I'll Take My Vocation... in Tahiti!!

Today's Lenten reflection is on vocations. No matter what your vocation in life is, Christ should still be the center of your life. When I was young and madly in love with Hoodoo Head, he was the center of my universe. He was the sun I orbited. As I matured, I could see how such a "love solar system" was completely unnatural, and it seemed to me that a much better model would be a twin star system with two equal suns revolving around each other. However, when Ubi Caritas and I were contemplating a vocation of marriage to each other and I read Fulton Sheen's Three to Get Married, I realized the best analogy for married life would be two equal planets in each other's orbits, both circling the same sun (Christ). The best marriages are not those where the spouses gaze at each other but where they both gaze in the direction of God.

Some people, of course, are not meant for a vocation to marriage but for a religious vocation. They are the sole planet in their solar system, orbiting the sun of God with no distractions. I thought this sounded like a wonderful life, and the people I know who were called to it seem to be so full of joy, but apparently God is not calling me to a religious vocation. As hard as I listened for the call, I never heard it, and finally my spiritual director told me straight out that he did not feel I was called to the religious life.

So I fall in that fuzzy third category: those people who are still not sure what their vocations are. That's right - I STILL don't know what I want to be when I grow up! It matters not, as long as I keep God at the center of my universe, I can deal with all the comets and meteors that might enter my solar system, and maybe someday I will share it with another planet... or many other planets! (To stretch this silly analogy to the breaking point, I do have a couple of little moons named Charlie and Cashmere!) (I'm only counting the rabbits because the guinea pigs will hopefully be adopted by someone from the Lutheran choir this weekend, and Sylvia the Hedgehog isn't much of a moon. She's more like space debris.)

Wherever my vocation in life takes me, hopefully it's warm and full of palm trees!

Famous Hat