| Cathleen Falsani

Heeding the call is utlimately up to us

Can you have a calling, if nobody else hears it? Or if the right people don’t hear it — the ones handing out the funny collars and the jobs?

It’s a question I’ve been mulling as the Roman Catholic Church and those of us who watch it for a living await the arrival of a Vatican document that is expected to impose a blanket ban against allowing homosexual men to train for the priesthood.

What will happen to those homosexual, celibate men who feel the call of the Holy Spirit to enter the ordained ministry if the church says gays need not apply?

Does their call simply disappear?

Was there never really a call in the first place?

Does the call get put on hold, or transferred to another line — of work, of ministry, of thinking?

Catholicism is hardly the only religious forum where the question of who should or should not be allowed to serve the church in ordained ministry is being debated.

A number of Protestant denominations as well as the worldwide Anglican Communion (prompted by the Episcopal Church in the United States’ consecration of an openly gay man as a bishop in 2003), are all wrestling with similar, divisive issues.

The details vary from church to church, but basically, to me, the debate boils down to a question of calling.

Who has it, how do you hear it, and who has the right to determine whether it’s genuine or not?

For that matter, how does anyone determine God’s will?

The answer is about as clear as a squid-ink souffle.

A gay Catholic priest I know raised a provocative question about God’s will while we were talking about the expected Vatican ban on gay seminarians.

“If you believe God and believe God had a hand in this . . . if the clergy has become this gay, is this not the hand of God?” he said. “Shouldn’t the archbishops and the cardinals and the Holy Father be paying a little bit of attention to what God is doing, as opposed to what they think they ought to be doing?”

An obvious response to his thesis is another question: How do we know it is God’s doing? History is full of things that would seem to be outside God’s will. Slavery, for instance. Or genocide. Not that I’m comparing either to homosexuality. I am not. Not at all. So no scathing e-mails, please.

Frederick Buechner, the novelist and Christian apologist, once said of the ever-elusive calling: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep needs.”

It’s a quotation that is oft repeated on the “discernment” Web page of various denominations, religious orders, and schools of theology. What it means, exactly, is mushy. As it should be, perhaps.

In the mid-1990s, I was a seminarian myself. I was one among the minority of students who were pursuing academic degrees, not divinity degrees, at our Protestant seminary. My calling, I said time and again, was to journalism, not to the ordained ministry.

But plenty of my friends and classmates believed they had heard that peculiar call to devote their lives to God as clergymen and clergywomen.

There were many who clearly had a pastoral gift, a deep yearning to learn more about Scripture, to draw closer to God and help others find that closeness as well. You could see it, a quality that is truly impossible to quantify.

And you also could sense it when it wasn’t there. There were a few seminarians who I wanted to take by the shoulders, shake and say, ‘I beg you, anything else but the ministry. Really. DO SOMETHING ELSE! PLEASE!’ ” They were wounded people who had such deep, sucking holes of emotional and spiritual need that they projected it outward, and sought to help others. It wasn’t a sinister desire. Just a dysfunctional one.

A seminary professor of mine, one who also happened to be a psychologist, said she had seen the same phenomenon when she was in graduate school for psychology, and that it was common in all of the helping professions. Some people who have great wounds themselves want to help others who do, too. Sometimes they can help and they’re brilliant at it. But all too often, it’s a disaster.

We’re all human, we’re all wounded in one way or another, and so all ministers are wounded healers in that sense. But some people haven’t been healed enough to heal others.

It’s figuring that out — who is healthy enough in myriad ways to serve in ordained ministry and who is not — that is the theological hornet’s nest.

Somebody has to be the gatekeeper, and the task often falls to committees made up of, well, people. Their task is, by definition, a human enterprise, and therefore, mistakes can be made.

One of the best analyses of these painfully complicated spiritual conundrums comes from an unlikely source. Minna Proctor, a thirtysomething writer from New York City who describes herself as a “virtuous pagan” — she was reared by a secularly Jewish mother and a lapsed Catholic father, who gave her no religious identity — tackles them with incredible grace and aplomb in her book Do You Hear What I Hear? Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My Father (Viking, 2005).

About five years ago, Proctor’s father, who divorced her mother when Proctor was 9, is remarried and has two young children, announced that he intended to become an ordained Episcopal priest.

The Episcopal church has an elaborate, 45-step process of screening men and women who are interested in becoming priests. When a church committee rebuffed her father, a professor of music theory, during only the third phase of his discernment process, Proctor decided to learn everything she could about calling, ordination and discernment. She wanted to understand her father’s calling, and what it meant when others couldn’t hear it.

“The church should not claim to hear God louder or more clearly when it refuses an applicant who says, ‘God has called me to the priesthood,’ ” Proctor writes. “There’s no point in engaging in a playground shouting match — ‘He did not!’ ‘Did so!’ ‘Did not!’ Did so!’

“In the humble opinion of this virtuous pagan, the church should allow for John Calvin’s critical distinction between the public call of the congregation or the church, and the secret call of which every minister is conscious to himself before God . . . the honest testimony of our heart that we accept the office offered to us.”

With or without a ban on gays, or women, or divorced people, or non-celibates, or evolutionists, or socialists, or whatever the alleged spiritual defect might be, the calls will continue to go out.

Some will be heard, others ignored. Still, the call remains.

What we choose to do with it is, at the end of the day, really up to us.