Followup on Vocations and the Will of God

[[Dear Sister Laurel, many thanks for answering my questions on canon 603 and vocations generally. Did you mean that your sense of a deeper call (to authentic humanity) made it easier to handle the loss of concrete pathways? For example, what happens to women who feel called to preach or minister as an ordained priest but have to settle for something else? Would the theology you outlined in your last post ease their pain at being barred from the priesthood?]]

Great questions, thank you again! Yes, my sense that vocation first of all means a call to authentic humanity does make it possible to deal well with the loss of specific pathways. However, that does not mean it does away with the pain of loss, and especially not with the pain of being deprived of a vocational pathway that one desired deeply even to the point of knowing it as a call from God. It is more the case, at least in my own experience, that deep joy combines with pain; the pain adds a kind of poignancy to the joy one feels and the awe that comes from the sense of God's will being done in spite of difficulties and obstacles.

I suppose this is one of the places I am caused to reflect on the passion narratives and Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane; it is also one of the places this narrative is most consoling to me. I hear Jesus praying that he wishes the will of God could be realized in some other way, that surely it could shape itself differently than the events that stand in front of him now, and even (perhaps) that the events overtaking him are unjust and ensure the failure of his ministry as well as causing terrible pain to those who love him. Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom with his life and he did that unceasingly. During the years of active ministry he had to reappropriate Israel's sense of who God's Messiah would be, how that messiahship would be shaped and what it would look like in the face of historical circumstances and oppression. Again and again the reshaping, both in Jesus' understanding and as he embodied this call himself, took the form of weakness and self-emptying; now in these final hours this weakness and self-emptying would reach its climax in abject helplessness, pain, shame, and an even deeper degree of openness to God's will.

Specifically, with regard to reflections on vocation what strikes me most about the Gethsemane situation and prayer is the profoundness of the apparent conflict between what Jesus dreamt of and deeply desired and what he commits himself to in spite of not seeing clearly what God is doing in it all. I wonder that Jesus did not see historical circumstances preventing God's will from being done -- but clearly he did not see things that way. I wonder that Jesus did not say, "Abba, how can any of this be your will??!!" but again, he did not say this. Instead, he placed himself in God's hands and walked resolutely into the future trusting that ultimately even abandonment by God and godless death could, in fact, be (or at least serve) the will of God and the way God does justice. For me one lesson of all this is God works at levels deeper, more profound than what we can ordinarily see. Moreover God reveals Godself in the unexpected and even the "unacceptable" place -- something we all should hold fast to when we see our lives going "askew" in this way and that.

Regarding women who feel a call to the priesthood, for instance, but are frustrated in this for the whole of their lives, no I don't think this theology takes away the pain of this; it may even sharpen it in some ways. However, I do think it provides the means to move forward with real hope in spite of the fact that historical circumstances can actually thwart God's will in some ways while we hold onto the fact that simultaneously God can and does operate in even more profound ways to achieve his will. As I was reminded last night during a class on Galatians, that freedom can be expressed in negative and in positive terms: we can be free from things and free for them. Sometimes these two forms of freedom co-exist on the same level: we must be free from certain things if we are to be free for other things. But sometimes they exist on different levels so that despite certain unfreedoms we can yet be free for deeper and more fundamental freedoms.

Here too I am reminded of the Bonhoeffer quote I have used here a number of times: [[ Not everything that happens is the will of God, but inevitably nothing that occurs happens outside the will of God.]] This may not ease pain, but it does create hope and opens us to experiences of fulfillment,  joy, and awe which can co-exist with and even contextualize the pain.