Would you rather get up in the middle of the night for a crying baby or for the monastic bells? This question was posed to me in high school as a (supposedly) helpful way of thinking about what vocation, or state in life, I might be called to. The idea was that both marriage/motherhood and religious life require sacrifice, but you’d probably rather do one than the other, and that preference is probably a sign of where you’re called.
I’ve never loved interrupted sleep, but I could see myself managing it for a helpless infant or needy child much more than I could for some bells.
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Did that mean I was called to marriage?
The problem is that a task-focused question doesn’t help address the core of what a vocational state of life is: vows, made in love, to be faithful to a person (or persons, in a religious community). Preferring, in the abstract, to get up for a wailing infant rather than chapel bells is only at best the vaguest indication of a potential path to explore.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Of course it’s worth thinking about the things you would do in any state in life. But when it comes to married life or celibacy for the sake of the kingdom (cf. Mt 19:12), the tasks involved are not actually the primary things to consider.
Our vocations stem from love
I got some much better advice later when I was in graduate school. I was having a chat with a nun who belonged to an order of religious women that I really admired. Her job in the order was to help women discern if they were called to join. I loved their work and gushed to her about how I wanted to do what they do: help women and babies! Give retreats! Restore a view of what healthy sexuality and healthy femininity really is!
Did this mean I was called to be a nun?
“You really like our work,” she observed. “But you could do all of that without being a sister. Do you actually want to be a sister? I’m the bride of Christ whether I’m serving women or sweeping floors or flat on my back in a coma. It’s not the work that makes me a sister.”
I didn’t really know what to say, because she had just hit the nail on the head. I didn’t feel particularly drawn to be a sister per se. I loved Jesus and wanted to be sold-out for him, but what I wanted to do was the work they did.
There were tasks from the married state that I preferred, and tasks from religious life that I preferred. But ultimately, that didn’t matter, because the reason for doing any task in the first place is love. And love is not first about doing; it is first about being. As the ancient philosophers observed, agere sequitur esse, “act follows being”: What a thing does flows from what it is.
A woman spends her days serving women and children in need because she is someone who has given herself to the Bridegroom, who has asked her to serve his people in this way. A woman gets up in the night to care for her baby because their Creator has called her to join him in nourishing this new life that bears his image.
A death to self
Vocation flows from relationship. It flows from who we are and the connection and community we’re called to live in. Vocation isn’t an external uniform that we put on. We can don the robes of monks and nuns for All Saints Day, but it doesn’t make us religious.
If we think first and primarily of the tasks of any state in life, we fail to consider that even when the tasks are over or unavailable, the vocation remains. When a sister is in a coma, when a priest in persecuted lands is unable to say mass, when the babies never arrive, when the spouse walks away, our relationship to God, his Church and the people we’ve pledged ourselves to remains.
What’s more, we don’t always get to choose our tasks once we’re in a state in life. Maybe our vocation is to surrender our babies to God; what wakes us up in the night is the memory of their burial rather than their hungry cries. Maybe our vocation is to accept our superior’s will, to happily embrace mind-numbing administrative tasks, clearing the organizational red tape so that our fellow sisters can serve women in crisis. For men, maybe your vocation is to spend weeks at a time bored out of your mind, hiding in attics so you can say a single Mass rather than bravely spreading the Gospel every day in a public way.
With these as the options for tasks, it’s hard to say that any of them sound better than another. When God invites us to join him in a vocational state in life, he’s calling us to deeper intimacy with himself first and foremost. Only when we’ve said yes to this relationship will we really learn our exact tasks. Certainly there are different possibilities in each life: A nun will never have the same “tasks” of biological motherhood, but both states in life are callings to spiritual motherhood, to the virtue of self-sacrifice, to the requirements of true human maturity. Both call for a death to self in the midnight hour.
This means that the most helpful thing we can do to discern our vocational state in life is not to weigh up the tasks and see which is preferable, but to foster an intimacy with Christ and a life of service to others. In doing so, we will become the type of person who can hear God’s voice and be attentive to the relationship we want to be in, regardless of what we’re doing.
