Some people probably think I
am insane. I voluntarily left my well-paying job as an attorney. By
the time I left that job, every year I was accruing five weeks of vacation
time. We also got more than a half dozen holidays off every year. I
haven’t yet mentioned that we also got the week between Christmas Day and New
Year’s Day off. As you might expect, the job had excellent
benefits. I was under relatively little stress at that job. I even
felt somewhat of a sense of fulfillment in that position. As I insinuated
at the beginning, there are people who likely think I am crazy.
However, I was just not happy. I was not deriving enough satisfaction out
of my work. Later, I would conclude that I had not been sufficiently
nourishing my soul in that employment. At the time, I
could not articulate specifically what my vocation was; I just knew I was not
doing what I was supposed to be doing.
Accordingly, I left my job as a lawyer. I got accepted into the Peace
Corps. I moved to Morocco.
Rather than spend significant time here describing my tenure as a Peace Corps
Volunteer and my time in Morocco,
I refer you to the blog I maintained when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer (see
the link at the side of this webpage). For present purposes, I merely offer
a couple of pieces of information. I
served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the field of Youth Development. I
taught English as a second language to Moroccan youths and otherwise helped
them become more well-rounded individuals.
While I spent a significant
amount of time working, I also had a great deal of spare time. I passed
much of my free time reading. As my time in Morocco progressed, I read more and
more spiritual books. I read the entire Bible. I slowly savored
“The Imitation of Christ” by Thomas a Kempis. I read works of Thomas
Merton.
I also read about spiritual
disciplines, namely, solitude yet also spiritual community, as well as serving
others, living simply, praying, studying God’s Word, meditating upon it and
submitting to God. I noted that these practices were all tendencies I had
been developing in Morocco,
and that I hoped to retain them in whatever endeavor I next undertook.
Soon after I read about the
spiritual disciplines, I read Thomas Merton’s autobiography, “The Seven Storey
Mountain.” I realized that as a monk, Merton spent time in spiritual
community as well as in solitude, and that he was serving others, was living a
simple lifestyle, and was praying, and was reading The Word and was studying
and meditating upon It. He was trying to submit to God as much as he
could. I suddenly wondered, “Has God been calling me to be a monk?”
In Morocco,
I often thought about what I would do once I returned to the U.S. I
had been thinking that I wanted to use my skills to help people, so that I
would be serving God, and doing what He wanted me to do. Indeed, a
vocation is the job or occupation to which God calls a person. I hadn’t
realized that in trying to determine what my next undertaking would be, I had
been trying to discern my vocation. I had been trying to figure out what
particular work and lifestyle God had in mind for me.
I had found that silence and
solitude had been quite helpful as I discerned my vocation. In my
discernment, I had spent much time in prayer, much as contemplative monks do.
Some people might think of contemplative monks as escaping from the
world. Contemplative monks do not seek to shut out the world and never
again have contact with the world. Rather, they seek to share the fruits
of their contemplative life with those who do not live in the monastery.
Indeed, people come here to
the hermitage sometimes only for part of the day, at times coming only for Mass. Others come and often
stay overnight here at the hermitage. They come to enjoy the
silence. They clear their heads. Have you ever made a bad
decision? Have you wished that you took more time to more carefully and
calmly consider what you were doing? We aim to help people sit in silence
and stillness so that they make bring the fruits of such contemplation back
into the rest of their lives.
In the silence and the
solitude I had had in Morocco,
I found that I was better able to listen to God. Yet back then, when I was
so often in such a quiet space, alone, I was not aware what God, or even I, was
doing in such a place. Rather, I was not aware what God was doing in me,
how He was transforming me and gently guiding me with the Holy Spirit.
Although it seemed like a
mystery as my life was unfolding, now, looking back, it seems obvious. God
was helping me evolve so that I would be happier. God wants us to be happy in simply being
ourselves. We are to do what we are good at doing. We are to meet
the world’s needs. We are to serve God and our neighbor. However,
in receiving this message, we are being directed in a way contradictory to what
the world often tells us. The world leads us to believe, and
unfortunately, we do often erroneously convince ourselves, that we need to buy
this particular thing, we need to have this other thing, we need to look a
certain way. Unfortunately, many of these messages are trying to deceive
us into following illusions, and also unfortunately, we follow many of these
misleading messages. We will not have any of these possessions with us
once we arrive on the other side of the divide between this life and the
next. Therefore, the question is raised: Do we even possess any of
it? In the material sense, in this life,
yes, we can legally own property. Yet we
won’t own it in eternity. All we have
eternally are our souls, are our spirits.
We do well when we tend well to the spirits of ourselves and
others.
You might think of acting well
now with a view to the next life as analogous to planning prudently for
retirement. People manage the income they
have coming in now so that they will enjoy their retirement later. All the more important it is to conduct
oneself well now so as to later be living in eternal life. That’s what God wants. And in getting there, he wants us to be happy
along the way.
True happiness is far easier
to achieve than it appears. We are called to listen to God and to obey
God. In so doing, we gain freedom. We are set free from things, no
longer enslaved to them. We are liberated from all which draws us away
from Him.
The prophet Isaiah proclaimed
The spirit of the Lord God is
upon me,
because the Lord has anointed
me;
He has sent me to bring good
news to the afflicted,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the
captives,
release to the prisoners[.] Isaiah 61:1-2.
Jesus explained that He was
making that Scripture passage come true as He was reading it one day in the
synagogue. Luke 4:16-21. Jesus shows us The Way, and tells us the good
news, which brings us back to God. God
calls us to our vocations so that we will become more ourselves. In setting aside work, activities and
lifestyles which, for many of us, do not bring us true happiness, we set
ourselves free; we are no longer prisoners to the illusions which society demands
us to impose upon ourselves. When we
accept the vocations to which God is calling us, we are no longer captives to
the lives we were never meant to live.
When we open our hearts, we become who God has always intended us to
be. We are then truly, profoundly
happy.
