For Wilshire Baptist Church
Did you know that Sunday was the World Day of Prayer for Vocations? I didn’t either until this morning when I watched the weekly Sunday mass from St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Victoria, Texas. That church, like Wilshire and many others, has been live streaming their weekly services, and my brother-in-law Jim has been sending me the Facebook link the past few weeks.
I’ve enjoyed watching and listening because that is Jim’s lifelong church and was the home church of his sister Debra, my first wife. I attended services there many times, was married there, and attended ordinations, dedications and funerals. It’s a beautiful old building, dedicated in 1904, but the congregation was established in a log building at that site in 1824 simultaneously with the founding of Victoria. The church and city hall face each other today at the corner of Main and Church streets.
St. Mary’s, like all churches, is not a building but is the people who worship there and sustain a ministry and mission together. In Victoria, that has been an ongoing work for 196 years. At Wilshire, we’ve been at it together for 69 years. That work has never been more important than now, and so my ears perked up when I learned that the Catholic church designates the Fourth Sunday of Easter as the World Day of Prayer for Vocations. It is a day to lift up and support those who have been called to a vocation of ministry in whatever form that takes.
In the official prayer for the day, these excerpts may stand out whether we’re Catholic or not:
Holy Spirit, stir within us the passion to promote vocations to the consecrated life.
Inspire us daily to respond to Your call with boundless compassion, abundant generosity, and radical availability.
Help us to remember our own baptismal call to rouse us to invite the next generation to hear and respond to Your call.
Inspire parents, families, and lay ecclesial ministers to begin a conversation with young (people) to consider how they will live lives of holiness and sacred service.
Disrupt our comfortable lives and complacent attitudes with new ideas to respond courageously and creatively with a daily ‘YES!’
I can’t imagine a more daunting time than now to be in the professional ministry, whether a church pastor, a chaplain, a missionary, a teacher or whatever. The world has been “disrupted” for sure by Coronavirus; not only has the method and means of ministry been upended, but the range of human needs – spiritual, physical, emotional – has been stretched to the horizons. Likewise, I can’t imagine being on the cusp of discernment about the ministry and not knowing if the vocation will look as it once did or will be redefined in ways that are still unknown. In my own experience, the way journalism is practiced today is very different from what I learned in school. But those changes have come over decades and not in a matter of weeks.
In this environment, a prayer for vocations has never been more relevant or needed. However, let’s not forget that all of us are called to ministry no matter what we do to make a living. Clergy and laity alike have seen the landscape change regarding how they can serve others through their chosen occupations.
One last thought: The call to vocation, whether ordained or not, can start early if we nurture it. In his homily on Sunday, the pastor at St. Mary’s told a story of when he was teaching at an elementary school and a boy in the class asked him how old one has to be to become a priest. He answered that one is usually around 25 years old. To which the boy asked, “Even if I start training now? Is it possible to start training now?” To which a teacher standing nearby answered, “You already are training now.”