SHALL WE DANCE?

by Anne Husted Burleigh

Only a short time ago many Catholic bishops used a standard method for attracting young people to the priesthood and religious life. Apparently fearing that outright recruitment might backfire and frighten prospective candidates, they remarked on vocations only in a general way, hoping that the example of Christian faith in itself would attract vocations. Now, however, certain energetic bishops and cardinals realize something more is needed: an invitation.

“Walk up and ask,” says Edward Cardinal Egan of New York. He himself is cheerfully relentless in issuing that invitation everywhere he goes. He has told New Yorkers that any young single man in his archdiocese is fair game for being invited to investigate the priestly vocation. His method works. As bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut, he ordained 54 priests in 11 years.

Fr. Robert F. McKeon, special assistant for vocations in the New York Archdiocese, has said in Catholic New York that the cardinal’s strategy works “because it is modeled on the style of Jesus, who called his apostles with the direct request, ‘Come, follow me.’” This direct approach, says Fr. McKeon, helps men overcome the fears and doubts, ingrained in our culture, about any kind of lifelong commitment, especially to the religious life.

Meanwhile, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick of Washington has gone where young people congregate. Scarcely had he received the red hat than he went to Lulu’s Club in Washington to address young people gathered for Theology on Tap, a successful 20-year program in cities around the country for the purpose of bringing solid theology to spiritually hungry but typically poorly formed young Catholics in their twenties and thirties. Theology on Tap meets these young folk where they congregate, in bars and coffeehouses.

“You have to make the effort to take control of your life and make sure that you are becoming all that God wants you to be, all that you can be,” Cardinal McCarrick told his audience. “It is possible to rush through all of this and end up with nothing.” He has no problem with meeting young people in such an unlikely setting. Evangelization is his goal. “We need to be about spreading the good news of our Lord and Savior,” he says. “The good news is that God wants to walk with you, wants to love you, every single day.”

In Cincinnati, Ohio, where Theology on Tap meets at the Mt. Adams Bookstore and Café and draws crowds of 80 to 200 each session, Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk enthusiastically answered a call to speak to the group.
In Little Rock, Arkansas, Bishop J. Peter Sartain, ordained bishop just last year, writes an eloquent column in the Arkansas Catholic, in which he regularly invites young people — indeed all his flock — to examine their lives and honestly consider where the Lord is leading them.

“‘To live means to be desired and loved by God, moment after moment,’” he recently wrote, quoting a Vatican document on the consecrated life. If that is so, then most of us live our lives backward, emphasizing not that God desires and loves us, but rather that we desire and love God, or others, or any number of things. Most of us, Bishop Sartain says, if asked to define our life, would naturally focus on the “I,” declaring that “to live means that I” am such-and-such or want to do such-and-such, listing “things that ‘I’ would accomplish, achieve, feel, think, know, do.” He reminds us that the true definition of life “does not begin with anything ‘I’ set as a goal for myself. Instead, it begins with recognizing that the only reason I am alive is that I am desired and loved by God.” The point is that “I am neither the source nor the goal of my life.” I am “desired and loved by God, moment after moment, and therefore I am alive.” My very definition is that I depend entirely on God. I would not be here if God were not here, loving and desiring me. Therefore, says Bishop Sartain, “my existence is evidence that God exists!”

Pondering that not I but God is the center of my life causes a “revolution” in one’s heart, Bishop Sartain points out. “If the reason I am alive is that I am a desire of God, the beloved of God, a thought of God, an object of God’s favor, then nourishing a relationship with God brings me even more to life. Making myself the center, the point of it all, only lessens me.”

The young man who comes to this realization may leap to conclude that if he is alive because God wants him to be, then everything that restricts the flow of love between him and God should be cleared away. His happiness lies in freely receiving and loving God. He begins to see that by surrendering himself to God, losing himself, as the Gospel says, he actually finds himself.

Such thoughts lead to religious vocations. “It is the revolutionary irony of the Gospel,” says Bishop Sartain, “that in forgetting myself I find myself, that in surrendering myself to God as his instrument I come alive.”

He points out that young people considering a vocation sometimes ask, “Should ‘I’ do this?” This is the wrong question; it is the sort of question that might come up when one is considering a career change. The question, however, is not whether I should do this, but rather how can I surrender myself to the truth that God loves and desires me.

“Discerning a vocation,” Bishop Sartain stresses, “is a progressive willingness to give myself to that truth, to be defined by God’s desire and love for me, to want to become an image of God’s love and desire for everyone.” In our age, he acknowledges, when the popular cry insists on self-fulfillment, “that is no easy task.” Yet self-fulfillment is not the proper goal of the Catholic who is discerning a vocation. God’s love means that he wants the best for us; his best will always be far beyond whatever our own paltry fulfillment might be.

Bishop Sartain knows both the questions and answers of those wondering if they can take the leap into religious life: “Am I afraid of falling? God will catch me. Am I too weak? Yes, but God is strong. Will I miss my former life? Probably, but I will gain something more. Will I abandon what I have built up? No, I will give it to God. Will I limit my future choices? Most definitely yes, but in giving myself to God I will gain everything.”

Bishop Sartain follows the Holy Father in asking his flock to pray for those considering vocations to the priesthood and consecrated life. Like John Paul II, he realizes that our gift of freedom is not for the purpose of self-assertion but for self-donation. What we receive through God’s love we do not hoard but give back to him. Pray then, asks Bishop Sartain, that those in discernment “will have the courage to stake their lives on what it means ‘to live.’”

Anne Husted Burleigh is a free-lance writer and wife, mother, and grandmother. She writes from her home at Turkey Ridge Farm in Rabbit Hash, Kentucky. 

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