In the beginning was the Word

Een inspirerende tekst over roeping van Timothy Radcliffe bgv Palmzondag 2009

Brussels 2009

Have you got a vocation? The short answer is: yes, otherwise you would not exist. A vocation means a calling, and everything exists because God is always, at every moment, calling it into existence. The Word said, ‘Let there be light’, and there as light. God says ‘Let there be rabbits and squirrels and stars’ and there are.

To be human is to be called to share God’s own happiness. It is to have the vocation to share the life of the Trinity which is perfect, equal love. On the 14th March, when I wrote this lecture, there were estimated to be 6,766,576,051 people on our planet. Every one of them had a vocation to enter God’s love. Otherwise they would not exist.

This is the good news that we need to share with our contemporaries. This is a time of acute anxiety. The financial crisis means that millions of people are losing their jobs and even their homes. Many young people have no prospect of ever having a job. Old people are finding that their pensions are worth less. We have no idea how long this crisis will last. Then there is the threat of ecological disaster. By the time that many of you are my age, the world may be in a terrible mess, with drought and flooding, and massive starvation. We also see the rise of violence in the inner city and between people of different religions. And so there is a profound worry about the future. Where are we going?

Everyone of you has the beautiful task of sharing your hope, which is in the universal human vocation to share God’s love and happiness. We do not know how we shall arrive, and the way ahead is dark, but we trust this: that God made us to flourish with Him and we shall.

That is all very lovely, but I meet a lot of young people who are puzzling over how they should live this vocation. Should they be married or become priests or religious? Should they work for justice or go into business? Should they be artists or farmers? Each one of us needs to discover how we will live this human vocation to share God’s love.

It is said that Jesus came back to earth once, and met St Peter. And he said to Peter, ‘I want to do something that I have never done before. Take me to play golf.’ So they set off for a round, and Jesus bangs his ball into a lake, and so he says to Peter, ‘Do go and get it for me please’. So Peter wades in, gets the ball and gives it to Jesus. Jesus has another swipe and there it is back in the lake. Peter said to him, ‘You can go and get it yourself this time’. So Jesus walks on the water to retrieve the ball. And a passerby looks in astonishment and he said, ‘Is that who I think it is?’ ‘Yes, says Peter, ‘but the trouble is that he believes that he is Tiger Woods.’

To put it very simply, we find our particular vocation by discovering how we can best flourish now as loving people, open to the infinite love which is God. Joseph Pieper defined love as delight in the existence of another person. We say to them, ‘It is wonderful that you exist.’ But we may live this love in many ways. We may give ourselves to someone forever in marriage, saying ‘it is wonderful that you exist.’ This is an act of gratitude to the Creator. We may do as religious, dedicated to showing God’s delight in people who are forgotten or despised. We may live that love as doctors or nurses, embodying God’s love for them in their suffering. We may do so as artists, delighting in beauty, which is a hint of God’s beauty. We may do so by working for international development, expressing God’s love for the poor. All of these are vocations and not just jobs, because they all express in different ways God’s delight in us and all creation. And they are not exclusive. One might have a vocation to be a married doctor or a priest who is an artist. Most of us are called to love in various ways.

Pedro Arrupe SJ said: ‘Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.[1]’

So discovering your vocation is finding out how you are created to love best. Each of us needs the right environment for our form of loving to unfold. It’s like plants. Some plants need an acidic soil and protection from the wind; others need an alkaline soil otherwise they die. Some plants flourish in a rain forest and others in the desert. We must discover what sort of environment we need for our capacity to love to flower. Every vocation has its place within the ecology of love. None is better than another. But we need to know which is ours. It is no good pretending to be a palm tree when you are actually a rhododendron!

