Ex nihilo, that is, from nothing, God called creation to be and He continues to call it forth whilst sustaining it. A watch-maker God would presumably have created something and then leave it to run on its own. Not this God of ours. He is actively involved in His creation. (If we have a complaint that creation is not behaving well—like global warming—do not blame God. Blame us).
Earlier we heard the calling of a man with unclean lips—Isaiah. Presumably, in a culture which values ritual purity, his defilement may mean a questionable religious observance—like eating pork? Yet, God overlooked his iniquities as He called him. In the Second Reading, we encounter another man who was anxious about his religion’s integrity. Saul saw the early Christians as an aberration of the belief system he knew and loved and set himself up to purge the religion of such deviant behaviours. Christians were heretical Jews. In God’s vocation, Saul became Paul and through his deep knowledge of Judaism, he became the preacher and teacher to the Gentiles that God has invited into the fold. Finally, we have a sinner to whom God revealed the divinity of His Son as well as upon whom He chose to establish the early Church from the remnant of Israel.
What glorious calls that God made through Isaiah, Paul and Peter’s lives. Since God is not a watch-maker, the vocation continues. When we read St Augustine’s famous Confession, that is, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord and our heart is restless until it rests in you”—this human longing for God is no more than our response to God who continues to call us to Himself.
God calls in a manner that no one is excluded. Vatican II reads this as the universal call to holiness. Whatever station we find ourselves, God is calling us to praise, to revere and to serve Him.
Today I would like to speak of a special calling and it might involve laying down one’s life for others. Firstly, we all speak of meaning a lot. It is important. For example, whenever we do not understand something, we tend to relegate it to the margin of uselessness and we mutter, “It is meaningless”. But, if one were to reflect on meaningfulness, one begins to realise how “self-referential” it is. Meaningful is basically about “I, me and myself”. We all enter into relationship and unwittingly we might be calculating on what we can get out of it. The usual measure of our gain is meaning. Thus, relationship falls apart whenever we can no longer derive “meaning” from it. Think in terms of pre-nuptial agreements. People might term it as “prudence, safeguard” etc but the bottomline is purely “What will I get out of it, should the relationship fail?
There are two callings in life which are not self-referential but they are not less meaningful. In essence these callings are directed to service of the Church and the community. The Church has seven Sacrament and two of them are called the Sacraments of service—marriage and priesthood. Both these callings are not alien to us. I could be wrong because one them is an option people rarely give much consideration to. And it is this option that I would like to talk about.
Yesterday, after Mass there was supposed to be an anointing for the sick and elderly. The organisers had asked that those who wanted to be anointed should register themselves. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, only a baptised can be anointed. Just like Holy Communion can only be given to a baptised and practising Catholic, the Sacrament of Anointing is not an open invitation to all and sundry. Registration allowed us to respect the integrity of the Sacrament because we would have ascertained from the registration that the person is a Catholic. Secondly, only a priest or a Bishop can administer this sacrament. Thankfully there were two of us and the registration helped tremendously in crowd control. There have been instances when the whole congregation would walk up to be anointed and there was only one priest available. Visualise that.
The shortage of the ordinary ministers of the Sacrament might not seem urgent. At Mass we have no shortage of volunteers for extra-ordinary ministers and also the other ministries. In normal English usage, the word extra-ordinary connotes something which is remarkable, amazing, astounding and definitely out of this world. However, in Church terminology, the ordinary is preferred over the extraordinary as it pertains to the ordered or standard arrangement of things. Ordinary means this is how things are supposed to be. Whilst the presence of so many extra-ordinary ministers might be taken or read as a wonderful sign of ecclesial participation, it is more likely an indication that there is a failure somewhere, a failure to provide.
What do I mean by the failure to provide? When there are no priests, what is the point of the extra-ordinary Ministers? Here I am not denigrating them because they do provide a valuable service. When there are no priests, who will provide us with the Sacraments? The Church stands on the Eucharist. Without the Eucharist there is no Church. But, without the priesthood there is no Eucharist. We may have a crisis of confidence in the people in the priesthood considering that we seem to hog the limelight for the wrong reasons—priests are paedophiles or nun-rapists. But, whatever the outcome of our crisis of confidence, the Eucharist will always be needed if we heed Christ’s teaching on the necessity of eating His Body and drinking His Blood for us to go to heaven. Thus, the Church exists to provide the Eucharist, the food for the journey heavenward. If that be the case, there will always be a need for the priesthood of Jesus Christ.
One of the reasons for scarcity of vocation to priestly life and by extension to religious life is because our “factories” run on the basis of two—meaning, if the first one is boy, pray the second one is a girl or vice versa and voila the factory shuts down.
Moreover, parents these days try to protect their children from danger to the point that they may just over-compensate. What their generation never had, they make sure that the young have plenty and more. What their generation suffered, they make sure that the young do not have to endure it. This over-compensation has not generated greater meaning in the lives of our young. Instead, without struggles, without challenges, life does not become more meaningful. Thus, there is a compelling demand to challenge the youth to rise above themselves and even to the point of laying down their lives for others. The essence of nobility is the giving of oneself to an endeavour much bigger than oneself and it this which gives meaning to life. Meaning is never found in selfishness. It is gained through selflessness. As someone rightly remarked that the next evolutionary step for mankind is to move from man to kind. From selfishness to selflessness. As Martin Luther King Jr rightly pointed out, “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity”. When we lament about the selfishness of society, that is because we have not taught the young to look at the horizon beyond the self.
God has not stopped calling Christians to a life of service, in particular, a life of service to both Church and community as a priest (and by extension a religious)—a life which places others ahead of one’s own advantage. If the Church is necessary for salvation, then the Eucharist will always be needed. For that the priesthood must go on. The vocation crisis is no indication that the priesthood is irrelevant but more because we have stopped listening. To all the young men (and not so young) present here, is God is calling you? If you even have a faint inkling that He is, be brave. Respond to Him.
