An Inexplicable, Imperious Call

I ask myself, is what I do in life, what I have done, reflective of me, of who I am? Or is it an outcome of external forces, or of obeying convention, in either case a determination that has nothing or little to do with who I really am inside?  If we want to live life as vocation, this is an important question to ask ourselves, it seems to me.

Gabriel Marcel has some helpful things to say on this subject in Homo Viator.  Marcel contrasts an action that can be repeated by anyone (and explained by anyone as relating to certain goods -- money, for instance, power, security, fame, etc.), and an action that emerges from the heart of an individual.  The latter action more totally involves the personality of the agent and partakes more of the nature of a vocation.  A vocation has an imperious character, and for that matter is "always bound up with the presence of a generosity which cannot be confined by any possible self-interest; this is particularly clear in vocations such as that of the priest, the artist, the doctor or even the soldier, and is less so for that of the technician in whom the vocation tends to be confused with the exercise of a strictly specialized function."

In other words, a sign of vocation is just the inexplicable character of the call and the response, which is nevertheless insistent.  In the little work I do in Guatemala I ask myself why I am doing this, and in fact, come up with no answer that would satisfy anyone. ("Oh, that's just your 'thing.'") Still, it involves generosity, a facet of love, and I can't simply dismiss it as absurd.  I did not originate the call, but luckily responded to it. I can say the same for many things I've done in my life: many times accepting things for no particular reason except that I was asked.

Responding to the call (sometimes clothed as an invitation) is important.  Marcel says, "to refuse to follow a vocation, whatever the motive and however reasonable the refusal may be, is in no way to emancipate or free onself.  It is exactly the opposite, and we cannot dispute the fact except in the name of a conception which amounts to the admission that wisdom for each of us consists in planning all our actions to fit in with some object which can be readily accepted by public opinion."  "Creative Vow as the Essence of Fatherhood." p. 105-106.  As Beatrice tells Dante in Canto V (lines 46-47), a vow "is never cancelled save by being kept. . . " (though some vows should not be kept, she emphasizes, like Jephthah's (to sacrifice the first person he met after returning in victory -- his daughter (Judges 11:30-31).

So, paradoxically, I find my freedom in following my vocation.  Not following it enslaves me "in a prison however well-appointed and comfortable it may be." Ibid. p. 107.  Responding to the call "frees" my uniqueness to be born.

Responding in generosity, in love, to God's call, makes all the difference in the world:  it changes everything! It changes ME into who I can be!