For many people the toughest question is whether they are called to be married or else chose celibacy as a priest or religious. We need both vocations since each expresses something of the mystery of God’s love. God’s love is both particular and universal. God loves me in my uniqueness. That is why I exist as a particular individual. God says to me, ‘Timothy, it is wonderful that you exist’. Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth century English mystic, said that God could not be angry with us otherwise we would immediately cease to exist. And this dimension of God’s love finds a vivid expression in marriage, in which two people offer delight in each other. Their relationship is a sacrament of God’s delight in each of us. They speak God’s word to other, ‘It is wonderful that you exist.’

But God’s love is also universal. In Dante’s words, God is ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars.[2]’ It is all encompassing. And the vocation to priesthood or religious is to be a sign of that vast, limitless love.

For us, these two dimensions of love cannot be lived equally at the same time. If I passionately love Elizabeth and give myself to her forever, then I cannot love Margaret in the same way. My love for Elizabeth is a sign of God’s particular love precisely in its utter focus on one person. She is the one for whom I am made, the sun around which planet Timothy turns. But the unpossessive love of religious life and priesthood expresses another dimension of God’s love; it’s spaciousness, reaching out to everyone. In God, these two dimensions are one and the same. God is a single love, utterly particular and universal. For us, they are in tension.

This does not mean that married people will just love each other, in a passionate and introverted relationship which has no space for anyone else. D. H. Lawrence called such narcissistic love egoisme a deux. In India there is a story of two Brahmin women who obeyed the command to gives alms by just swopping equal gifts and so giving away nothing. Be warned; they were reincarnated as poisoned wells! The mutual love of a couple is the soil in which married love is planted, but they must open themselves outwards to others, otherwise their love will be barren.

Usually this happens with the arrival of children. The father may be shocked to find that he is no longer the exclusive focus of his wife’s love. Her life must revolve around another. And the time must come when they must love that child enough to let it go, and find some partner in life. The paradox of married love is that we must so love our children that they can love other people more than us, or at least more passionately. Our love must set them free. C.S. Lewis said, ‘It is a divine privilege always to be less the beloved than the lover[3].’ God is always the one who loves more than he is loved.

A Christian family exists to let us go. Joseph and Mary learned this the hard way when they lost Jesus for three days. The child says to them, ‘How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’ (Luke 2.49). So the soil in which the plant of married love must be rooted is that of a passionate relationship for another person. But the plant flourishes by opening itself to others. Our loves turn outwards to children and friends. In fact no relationship that was founded just on two people gazing into each other’s eyes could endure for long. No relationship could fulfil all that we need. I know a Dominican sister who is one of eleven children, typical Catholic family breeding like rabbits. Every year they have a vast Christmas party for all the great tribe, a hundred people or more. One year Sister Pat saw a couple of young men whom she did not recognise so she went up and said, ‘Now, whose children are you?’ And they said, ‘We were driving by, feeling lonely, and we saw the lights and heard the party and so we just came in.’ The family said that they could stay, as long as they watched the family videos, just like everyone else!

And it is the same in religious life and priesthood. The soil in which our vocation to love is planted is that of a wide love, even for those whom we do not yet know. This involves a real sacrifice in that one renounces the joy of love in which two people give themselves to each other for ever. We are called to be signs of God’s spacious love which shuts out no one. It is a just as much vocation to love as that of married people: but especially for those whom no one loves, the people who are forgotten, or despised.

When I was in Angola during the civil war, I had a meeting with the postulants to the Dominican brothers and sisters. They were cut off from their families and those whom they loved by the conflict. Should they leave their religious communities and go home to care for their families, or stay in the Order? Africans have a deep sense of family and tribe and so this was a terrible dilemma. But one young sister stood up and said, ‘Leave the dead to bury the dead; we must stay to preach the gospel.’ That is a generous love.

Our communities are signs of God’s spacious love by living with brothers and sisters whom we would not have chosen and with whom we may disagree about religion, politics and even food! They may sometimes drive us nuts. One monk said that he had had to listen to the monk who sat beside him slurping his tea for twenty years! Join the Dominicans and you can sit where you like! But our common life is a sign of the Kingdom precisely because of our differences. A community of like-minded people is not a sign of the Kingdom. It is just a sign of itself.

