CIDC Congregational Immersion and Discernment of Call discernment Life Call National Vocations Awareness Week vocation
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August 7, 2024
Photo by Cathal Mac an Bheatha.

In Australia, we commemorate National Vocations Awareness Week from 4-11 August 2024.

In 2013, in Gaudete et Exsultate Pope Francis called us to “rejoice and be glad” and to live holiness in today’s world. The 2019 General Chapter of the Sisters of Saint Joseph called us, “Let’s rejoice in our vowed religious life”. Divine love present in us calls us constantly, yet are we awake? The late Jesuit Pedro Arrupe called us to “Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything”.

In scripture, the term ‘rejoice’ is used to express a deep sense of joy, happiness, and gladness, often in the context of celebrating God’s goodness, salvation, or blessings.

A spirituality of ‘rejoicing’ calls us to live life to the full. We have a potential within us to become a new type of people rejoicing and engaging in the world.

We are all called to live the life we are given, and the journey is one of sifting and sorting how to open our heart and mind into the fullness of life available to each of us. Our quest for life is a daily invitation to live into our unique call to life. This seeking is the way of discernment.

Discernment is the descent into the depths of the soul where we walk into the inner cave of Mystery, intuitive energy, the deep self.
There we wait to know, not the answer,
But the integrity of the call.Doris Klein CSA

A life of discernment means making choices for life. Scripture reminds us that our choices are caught up with God’s choices. “You did not choose me. No, I chose you.” (Jn 15:6) Life calls us to live into our full potential and in the process of doing this we can choose to ‘rejoice’ all the way.

“We have in our midst the infinite potential to create a sustainable world, a world of shared life, a just distribution of resources, a new world connectivity to the whole, a new world soul. The power is within us. The human person is God-in-the-making. This is the religion of tomorrow, not one of finality, but of ongoing revelation of divine light.”
[Delio, Ilia. The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole (p. 317). Orbis Books. Kindle Edition.]

Believe in the whisperings of God to your own heart…Mary MacKillop to her mother Flora, 1868 (aged 26)

So, let’s rejoice in our life call to life in whatever the call is for each one of us. Let’s embrace every opportunity to realise who we are… and rejoice in this!

Therese Carroll rsj
Convenor, Congregational Immersion and Discernment of Call