The word vocation means call, but it remains inextricably linked with the more sensitive meaning of response.

Who can ever repeat the word by which God drew him into Himself? Perhaps a glance, a word, a book, a circumstance … can be recounted, but they are just the framework, the setting: the voice is clear only to those who hear it. It is an invitation to which one can adhere with a gesture, a promise, a letter, a commitment, a religious habit, which can be seen by many.

So we are left with the call and the response, two distinct and free acts affecting different people, relating to each other. Specifically, the caller is God, who first says his “yes” to man, and the respondent is the creature who says his “yes” to Him. Let us pause for a moment, within the context of the Judeo-Christian tradition, considering these two moments of a possible dialogue between God and humanity.

From nothingness God calls into existence and calls what is not there as if it were already there (Cf. Rom. 4:17). He spoke, and there was light, stars, water, earth, living things, and everything was ordered. He spoke, and there was humanity, male and female.

The creative act, both in the narrative of the Yahwist tradition and in that of the Priestly tradition (Cf. Gen 2:4b-3:24 and Gen 1:1-2:4a), though with very different literary genres, takes on the features of a dialogue, in which God’s word becomes reality, vocation existence, relationship existence.

In Genesis chapter 3, “the Lord God called the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?” (Gen 3:9). The creature, who had lived face to face with God in free and full communion, is now hidden and the Lord God is looking for him. A gesture of man’s distrust of God breaks the relationship that permeates the earthly paradise. The call reopens the dialogue and, with a gesture of care, the Lord God calls and establishes a new, personal relationship with man who can turn back to Him. In biblical history, the first vocation in the strict sense is that of Abraham: with him, God manifests that he wants to walk in the history of a people, in proximity with men and women who have specific names and faces. After Abraham, there are the Patriarchs, the Exodus experience. Salvation history continues, studded with people who are called and who, in responding, make a particular mission their own. The historical books, the sapiential texts, the events of the prophets, guard the vocations of men and women who, by their physical and spiritual generativity, prepare for the coming of the Messiah, culminating in the person of John, who announces, “He who comes after me is stronger than I […] he will baptize you in the Holy Spirit” (Mark 1:7-8). Even in the diversity of biblical vocations, there are elements that generally recur. Vocation is a manifestation, an event; the person called receives an invitation and a mission. The call is first and foremost an invitation to a deeper relationship with God. The response is realized in history as the fulfilment of a promise, a mission received.

In the New Testament, God breaks into history by calling Mary to become a mother. It is still the Lord, as in the first Testament, who takes the initiative and without following human logic, offers motherhood to a virgin (cf. Lk. 1:26-27). She will be the mother of a son whom she will name Jesus, the Saviour (cf. Lk 1:31). Mary, full of grace, from whom her relationship with God shines in beauty, is challenged in freedom (cf. Lk 1:34), but she is not left alone; the Lord is with her (cf. Lk 1:28). Mary’s availability becomes service (cf. Lk 1:38), thus the mission revealed to her is fulfilled. In Mary the Word becomes incarnate, she becomes the mother of the Lord (cf. Lk 1:43). With the incarnation, God takes up His abode in a new and definitive way among people. He makes Himself a neighbour. “The Logos, who is with God, the Logos who is God, the Creator of the world, (cf. Jn. 1:1), for whom all things were created (cf. 1:3), who has accompanied and accompanies humanity in history with his light (cf. 1:4-5; 1:9), becomes one among others, takes up residence among us, becomes one of us (cf. 1:14). “[1] In this new relationship, the Word made flesh can say, in a human voice, “follow me.” In all four gospels this invitation recurs. Jesus calls his disciples to follow him and continues, in the Church, to call (and call us), to an ever fuller union with the Father, in the perspective of an ever more perfect charity towards our brothers and sisters.