The most powerful sign of this that I have ever seen has been on visits to Rwanda and Burundi during the difficult years of civil war and genocide. Brothers and sisters of the warring tribes had to share a life, eat and pray together. That is a witness to God’s vast love. It was painful but a sign of hope.

The temptation of our society is to search for community only with the like-minded, people who share our views, our prejudices and our blood. Conservatives associate with conservatives, and progressives with progressives. Old people are sent to old people’s homes, teenagers spend their time with teenagers, and so on. I say nothing of Walloons and Flemish! Mrs Thatcher used to ask of people, ‘Is he one of us?’ We should refuse that temptation. Instead of being homogenous, like a block of vanilla ice cream, we should be like a good casserole, in which it is the difference tastes that gives the savour.

In many countries the Church is profoundly polarized between so-called conservatives and progressives. There is a real enmity and anger within our Church at those on ‘the other side.’ The prophetic role of religious is to reach out in friendship beyond the divisions. The opposition of left and right, traditionalist and progressive, derives from the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment and is alien to Catholicism. We are all necessarily both conservative, looking back to the gospels and tradition, and progressive, looking forward to the Kingdom. It is true that some of us have a more ‘conservative’ or ‘progressive’ temperament, but for us there can be no fundamental and ultimate opposition between tradition and transformation. And so in our communities we must refuse to let ourselves be divided into camps.

One of the challenges is that of reaching across generations. In my community in Oxford, we encompass at least four generations. There is one old brother aged 83, who was formed in the classic tradition of before the Council with the pre-Vatican understanding of religious life. There are four or five of my generation, who lived in the exhilarating and tumultuous years after the Council. There is a larger group of people who come from what is sometimes called the ‘John Paul II generation’, who reacted against some of what they thought of as the wild liberalism of my generation. And now there is ‘Generation Y’, in their mid and late twenties, which is different again. A community will only thrive if it dares to welcome the young, to challenge them and to be challenged by them, knowing that they will never be like us. Many congregations are dying because they do not accept that the young must be different. When I was a young friar, we had a wonderful old Dominican called Gervase: A great scholar, he often argued against the crazy ideas of the young and resisted our innovations, but when it came to the vote, he always voted in favour of the young, because without the young there is no future.

It is not only religious and priests who may be called to be signs of God’s universal love. This is the vocation of single people like Jean Vanier, who co-founded the L’Arche movement, with Thomas Philippe, a French Dominican. Jean grew up in a privileged world. His father was ambassador to France before becoming Governor General of Canada. Jean did a brilliant doctorate in philosophy and taught at Toronto University. Then he met Raphael and Philippe, two young men with mental disabilities. He established his first community with them and it transformed his life. He wrote, ‘They called me to take another path, the path of tenderness, compassion, and communion. They taught me how to celebrate... The weak teach the strong to accept and integrate the weakness and brokenness of their own lives, which they often hide behind masks.[4]’ He tells about the great victory, when a young man, Eric, finally learned to pee in the lavatory. The whole community gathered to drink champagne in his honour.

So some of us are called to be signs of God’s spacious, universal love. But no one can escape from the challenge of loving particular people. The vocation of priests, religious and people like Jean is planted in the soil of this generous and open love. That is its foundation. But unless we learn to love particular people deeply then our love may become cold and empty. It would be running away from the complexities of relationship, and that would be cowardice. Aelred, the twelfth century Abbot of Rievaulx, warned religious against ‘a love that in addressing itself to all, reaches no one.[5]’. I am told that in the past religious were often warned against ‘particular friendships’. Gervase Matthew OP always said that he was more afraid of ‘particular enmities’! W. H. Auden, an English poet, joked: ‘we are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.[6]’

Mother Teresa of Calcutta was attending an important meeting, packed with bishops and dignitaries. On the way in she was stopped by a beggar. People tried to move her and not keep the important people waiting. But while she was talking to the beggar, he was the only person who existed. She looked at him alone. He was not a generalized ‘poor person.’ He was this particular person, with his own face, who was Christ.

