All over the province of Cebu this week, seminarians are in different parishes to explain what vocation is all about. More particularly, they try to persuade the youth to entertain the thought that God may be calling them to the priesthood or religious life.
Most of what I am going to write in this column I have already mentioned to my students.
The first vocation is to be a good human being. For us Christians, the second is to be committed to our faith. Only then can we entertain the thought that God may be calling us to the priesthood or religious life. To put it in other words: Before one can become a good priest or nun, one has to be a good Christian. And before becoming a good Christian, one has to be a good human person.
The call to be a good human being is difficult enough. One celebrated philosophy professor in Ateneo de Manila famously said, “Madaling maging tao. Mahirap magpaka-tao.” To be a human being exclusively in the biological sense is a matter of existing. To be an authentic human person involves a life-long process of nurturing right relationship with the self, fellow human beings, nature and God.
Jesus himself did not call everyone to a radical kind of apostleship or discipleship. He must have seen something in the rich, young man for he called him to sell everything he has and give the money to the poor. For this young man, the calling was more than plain obedience to the commandments. Yet, Jesus did not demand that Martha, Mary, Nicodemus and many others surrender their property.
This brings us to the method of calling. In this regard, Jesus violated all the known rules of advertising a product. If we use the contemporary standards of commercialism, Jesus could be a poor advertiser. A manager who is in need of people to work for him would entice them by emphasizing the perks of the job. The more dire is the need for personnel, the more he would enhance the “come-ons.” The manager would possibly proclaim, “You are being recruited for a job that other people, if they only know, would do anything to get.”
The tack that Jesus took was diametrically opposed to today’s standards of good business advertisement. He would exhort potential disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily, and follow me,” (Lk. 9:26). In another instance, he would boldly proclaim, “Whoever does not hate father or mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, cannot be my disciple,” (Lk. 14:26). When a disciple expressed the desire to follow him but begged that he be first allowed to bury his father, Jesus was uncompromising, “Let the dead bury the dead,” (Mt. 8:22, Lk. 9:60). In one instance, when two brothers who were parts of his inner circle wanted to be assured that they would occupy seats “one on the left and the other on the right” of Jesus when he would be proclaimed king, Jesus responded, “You do not know what you are talking about.” Then he warned the two that they would have to experience suffering like him. Since he was an itinerant preacher, Jesus told his followers that he does not even have a permanent residence. “Foxes have holes and birds in the sky have nests but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head on.” (Mt. 8:20).
To put it plainly, Jesus did not have the habit of sugar coating his radical demands. He honestly warned his disciples that they would face hostility and suffer much.
When we now go to the aim of telling the youth to entertain the thought that God may be calling them to the religious life, should we regale them with stories about the perks and privileges of the religious life? Should we not tell the youth that an authentic religious life is demanding? Well, it would be another problem if what we tell them is different from the reality that they see. They can see the gap between the message that that religious life is full of crosses and the absence of the cross in the lives of the religious that they encounter.
But we should not skirt from telling them the ideal, while admitting that we often fall short.
Telling the youth that religious life demands much from them would mean that only few would be encouraged to enter. But the few would be more committed and be without illusions. And hopefully, they would not be expecting the perks.