At Peace with the Entirety of Your Vocation
Needing a Savior is much nicer on paper than when lived out in real life.
This morning I read this interview at Pillar Catholic with Meg Hunter-Kilmer. I’ve been a fan of hers since she first came to my attention about the same time I was digging up saints for the evangelization book, but I didn’t know that she was a full-time wandering missionary. As someone who also loves studying the lives of saints, teaching the faith, and being on the road, I immediately thought: What an awesome life.
The timing could not have been more providential. It was one of those mornings when I was not winning any awards in the Complete Abandonment to the Will of God department. One of those moments when other people’s vocations seem so much more fun and useful and suitable than your own.
I write this, of course, as someone who can list five major reasons and host of smaller ones for why my vocation as a wife and mother, living settled in the same community for decades, is in fact the perfect God-given vocation for me, and one I’m daily grateful for.
Still, there are the two unavoidable facts about other people’s vocations:
Their crosses, toils, and disappointments are so much more navigable than my own, since of course I don’t actually have to endure them.
All that I would be deprived of from my own vocation barely registers on the mental balance, since, conveniently, I am not actually deprived of these treasures.
The discomfort of my own life, the life I actually live and the one for which I am accountable, is a discomfort exquisitely ordered towards bringing to my attention my desperate need for the grace of God.
To evangelize, I need to come to terms not only with the blessings and joys of my own vocation but also with its greatest difficulties. In particular, I need to develop the habit of seeing my inabilities as part of the fruitfulness of my calling.
In my imagined saintly-life, I wouldn’t experience relationship conflicts, inadequate resources, or mortifying personal failures. Whatever ministry I envisioned as being the perfect expression of my calling would sail along like a breezy day riding the waves, the expected ups and downs a source of excitement and pleasure, me floating easily over the surface of it all, majestic and glorious. I’d be good at it.
That’s not real life.
In real life the hard things are hard. There are things I’m terrible at, and which make everything worse than it otherwise would be. There are things that seem like I must be able to do them if I’m going to be able live out my vocation fully . . . and I can’t. Whether because of my own shortcomings or the limits of my circumstances, my very reasonable notions of a holy, God-pleasing life turn out to be utterly unattainable.
What’s left for me? The actual holy, God-pleasing life that is me carrying out the divine will as a limited creature in a fallen world.
I have to come to peace with this in order to evangelize because for many people the barrier keeping God at bay is a sense of impossibility: I couldn’t be Christian because it would mean turning my back on this important part of my life. It would require virtues I don’t have and don’t want. I would fail at it. I would be miserable. This is not a religion for people like me.
Far too often, we the would-be evangelizers feel the same way. We divide the world up into those people who can reasonably be converted and those we imagine just can’t. Some people are just too far gone. Too far divorced from what Christianity requires. Too deeply immersed in a mentality, or an addiction, or a lifestyle that just. won’t. work.
Yeah, well? My life doesn’t work either.
My pretend life? The one where I never do all those embarrassing things I keep bringing to confession, over and over again? The one where I never fail to do the things I know are so very important? The one where my ministries succeed, hearts are changed, and we’re all one big happy family? Pretend-life is going great.
Real life? Not so much.
The crux is that evangelization is not an encounter with Successfully Following the Rules. If that’s your god, not many people are going to be able to meet spec.
But an encounter with grace? Sure. Even someone like me can have that. And if me, then anybody.