Bede Jarrett, who was Dominican Provincial of the English Province seventy years ago received a letter from a young Benedictine novice, Hubert van Zeller, who thought that he ought to leave religious life because he had fallen in love with someone called P. But Bede disagreed vigorously: ‘I am glad [that you have fallen in love with P] because I think your temptation has always been towards Puritanism, a narrowness, a certain inhumanity. Your tendency was almost towards the denial of the hallowing of matter. You were in love with the Lord but not properly in love with the Incarnation. I believe P will save your life. I shall say a Mass in thanksgiving for what P has been, and done, to you. You have needed P for a long time. Aunts are no outlet. Nor are stout and elderly Provincials.[7]’

So every vocation aspires to the mystery of God’s love, simultaneously particular and universal, but they do so planted in different soils. We must grow where we are planted. If one is rooted in the soil of passionate love for another person, then that is where one must flourish. The time will come when one must reach out for a more universal love. One will come to love others and delight in their existence. But if that undermines the fundamental relationship, on which your life is founded, so that you drift apart, then one will risk having nor roots at all and die. Likewise, the priest or religious will come, I hope, to really love individual people, and to want to say to them ‘It is wonderful that you exist.’ But if that undermines our special way of loving, then we may get into a mess!

When I was newly ordained, I fell very much in love with someone who loved me too. Here was someone whom I could marry and have children with. My life was turned upside down! Had I made a mistake? I had made my vows just a few years before and promised myself to the Order until death, and here was I feeling this vast love for another. It was a bewildering experience. It seemed wrong and destructive just to renounce my love for this woman and run away. But then I knew that I could not renounce my commitment to the Order either. I had to learn to see this new love not as an alternative to my vows. I was rooted in the soil of the Order. This was where I had put down my roots, where I must live or have no life. But my love as a friar and a priest must open itself out to others in their very particularity.

But how can we know which is our vocation? It ought to be difficult to discover, because we all called to love both in particular and more widely. One would hope that everyone who is called to marriage will feel the tug of the freedom to give their lives away with mad generosity to the forgotten. And if someone who feels called to religious life did not also know the desire to give themselves to someone in a committed and passionate relationship, then you might wonder if they are running away. We all long for the vastness of God’s love, which excludes no one, and the desire to make another the focus of our life and say, ‘It is wonderful that you exist.’

We slowly discover how we may best flourish. Maybe we fall in love but also visit religious communities. We put down a tentative root in this alkaline relationship and then another in this acidic monastery! We go on looking until we find the soil in which our hearts can expand, and we can breathe deeply. Once I met a man who explained that he had been engaged, and then broken it off and gone to seminary. Then he had left and got engaged again, and then broken that off and now he was thinking of becoming a Dominican. I told him that he would either last six months or else he might have found his home forever! He is still with us, thirty two years later!

And we must also keep our ears open for a Word. In the beginning was the Word. And it may burst into our lives and summon us. St Antony was living a contented life as a wealthy farmer when, in 269, he hear the gospel saying “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” And he knew it was addressed to him, and so he sold almost all that he and his sister owned and gave it away. A bit hard on his sister who might have felt the same call! A thousand years later, Francis of Assisi heard the same words, and knew that they were for him and gave up everything. Each of us must keep our ears open for the Word that calls us. It may come unexpectedly, through a friend or even a film. A priest friend of mine noticed a young man who came to Mass every day and so he went up to him and asked, ‘Have you ever thought of being a priest?’ The young man thought for a while and replied, ‘I do not want to be a priest. I want to be a bishop!’

