Sr Sandhya, whose experience includes teaching in different parts of India and leadership in her congregation, finds that vocation is a never-ending process. She recalls a formator whose love and wisdom helped her much.
“Vocation more than our own choice, is a response to the Lord’s unmerited call.” (Pope Francis, Letter to the Priests, 4 Aug. 2019)
Vocation, being a life option, is planted in us like a tiny seed by God even as we were conceived in our mother’s womb. It may be a call to seek God in the intimacy of marriage or a call to union with God in celibate life. The primacy of the path whom one chooses—reaching God through a human partner or through religious community and mission—decides the path one will follow. To some, the discerning of vocations may seem as tangible as a gentle breeze. For some others the discerning of vocation may be an unquenchable thirst, a search for months and years before arriving at a decision. What is important here is to know that God is the giver of our vocation.
Looking back over more than forty years of my celibate life, I can see how staying on in my chosen vocation has been a continuous process of discernment and decision-making. In the face of hardships and crises of adolescence (I joined as a teenager), midlife and post-midlife, what kept sustaining me was my decision to listen repeatedly to the unmerited call of Jesus, to see him at the center of my life and my desire to be like Him in prayer, community and mission.
Sr Sandhya SND
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