Everyone Has a Vocation

Friday, Oct. 18, 2024

One thing I love about my job is that I get to hear speakers I otherwise wouldn’t. Case is point is Father Michael Niemczak, who spoke at last week’s clergy convocation. Fr. Niemczak is a formation director at Mount Angel Seminary, where many of our seminarians attend. His topic was vocations, which isn’t something I’d normally go out of my way to hear about, but because it was work I listened in, and I’m glad I did.

As an unmarried person who isn’t a member of a religious order, I often feel I’m outside of mainstream Church life. After all, in the Catholic Church there is the Sacrament of Marriage for couples, the Sacrament of Holy Orders for male clergy, and the vows taken by consecrated women and men, but there is nothing similar for a single person who chooses to remain unmarried and outside a religious congregation. It almost seems as though the Church thinks that single people are in some sort of holding pattern, as Fr. Niemczak phrased it – that it’s not until we get married or take religious vows that we can partake fully in Church life.

That’s a misperception, Fr. Niemczak said. People who are single “are meant to be living witnesses to what it means to be a baptized person in the world, living out that call to be Christ to anybody or everybody,” he told me. 

“You can go to places where a priest is not welcome, you can go to places where a mother or a father just doesn’t have access or time or bandwidth to be there,” he added. “You can be with people who would never speak to a nun or to a brother, but they’ll speak to you and they’ll encounter Christ in you.”

Put in those terms, being a single Catholic sounds like a whole lot of responsibility. I’m called to ‘be Christ to anybody or everybody’? That means I’m supposed to profess my faith in word and action every time I interact with another person so that they might receive the love of God through me. Of course, I and every other Christian is called to do this through our baptismal vows, but how many of us actually think about doing it on a regular basis? Sure, we renew these promises every year at Easter, but then we renounce Satan and all his works, and affirm that we believe in God, Christ and the Holy Spirit – there’s no call to put those beliefs into action. Fr. Niemczak pointed out that we are actually called to live out those vows every day, and sometimes in places where a priest or a nun might not be welcome.

That’s a challenge I’m not sure I’m up to.

Another point that Fr. Niemczak made that I need to reflect on is about heaven. “If we can’t imagine it, we won’t desire it; if we don’t desire it then we’re not going to have the energy that we need to meet the demands of Christian life,” he said.

This made me wonder when it was that I last thought of heaven – not in the general sense but as a place where I hope to spend eternity. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls heaven “the state of supreme and definitive happiness, the goal of the deepest longings of humanity.”

Can I imagine that kind of happiness and if so, am I willing to live the life that will, through the grace of God, lead to it? That life requires living out my baptismal promises, which I’ve already noted is a challenge because through baptism I am called to a life of service to others.

On the other hand, Saint Teresa of Avila said that she believed God remains with us on the journey through this world; this thought echoes throughout centuries of Catholic teaching.

If heaven is infinite happiness, and God will accompany me on my journey there, through whatever suffering is in store, then perhaps by meditating on this I will find  the strength to live out my vocation.