‘Getting in all sorts of trouble’ part of one’s personal vocation

At the risk of making the living reality of a vocation seem overly schematized, we note what might be called vocation’s three levels. First, there is the general Christian vocation that comes with Baptism and is reaffirmed in Confirmation: the calling to love and serve God and neighbor, and to participate in the life and work of Christ’s Church. This general calling is specified by the vocation to a particular state of life — the clerical state, consecrated life, marriage, the single lay state — each with its own particular obligations and opportunities. Finally, the baptismal vocation and the state in life vocation are further specified for each individual in a personal vocation shaped by the unique, concrete circumstances of his or her life.

For a layperson to suppose only a small, select handful of people — clergy and religious — have real, honest-to-goodness callings from God is a grave obstacle to wholehearted participation in saving the Church as part of his or her personal vocation. That was illustrated by something Flannery O’Connor said when a correspondent asked her why she, a Catholic novelist and short story writer, wrote so often about Bible Belt Fundamentalist fanatics rather than her fellow Catholics. This was O’Connor’s reply: 

To a lot of Protestants I know, monks and nuns are fanatics, none greater. And to a lot of the monks and nuns I know, my Protestant prophets are fanatics. For my part, I think the only difference between them is that if you are a Catholic and have this intensity of belief you join the convent and are heard from no more; whereas if you are a Protestant, and have it, there is no convent for you to join and you go about in the world, getting in all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don’t believe anything much at all down upon your head. 

O’Connor’s response reflects the assumption, common to Catholics then and now, that “intensity of belief” must lead a Catholic to the priesthood or religious life. Yet Flannery O’Connor herself was a shining example of a Catholic layperson living and working in the world whose deeply held faith illuminated her art. In the present crisis of the Church, it is more than time for Catholic lay people, rising to the diverse challenges and opportunities of their personal vocations, to begin — or in some cases continue — “getting in all sorts of trouble” by witnessing to the Faith in the face of hostile, militant secularism.