As Mysterious As Being Born

From the desk of Fr.Ignatius Waters CP

Sunday 26th April 2015

A vocation is as mysterious as life itself. The first vocation is obviously the call into life itself. The mystery that we came to be at all, called into life, in a particular family, with particular values, in a particular place, at a particular time in history. And it’s good to reflect on our own story. It’s not a sign of old age but a desire to see and understand how God has been leading us and educating us through all that has happened in our lives. And all means all – the good and the bad, the successes, the failures, the influence of parents, teachers and friends. Life shapes us and carries us. I hope this little poem by John O’Donohue finds some echo in your own story and experience as it does in mine: “I love to live my life/ Like the river flows/Carried by the surprise/ Of its own unfolding.”
When I was a child in Primary school and not yet eight years of age, (I know that because we transferred to the De La Salle school at eight) a Passionist priest came into the classroom dressed in the habit with the heart badge, the mantle, the sandals, the whole works! He was Fr. Fergus Clark, a native of Navan, my home town. The teacher asked me (why I wonder?) would I like to be a priest like Fr. Fergus. I was afraid of this apparition so I was very definite in my answer: “Oh no!” I said, “I want to be an ordinary priest like Fr. Herbert!” Fr. Herbert was the local curate. The story is too long for one page but I discovered much later that Fr. Herbert was anything but an ordinary priest and that the Passionists, despite their strange dress, were very good and ordinary men! Men of mercy and compassion! But isn’t it just extraordinary that my whole life’s journey grew from that early and ordinary human encounter? It’s as mysterious as being born!
During our years of training and studies, we were separated from home and family. We were told we were leaving that world and entering another called ‘a state of perfection’. And, young though I was, this notion filled me with an uneasiness I couldn’t then put into words. It no doubt came from some deep ‘home’ wisdom but I certainly didn’t call it wisdom then. I just thought I wasn’t strong enough for this, detached enough or spiritual enough. On the rare occasions I gave voice to my fear, I described it as “a fear of losing touch with the man on the bike.” That man on the bike was my father and symbolised for me ordinary human life in family and work and all that was good and genuine in normal life. I didn’t want to be different from the rest of humanity and certainly not from ‘the man on the bike’ going home after a hard day’s work. How happy I was in later life to find Thomas Merton, the great spiritual writer and mystic of the last century, saying, “The illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of ‘separation from the world’ that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vows we become a different species of being, pseudo angels or spiritual men.”
And he concludes by saying, “Thank God, thank God, that I am a man like other men, that I am only a man among others – it is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race.”

All vocations must build on this foundation!