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“To be saints is not the privilege for a few, but a vocation for everyone.” – Pope Francis

“Our concern must be to know God’s will. We must enter that path if God wants, when God wants, and how God wants.” – St Gianna Molla

“The place that God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet.” – Fredrick Buechner

“There is no place for selfishness, and no place for fear. Do not be afraid, then, when love makes demands.” – Pope John Paul II

“The Christian vocation is first and foremost a call to love—a love that attracts us and draws us out of ourselves.” – Pope Francis

“We all have a vocation. God has placed us in this life to fill a special need that no one else can accomplish.” – St Francis de Sales

“Each woman who lives in the light of eternity can fulfill her vocation, no matter if it is in marriage, in a religious order, or in a worldly profession.” – Edith Stein

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MESSAGE OF POPE FRANCIS FOR THE 2021 WORLD DAY OF VOCATIONS (25 April 2021)

[The following text is taken verbatim from the Pope’s message. The complete document is found on the Net.]

Through his ordinary life, he [St Joseph] accomplished something extraordinary in the eyes of God.

God looks at the heart (cf.1 Samuel 16:7), and in Saint Joseph he recognized the heart of a father, able to give and generate life in the midst of daily routines. Vocations have this same goal: to beget and renew lives every day. The Lord desires to shape the hearts of fathers and mothers: hearts that are open, capable of great initiatives, generous in self-giving, compassionate in comforting anxieties and steadfast in strengthening hopes. The priesthood and the consecrated life greatly need these qualities nowadays, in times marked by fragility but also by the sufferings due to the pandemic…

Saint Joseph suggests to us three key words for each individual’s vocation. The first is dream. Everyone dreams of finding fulfilment in life. We rightly nurture great hopes, lofty aspirations that ephemeral goals – like success, money and entertainment – cannot satisfy. If we were to ask people to express in one word their life’s dream, … the answer [would be]: “to be loved.” It is love that gives meaning to life… Indeed, we only have life if we give it; we truly possess it only if we generously give it away. Saint Joseph has much to tell us in this regard, because, through the dreams that God inspired in him, he made of his life a gift.

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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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1. When you hear or use the word “vocation,” what comes to your mind? What, in simple words, is a vocation?

Vocation is a call to love and serve God; a call to my life to be a response to something (or someone) beyond myself; a reminder that I need to go beyond myself to a particular mission; an expression of a deep desire to get into the shoes of others in need; it is a journey upon untreaded paths; in short, it is a deliberate ‘yes’ to a mission that is challenging and comforting.

2. According to you, are we (Religious) sincerely trying to promote the vocation of every person – to live as Jesus showed, and do God’s work – or, are we simply looking for “hands for work” (people to staff our institutions)?

Sometimes I feel that many of us religious are not trying to promote the vocation of serving the Church and the society. We need to realize the dream or ideal for which one has joined the religious life. True, we need hands and human resources to carry out the mission of our Congregation, but we force the apostolate upon the individuals, who don’t have any liking for that type of work; instead, we can have constant re-visiting of our apostolates, according to the signs of the times, in order to enable our new recruits to contribute their mite to the vision and mission of the congregation.

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Sr Ranjana Carval FS

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When I hear the word “Vocation” what comes immediately to my mind is: priestly or religious vocation.

But vocation is much more than that. It is deep call or impulse one feels as coming from the divine to follow a particular way of life or career. Each individual is called for a unique way of life and it is not easy to understand exactly what God wants through this call. It needs a process of discernment and accompaniment. We need to help the young person to understand himself/herself and his/her temperament, aptitude and also discern suitability of the candidate for a particular vocation.

As for our understanding and praxis of “vocation promotion,” I feel we as religious currently trying to find “hands for work” to staff our institutions as the candidates’ numbers are coming down. In this process of looking for numbers, there is a danger of losing a genuine religious vocation, either because of joining a particular congregation without proper knowledge and become misfits, because a religious order recruits young people with the hope that they will slowly get used to the particular way of life. In this process, “snatching” of candidates is also done. What I mean is: A candidate preparing to go to one congregation, may be wooed by another congregation and taken in.

Fr Jose Palely SDB

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I belong to the Congregation of Brothers of St Michael, Coimbatore. My vocation story is not dramatic. It happened in a very ordinary way.

I grew up in a village of Namakkal District of Tamilnadu. My dad was working at the Salem Cooperative Sugar Mill and my mum was working on the farm. I have a younger sister and a younger brother. In my childhood days, our life was quite hard. We lived in a small house without electricity.  I studied in a Catholic school up to 10^th standard and did my higher secondary in a Muslim school.

