National Vocation Awareness Week

This week, January 10-16, is National Vocation Awareness Week. While the emphasis is on vocations to the priesthood and consecrated life, we do well to remember other vocations as well. The simple but profound fact is that without the vocation to marriage, we would have no priests, no consecrated men and women. The sacrament of marriage is a magnificent one, and every day I pray for married couples, especially among my own family and friends. I ask our dear Lord, who worked his first miracle at the wedding at Cana, to give them all the strength and the courage they need to be faithful to their vocation, to God and to each other. And I thank God for their deep, abiding love that "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things" (1 Cor 13:7). In them and through them, Christ makes all things new. Hallelujah!

It was to a married woman that St. Francis de Sales wrote this practical advice: "We must love all that God loves, and he loves our vocation; so let us love it too and not waste our energy hankering after a different sort of life, but get on with our job (St. Francis de Sales, Selected Letters Translated by Elisabeth Stopp). This is excellent counsel for all, and so this week I've been praying that each one of us will indeed love our God-given vocation and throw ourselves into it with boundless enthusiasm and great faith, confident that the Lord who calls us wants nothing less than our total cooperation and our absolute joy. Even if we are in the midst of discerning our vocation in life, we are still at this precise moment within a vocation to which God has called us, and that alone is reason to rejoice.

Thank you, dear Lord, for our respective vocations. Help us to bloom where we're planted and thus give glory to you. Amen.