by Fr. Chuck Gallagher, S.J.
The whole world is screaming for community. Everybody admits the need for community – from sociologists and academics down to the normal man on the street. No one can deny the tremendous heartfelt need for closeness, roots, involvement in the lives of others, and for a caring community. We all want to care for others and be cared for by others.
And that is what is held out by Jesus. That is what the Church is all about – to bring alive the statement of Jesus that we are to love one another as he has loved us.
But in order to understand this community of love we are called to be, we have to get back to St. Paul’s great mystery. That is our bedrock – that the way a husband loves his wife reveals how Jesus loves the Church. We need to look to Matrimony. We need to examine it and see that our married people understand their own significance.
One of our problems, though, is that we don’t have an adequate understanding of any vocation, never mind the vocation of Matrimony. We keep mixing career and vocation. For example, we make being doctor or a lawyer or a teacher a vocation. It’s not – it’s a career, and a very good and very beautiful career that offers the possibility of a high level of service in accordance with the Gospel. But service (or ministry) looms too large in our consciousness. It takes too big a place in our understanding of what being Gospel is. We think the prime, almost exclusive mission Jesus Christ has called us to, is one of service rather than one of love, or to be more fair about it, we’ve equated love with service.
Service can be and frequently is an expression of the love that exists between people, but the real love is the relationship we establish with one another and that is only symbolized by what we do for one another.
Really, there are only four vocations in the Church: Matrimony, Dedicated Single Life, Religious Life and Priesthood. Each one of these vocations is a unique way to love within the faith family. The fact is that a vocation doesn’t focus on what we do. It’s a call to a specific relationship to the rest of the faithful. It is this relationship with the people of the Church that is our call and it is this we have to spend our life to establish.
How we exercise our talents can be our career. It might be as a librarian, a teacher, a director of religious education, a counselor, a social worker or what have you. Career or profession, then, concerns itself with ministry. Whereas vocation concerns itself with a way of life. Fundamentally, being a member of the Church is to commit myself to a way of life.
All too often, however, we look on vocation in terms of what we do: What do I do as a priest? What do I do as a sister? What do I do as a committed baptized-confirmed person? But that’s the second question. The first question and the basic one for the adult in the Church is: What fundamental relationship am I going to have with the people of God? As a celibate in Orders? As a celibate in community? As a married person? As a celibate lay person?
Only then can I ask myself: How am I going to spend that relationship in your midst? How am I going to spend my marriage? My Orders? My community? How am I going to express, in concrete terms, my relationship with my fellow believers? Whether that relationship is direct, such as priesthood, or indirect, such as marriage or religious life.
And when we grasp this idea of vocation, then we can begin to approach an understanding of the Sacrament of Matrimony and therefore of the Church.
Fr. Chuck Gallagher, S.J., was the founding director of the PMRC (now EverMore in Love). He was a compelling and prophetic voice in the Catholic Church for the Sacrament of Matrimony and the joy of the incarnation for over five decades, also founding Worldwide Marriage Encounter. This post is an excerpt of Fr. Chuck’s book, One Flesh
