment stories, one of a young man discerning a call to the priesthood, (I remember falling to my knees, and thinking, “Oh no, you want me to be a priest!”) and the other of The Internet Monk’s call to be a preacher, (It was, I’m convinced, the great mistake of my life.)

These are two very powerful reads, and I am posting them on a Sunday because I think it is useful for us to remember, as we head in and out of church and go about our business, that priests, ministers, rabbis and preachers do not live easy lives. If they take their vocations seriously, this great calling to serve the Lord by tending his sheep, that means they work hard, they give up much, and they take on the difficult yoke of living the life of “the necessary other.” A perpetual outsider, not living quite the same lives the rest of us lead.

All too often, we ask our priests and pastors to pray for us, but we forget to whisper up a heartfelt prayer for them, too, not just for them in their work, but in their family lives, in their weariness, in their loneliness or doubt. For their intentions. For their souls.

I have long maintained that saying “yes” to the Lord is not something to be done in a moment of emotion or religious fever – I’m not talking about conversion. Sometimes an emotional vulnerability allows precisely the opening the Holy Spirit needs to whoosh in and give us a prompting toward humility which lands us on our knees, if we choose to heed it. It allows the heart to be opened enough for Love to creep in.

But offering oneself to be of use to the Lord should never be done lightly, for it is a grave offer. If you make the offer – if you, in gratitude or thanksgiving, or simply in fervent love – say “Lord, I love you, and yes, I want to serve you however you will use me…” be prepared to be taken up on it, and to be used, and used fully. To be fully used up. Yahweh is no God-of-half-measures, and if through the inspiration of the Spirit one feels inclined to make such an offering of oneself, one needs to understand – the Spirit is not inspiring you to make the gift, “just for today,” or “for as long as it is fun, or easy.”

We see this all the time – I think in some ways John Paul the Great is the perfect example of one who pledged himself to God and found himself used so thoroughly that by the time he died, there was truly nothing left for him to give. Ditto Billy Graham. Ditto Mother Theresa, and Teresa of Lisieux, and Cardinal John O’ Connor and so many others who, like the very first Chrisitians and Apostles, completely submitted to the Lord and allowed themselves to be used until they were used up. God CONSUMED them, body and soul, in a sort of terrible beauty. A “reverse Holy Communion” so to speak, wherein rather than Christ being consumed by them, they were consumed by him.

The idea of the consumer being consumed is not really so startling. Faith itself is a gift. The burning need to serve is also a gift, one the Spirit gives to you – one you give back to God in return. St. Paul tells us that a gift, once given by God, is irrevocable; it is always there. But sometimes we frail humans lose touch with it, or forget that our “gift” or wish to give to God came first, via a gift of faith. I think there can be perhaps nothing so difficult as believing and yet being weary, being called and yet feeling unworthy or unfit for the job. We forget that ministry in Christ (both ordained or lay) is never about worthiness, for none of us are worthy: it is wholly about WILLINGNESS. I recall reading something recently, an old article on President George W. Bush, which recounted that he – upon becoming Christian – asked the Lord to use him. While we see everyday all the people who doubt his “worthiness,” his willingness is another story. He certainly seems like a man who is in the process of being fully used…consumed.

I wonder how many of us are really willing to endure it – the consumption of Christ?

God gives the gift of faith, some folks give it back in service. God tells us “take and consume,” some give their lives back in return, saying, “Lord, take and consume,” it is an endless give-and-take, and a very great mystery of love.

It is not easy to be a man or woman of God, to live a vowed and consecrated life, regardless of whether that consecration involves a celibate life lived in community, or in a humble rectory, or in a hermitage, or a life lived in chaste marriage. In each case, the life is busy with the Work of God, and somehow – even perhaps with the hermit – the supernatural must balance with the natural, the charity to which we are called will be challenged by our fellows, by our feelings, by the times and by our own tempraments.

Today, perhaps take five minutes to sit quietly and hold in prayer your priest, your pastor or someone else you may know of who has made the grave offering of not merely “loving” God, but of “being poured out like a libation” for the benefit of his or her fellow sheep, in service to a passionate and intensely loving God who uses up every last inch on a spool of thread and wears down every pencil to its nub, so that nothing is wasted or cast aside.