Discerning in community
NTC/Juan Guajardo
Discerning God’s will can seem like a difficult and challenging process. Young men considering a priestly vocation weigh many questions.
How do I know what God wants from me? How do I know if what I am experiencing is the calling of God or just my own thoughts? How do I handle the internal and external pressures of making such a big decision that others may not support? Will I ultimately have the strength to do this?
In seminary, every man studying to become a priest must take a class on Trinitarian theology. This is the study of God as the Trinity (Three persons, One God).
The first point of importance for us as bearers of His image is that God, in His essence, is a communion of persons. Even God is not alone. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the three persons in God’s unity.
What does this tell us? It tells us that it “is not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). We need other people. We are not meant to exist and make decisions in an isolated vacuum. We need the help of others: our friends, our parents, our community, and our priests to help illuminate the difficult road ahead.
The Vocations Office for the Diocese of Fort Worth has recently launched an opportunity for parishes to have vocations ministry teams. These teams of four to five people are designated by the pastors to spearhead promoting vocations in each parish. (See pages 32-34 for more information.) Responsibilities of the team range from making sure proper advertising is in place for upcoming events, as well as reminding the faithful in our diocese just how important religious vocations are — that they are not merely another job among jobs.
A vocation is the calling within which God establishes a person’s path to know, love, and serve Him best. The priesthood is thus a vocation, a supernatural calling to a young man to follow Christ as the Good Shepherd for His people.
These teams need your help. To foster and increase vocations in our diocese, we need a community to reawaken in our people the dignity of the priesthood, its value, and the tremendous honor it brings to a family that God would choose their son for this glorious and awe-filled adventure. This honor does not originate in ourselves, but it is a calling that comes forth from God Himself.
St. John Vianney, the patron of diocesan priests, once said, “If I were to meet a priest and an angel, I should salute the priest before I saluted the angel. The latter is the friend of God; but the priest holds His place.”
At the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass every Sunday, the priest in a special way stands in persona Christi. As he says the words of consecration over the bread and wine, Jesus is speaking in and through him. The result is the Bread of Life, the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, our spiritual food, the nourishment of our souls, and union with God Himself.
Without this bread from heaven, we have no life within us.
Let us pray for more priests, not only to come from other places, from other families, from other parishes, but from our own, so that one day, at the end of our lives, when a priest forgives us our sins, anoints us, and offers us the Eucharist as food for the journey to heaven, maybe we can experience the added gift of knowing that this priest came from our own community, and now stands between heaven and Earth as a bridge for us to arrive to our true and eternal homeland.
Father Brett Metzler serves as Chaplain at Nolan Catholic High School in Fort Worth and as the Vocations Director for the diocese. Find his regular columns for the North Texas Catholic here.