Ring, Ring . . . Vocation Calling

There were two factors that deflected me from life as a priest: Janice Betz and the heady, exclusive concept of Vocation.  It took Bob Hartigan, an old seminarian to see the power and freedom of vocation in my own married life 25 years after Janice. 

When I was 13, I imagined going to the seminary.  In bold contrast to today’s stories of abuse, the priests I knew were men I admired.  Our old white-haired pastor was a kind, exemaplary figure, reading stories of heroic men to the boys at St. Mary’s School.  Bishop Sheen was on TV weekly, eloquent and entertaining, perhaps the first glimpse I had of building an intellectual argument, his prop a two-sided blackboard that his “angels” would mysteriously flip to its blank side when it was off camera.  And in 7^th grade all of us altar boys were taken on a field trip to the nearby Maryknoll seminary for a day of nature and sports, hosted by a charismatic twenty-something seminarian.  We’d subscribed to Maryknoll Magazine after that, feeding monthly my fantasy of a life of adventure, added as a layer of motivation atop my instinctive attraction to the mystery of celebrating Mass.

Janice Betz was a 7^th grader in the church choir of our new parish, filling my adolescent innocence with fantasies un-priestlike, mysteries different from those I found in church, with a sense of urgency that contrasted with the calm daydreaming in Maryknoll.  As simple as that kind of experience is for most to imagine, there was also in my head the struggle with the idea of what we were taught in Catholic school as “vocation”, which was taught as something that you either had or you hadn’t.  Explained about as poorly as a “dirty” picture or a “clean” job, “vocation” became one of those specters in my 7^th grade mind, appearing on the periphery of my vision, but out of reach, out of focus.  So Janice Betz, mine in imagination only, cooked my vocational goose and sent me to regular High School at 14.  There, my love life mediocre at best, I found another group of priests to admire, this time a group of them who lived together in the school, who wore cassocks and large pectoral crosses on their chests, and sashes around their waists, who were diverse characters, like the Jesuits I’d come to know later.  At 16 as my senior year approached I found myself again thinking about seminary when I began to consider colleges. 

Since my love-life continued to exist only in my imagination, the only impediment to my entering seminary after high school was that still-spectral idea of vocation.  It was kind of like “mono”, the virus that you either got or you didn’t, and you never knew why.  Momentum carried me down the wide path of normal worldly life, and I found myself called to a life of married love and fatherhood.  It was Bob Hartigan who blew me away 15 years into that married life with a new sense of vocation, who put flesh on the specter at the periphery of my awareness, who brought it front and center and freed me to take a good look at it. 

Bob Hartigan found his “vocation” at 50 and joined the Jesuits at twice the age of the average “seminarian”.   After two years in a residential study program as a “Novice” he was assigned two years of service called “Regency”.  To the advantage of many of us at the university, he was assigned to Campus Ministry, and immediately began opening to all of us a fresh look at vocation, not as a yes or no question, but as a call to everyone to an intimate relationship with God.  In his own process of deciding whether or not to become a priest, Bob had found something he knew would help all of us, in the “Ignatian” ways of considering who we are, and how we are called. 

Bob was like our secret agent, a person like us who had lived a life of a “layperson”, a non-priest; he brought us into the tent, literally.  He would invite all of us to a free lunch at the Jesuit residence, where we would have a sandwich and a cup of coffee and watch a presentation that he put together about opportunities for us to enjoy the life he’d discovered with the Jesuits.  “Ignatian” became a familiar word on campus, along with “Spiritual Exercises” and “discernment”.  He broke the news to us.  We were welcome too.  He convinced us with his life-wrinkled face lit up by a broad smile, his gray hair convincing us that vocation was not something that disappeared with acne.  He made it obvious that if God could call an old guy like him, God could call us too, and call us to the life that he had discovered in Ignatian spirituality.  We learned that we were not only allowed, but encouraged to take advantage of eight-day and even 30-day retreats, spending time in intimate companionship with God, returning to our “normal” lives in the world and finding God “in all things”, living in a world unchanged but transfigured. 

Bob’s invitation changed my life, and Kathy’s.  We gave each other time to go away for 8-day retreats, and a few years ago we shared the experience of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola’s way of coming to know ourselves as beloved of God and called to love.  Fr. Bob Hartigan S.J. died a couple of years ago in the downtown parish where he served.  His vocation was calling all of us, freeing us from the old, exclusive idea of “vocation” as  this-or-that, yes-or-no.  His enthusiasm in opening wide the door of Ignatian Spirituality was part of a movement that has spread throughout Jesuit parishes, schools, and colleges as well as deeply and broadly in the internet.  We’re all called.  We’re all warmly invited. Here's a link.

Vocation is not a call from our lives to God; it is a call into our lives, where God is waiting for us, longing for us.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.