A big question when we are considering our vocation is whether we shall endure. I may love Elizabeth, but do I want to be with her forever? I may love the Dominicans, but can I take vows until death?

A few years ago there was a Congress in Rome about religious life, and it was people questioned whether commitment until death was still a necessary part of religious life. I am all in favour of opening our communities to all sorts of friends, associates and collaborators but at the centre of religious life and marriage, there must be the courageous gesture of giving our lives until death. It is an extravagant gesture that speaks of our hope that every human life in its totality, up to and including death, is a path towards the God who calls. A vow until death is a sign that every life, however much it is marked by failure and frustration, is on its way to the God of love.

Once an elderly friar called John, facing death, told me that he was about to fulfil a great ambition, to die a Dominican. At the time I did not think that this was much of an ambition, but it is one that I have come to treasure. He made a gift of his life to the Order and, despite slipping and sliding on the way, he did not take it back. He was a sign of hope for the young.

I have been told a thousand times that the young cannot be expected to make that definitive commitment, until death. The young live in a world of short term commitments, whether at work or in the home. The average American has eleven different jobs in a working life. Marriages often do not endure. In 2005 43,000 Belgians got married, and 30,000 got divorced. And so it is asserted that we cannot expect the young to make solemn profession or to marry.

But it is precisely because we live in a culture of short-term commitments that vows until death are a beautiful sign of hope. It is a crazy gesture, but we must ask the young to make brave mad gestures, and believe that they can, with God’s grace, live them out. Recently four young men made solemn profession for my English Province. They are all bright, energetic and with University degrees. Every one of them could have flourished in the world, have had happily married lives and earned lots of money. Some young women said, ‘What a waste! They could have been happily married,...perhaps to me.’ I am not sure that anyone said that when I made profession, unfortunately! For them to give themselves to the Order until death speaks of our hope for every human being.

Are any of us strong enough to make that commitment? No! But if we discover the way that we are called to love, the soil in which we are best planted, then we welcome God into our lives, and it is God who will carry us through. If I live my life as a priest or religious with love and generosity, letting myself be touched by others, then God’s grace will give me strength. Of course marriages between good and wonderful people sometimes do not endure. Admirable priests and religious may leave. It is not for us to point the finger. It could happen to anyone. Who knows the secret struggles of another human heart? But I would still say that it belongs to the very idea of vocation to love that it be until death. For, as the Song of Song says, ‘love is as strong as death.’ In Risen Lord it is stronger!

This requires great courage. Our society is timid and afraid risk, which is why there is an obsession with health and safety. We are afraid of being mistaken and getting hurt. Even in the Church there is far too much fear. We may even be afraid of the risk of loving and being loved. It is always an adventure into the unknown. When we pledge our love for someone before the altar, then we do not know what lies ahead. When we give ourselves to a religious Order, we do not know what crazy things our brothers or sisters might ask of us. They might send us to China or elect us Master of the Order if they are really foolish! But it was the courage of the martyrs that converted the Roman Empire, and courage will be our best witness too.

There was a man who was driving along the top of a cliff wondering whether God existed or not. In fact he was so distracted that he drove over the cliff and fell out of the car. As he was falling he clung to the branch of a tree. Suddenly the question of faith became urgent and so he shouted out, ‘Is there anyone there?’ Finally a voice replied, ‘Yes, I am here. Trust me. Let go of the branch and fall, and I will catch you.’ So he thought for a while and then he cried out again, ‘Is there anyone else there?’

So be brave. Find the soil in which you can flourish as a loving person. And trust in God.

[1] Virgil Elizondo Charity New York 2008 p.22

[2] Paradiso 33.145

[3] op.cit. 184

[4] Essential writings p.100

[5] quoted by Liz Carmichael Friendship: Interpreting Christian Love London 2004 p. 96

[6] D. C. Schindler Communion Fall 2006 p.394

[7] op. cit. p.180