theROCK

Our Primary Vocation

Have you ever heard the phrase, “Your family is your primary vocation”?

Full disclosure, I think it’s time to retire that phrase. In my experience, a misunderstanding of what that actually means has created an idolatry of family life. Let me explain.

When the Church uses the phrase “family as primary vocation,” they are NOT saying “your family is the most important call in your life and everything else comes second.” It sounds like that's what they are saying, but we have to understand what “primary vocation” means in this context. Because for the longest time I thought, and many of us think, the most important thing we will do in our life is be a spouse and a parent, maybe even a grandparent. But this is false. You read that correctly. This is a misunderstanding of what the Church teaches.

Our most important vocation, our highest call, is to holiness. It is to be saints. It is to be completely and perfectly united to Jesus. THAT is our primary vocation. THAT is the most important thing we will do with our life. Everything else in life is meant to serve the purpose of drawing us closer to Jesus. Including our family. So when we talk about family as the “primary vocation,’ we are talking about family as the primary avenue God designed to draw you closer to Him. Just as for our priests, priesthood is their “primary vocation”–the primary way God leads them to Him. Our lower case primary vocation is meant to serve the uppercase Primary Vocation of holiness and becoming saints. The vocation is not the goal. It is the way we reach the goal.

But that isn’t how we are often taught that phrase. Instead, we have taken it to mean that God gave me my family and so dedicating all of myself to my family is actually what God wants. And while that is kind of true (please do dedicate yourself to your family), it also tends to mean that we dedicate ourselves to our family at the expense of dedicating ourselves to God. And that’s where we get it wrong. We skip Mass to go to sporting events because hey, that’s my primary vocation right? This is what I’m supposed to prioritize! We over book our calendars, focusing on the kids, not leaving any time for personal prayer. And we console ourselves that “hey, someday they will be out of the house” or “someday I’ll be retired and have more time for God,” completely ignoring the fact that God wants you to be present to Him now, always, in every stage of life.

When we put our family (or career or religious call for that matter) above our relationship with Jesus, we make an idol of the very thing that was meant to lead us closer to Jesus. We must reorder our lives according to the true order: God first and everything else (including our family) after. It is a hard shift to make. But when we put God first, everything else has a way of falling into place.

The Authentic Jesus

Today’s Gospel is about the people who know Jesus the most, the people he grew up around, rejecting Him. He didn’t fit the image they had of Him from His youth, so they couldn’t accept Him as He really is—the Son of God, here to preach and teach them about God. They were offended by what he had to say.

I find this such an interesting Gospel for the weekend of the 4th of July. Is the above not true of our current political climate? Everyone is offended by Jesus, or at least the authentic Jesus found in the Scriptures. We all have these little false Jesus’ we’ve created in our minds that fit our political ideologies. And we get really offended and astonished when presented with Gospel passages or Church teachings where Jesus contradicts the idea we have of Him in our mind. Both sides of the political spectrum agree with some of Jesus’ 
teachings and reject others.

Which is actually very fitting because Jesus says himself, in the Gospels, that he did not come to fit into the existing paradigm, but to upend it, to be above it all, to flip it on its head and restore His own order—God’s order.

So today, on this 4th of July weekend, as we celebrate our amazing country with an eye to the upcoming presidential elections, let us all take a moment to reflect on which Jesus we are worshipping – the Republican Jesus, the Democratic Jesus, or the authentic Jesus of the Scriptures. And let us once again commit to daily reading of the Gospels so we might come to know more closely who Jesus authentically is from the source itself. Only then can we truly make this country as great as we desire it to be.

Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, patroness of the United States of America, pray for us.

The Joy of Easter

How is your Easter going? Are you still celebrating the joy of this season?

Sometime I think we, as a Catholic church, don’t put enough emphasis on the Easter season. The same is true of the Christmas season. We put so much emphasis on the preparation, the repentance, the waiting of the purple seasons. We fill our calendars to the brim with ways to engage Lent, to dive in and dig deep. And then the Day comes – Easter, Christmas – and it’s over and wrapped up like a wedding day. No more programing. No diving in or digging deep together. Just life as usual, as if nothing happened. As if nothing changed. As if we hadn’t changed.

That’s not the way it is supposed to be, right? Lent is not more important than Easter. But the way we engage the two would suggest that it is. We only “do” Lent for the purpose of better “doing” Easter. We practice repentance to allow our hearts and spirits to more fully embrace the fullness of Easter…that is all seven weeks of it. Easter is almost twice as long as Lent. So why do we treat it like it is a single day?

It is the fifth week of the Easter season, but I invite you, challenge you even, to look at how well you are celebrating – or not celebrating – the Resurrection. You have a few more
weeks to go. What is something you can do to reignite the joy of Easter and celebrate Christ’s victory over sin and death? What were the practices you took up for Lent? How have you seen a change in yourself through those practices? How can you carry that transformation forward throughout the Easter season and beyond?