On the road to Damascus, “the risen Christ appears as a splendid light and speaks to Saul, transforms his thinking and his very life […] This turning point in his life, this transformation of his whole being, was not the fruit of a psychological process, of an intellectual and moral maturation or evolution, but came from outside: it was not the fruit of his thinking, but of his encounter with Christ Jesus. In this sense it was not simply a conversion, a maturing of his “self,” but was death and resurrection for himself: one of his existences died and another new one was born of it with the Risen Christ. “[2]

After Jesus’ death and resurrection, throughout the centuries, the Father, through the Spirit, has not ceased to invite people to share His life with Him. Thus, following the Son, so many have been called to share with Him the mission of recomposing in the world one family, perhaps carrying out particular projects, and we are still witnesses of this. In the Church, as priests, religious, lay virgins and married people, in different ecclesial realities and beyond: they are called to a life of self-giving, even among adherents of different Christian traditions and confessions, as in the case of monastic forms in the East, or followers of other religions pursuing paths of spiritual perfection. The call, addressed to a person or a people, always awaits a response. It opens a personal, original and unique dialogue that takes place over time. Abraham is captivated by the Voice that speaks in his heart and mind. He leaves everything on which he bases his securities and faces the risks of an immeasurable promise (cf. Gen 12:2-3). He responds with a concrete, manly act, and this is only the beginning of his new life with God. In the interweaving of varied responses, God weaves his relationship with humanity, leading history toward its fulfilment. There are those who confidently overcome fear due to their own inadequacy or because of burdens of the past, those who make an act of obedience, those who flee and return, and those who serve. Each in their own way says their “yes.”

It is because of a woman’s response that God can enter the world as a man, like us. Mary’s courageous “yes,” overcomes fear and inadequacy (cf. Lk. 1:29, 34), and comes to life in her humility, the boldness that only a full trust in God can sustain.

The Gospels also present the twelve responses of the apostles called by Jesus to follow him to form the first community on which the Church is founded (cf. Rev. 21:9-14). “And they, having “left everything followed him” (Mt 4:18-22; Lk 5:11). They left everything behind. They left their families: James and John their father, Peter his wife and children. They left everything they owned: the nets and the boat, all their possessions. Their concrete leaving everything to follow Jesus opens up something really deep for us: it tells us of their giving themselves freely and totally to Him who had personally chosen and called them. And this is what makes them worthy and fit for their very special vocation, that of founding the Church, of being its living pillars, the apostles in fact, whose ministry would be perpetuated down the centuries through the bishops.”[3]

Saul, after his encounter with the Risen One, responded and adhered to the Lord’s invitation by joining the Church. Abandoning his former conduct and putting on the new man (cf. Eph. 4:21-24) is signified in the change of name by which the great missionary of the Word is known: Paul. The response to the call involves his whole person, his whole being.

The Church, already in its founding core, is configured as a people summoned in the diversity of functions and charisms (1 Cor 12:1-15). A body, in the image of Christ, that walks in history. It remains throughout the centuries, in the finiteness of the humanity that composes it, a place of encounter with the Infinite that is God. In it, men and women continue to respond to personal and particular vocations, follow God, enlightened by the Gospel, sustained by the Spirit that impels them towards horizons broader than human understanding. Anthony the Anchorite, Benedict of Norcia, Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Teresa of Avila… are unique, but not alone and remain an example for many in adhering to God’s will.

Man and woman’s responses to God, because they are free, can be positive or negative. Many of the “yes’s” said, are kept in secret and lived in an everyday life that is not elevated to the altars. Nor do we know of many refusals. There is one, narrated in the gospel, of a young man whose name we do not know (it could be mine, ours). He does not say “no,” the gospel does not record the vocal response, but we know that at the invitation to leave everything and then follow Jesus, the young man goes away sad (cf. Mt. 19:22). The epilogue thus seems to highlight that consent or rejection is something vital rather than vocal and that the affirmative response to God’s call can arise in free hearts and in them, brings joy.

A vocation

In the 1900s, in the family of Luigia and Luigi Lubich of Trent (in northern Italy), God calls the second of their four children in a very special way.

Chiara’s call is not like those existing at that time: it is not a call to marriage, nor to life in a convent, or to remain as a consecrated woman, in a family. It is something else. With her response, God can open for her, and for those who wish to adhere to it, a new path. With her “yes,” a twig has been grafted onto the tree of the Church. “The grafting has taken place; the instruments God has used do not matter. What matters is the Church. Christ placed Peter there as a stone, and we poor, little ones, have the joy, in this 20th century, of enriching it with a new light, a new bloom. And all this happened because of the correspondence to the grace of those who worked there; especially because of the charism, a talent that we had to exploit, and also because of our weaknesses and our naiveté and our shortcomings. Not because weaknesses and naiveté are good things in themselves, but because having always believed that everything that takes place is for a good (for those who love God), weaknesses and naiveté and shortcomings have become useful matter for the Work of God, as well as our greatest strength, as Paul says, that he glories in them, they have become the assertion before humanity that ours is the Work of God. “[4]