As a child, I was not pious. In fact, I was a very a naughty boy. But my mum and teachers nurtured in me love for God and a helping tendency. My mum is very religious, an ardent devotee of Our Lady of Vailankanni. Every day she would narrate lots of bedtime stories with morals. The stories were about “how God protects the people who have faith in him and love him more; they inherit the good values and virtues.”   She used to take us to the parish church and make us sit near her.

Brother Johnson BSM

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Here is the frank and though-provoking vocation story of Olympio, once a happy Salesian priest, and now a happy married man. His story challenges us to have a deeper look at what we mean by “vocation,” and how meaningfully we live it.—Editor

I belong to a WhatsApp chat room. Every morning I get hit with a fusillade of exchanges. Most of the messages do not interest me. Yet, I faithfully browse through them every single day. Why am I still a member of this group? The members share a common past. Like me, they are all veteran alumni of Don Bosco High School, Lonavla (DBL), India.

One of the guys once posted charming pictures of the drive up the Western Ghats. As you climb into Khandala Sunset Point before entering Lonavla, the landscape turns otherworldly. To most people, it meant nothing. For me, it was sheer nostalgia. It took me back to the times when we made our annual treks to Lonavla. And that took me back to the good old days.

Olympio D’Mello

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I grew up in Mangalore in a very happy and devout family. I really enjoyed my childhood to the full.  My father was a man of faith, goodness and had great respect for people.  The former Bishop of Mangalore, Mgr Aloysius Paul D’Souza, who was our assistant parish priest as a young priest, said this about my father, “Whenever I see your father praying, I too feel like praying.”

Tragedy… and then a Large, Happy Family

Tragedy hit us. The saddest day in my life was when our mother expired, leaving behind eight of us. My sister was twenty-three then, and I was twelve. My father got married again, as he could not manage looking after eight of us. Four children were born in his second marriage. So, we are twelve children in all. We have been a very happy, united family.

Sr Stella D’Souza PBVM

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One of the former provincials of the Salesians of Don Bosco, Fr Mathew Maruvathrail SDB, had this experience.  When he was an aspirant, as he went home for holidays, he took with him two holy pictures—one of Dominic Savio and the other of Don Bosco.  Seeing the pictures, his mother asked him who they were.  Showing the pious-looking picture of the young boy, with his eyes looking up to heaven, young Mathew said that it was saint Dominic Savio.  The mother nodded approvingly.  And showing the other picture, of a priest with a smiling face, surrounded by a group of unruly youth, he told her it was saint Don Bosco, the founder of the Salesians.  Finding it hard to believe what he said, his mother exclaimed: “Eh, what kind of a saint is this?  He does not have the look of a saint. He is not serious!” Apparently, someone with a smiling face surrounded by unruly youngsters did not fit her standard of holiness. Saints are supposed to be serious and austere-looking, with a rosary or cross in their hand. Or, are they?

Holiness in God

When the word “holy” is used in the Bible, it means mostly “that which is separate,” and “that which.” is without blemish.”  It is in this sense that the Bible speaks of God as holy (Isaiah 6:3; Leviticus 19:2; John 17:11; 1 Peter 1:15-16).  God is totally separate from creatures in the sense that God is supremely transcendent.  And God is without any blemish whatsoever.  He is full of goodness, rather, he is Goodness.   The Old Testament calls God “the Holy One.”   Because God is full of goodness and mercy, he is very close to us and tenderly cares for us and tells each of us: “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3);  “I have carved you on the palm of my hands” (Isaiah 49:16), “I will rebuild you” (Jeremiah 31:4).

Fr Jose Kuttianimattathil SDB

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December 12, 2020, was the 262^nd and last day of the non-stop daily feeding of people in the Tengra and Sealdah station area of Kolkata. The people there were severely affected by the first lockdown. This initiative of the Salesian Provincial House community in Kolkata was spearheaded by Father Joseph Aymanathil the first Salesian to die of Covid 19 in Salesian India. The sudden and unexpected lockdown and its continuation for months brought about untold sufferings to the most vulnerable sections of the society—daily wage earners, scavengers, slum dwellers, beggars.

When hunger struck the people hit by the lockdown, we decided to provide cooked food daily to the starving people in the slums nearby and the footpaths around Sealdah Railway station. We could feed around 1500 people daily during the first six months. Once the lockdown was partially lifted, this number came down to around 300. A group of dedicated volunteers braving the virus daily saw to the preparation and distribution of food, an incredible feat indeed and display of their grit and perseverance. Food was transported to various locations by van rickshaws. The distribution was done strictly adhering to Covid 19 protocol. For almost all the beneficiaries, it was the only meal of the day for months. Life had come to almost a standstill for so many.

Fr Mathew George SDB

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