The foundation of it all

First, thanks to everyone who responded (here or elsewhere) to my thing on 1 Cor 7. I have something of a follow-up drafted and I will get that out soon (“soon” being a mostly useless word indicating “sometime in the future”) but I wanted to get my overall thoughts sorted out this week, so that’s going on the back burner for now. (I also just received another response, today, and I want to take time to read it and think about it.) But again, thank you for all your responses and the conversations that followed many of them; it was really helpful for me to think through these things further.

Origins of the lay vocation project

This current project (i.e. this study of the lay vocation) stems from a personal difficulty I had when my life took some twists and turns that I wasn’t anticipating and didn’t have vocabulary for. (iykyk.) As I tried to sort through it all, I came to realize that nobody else had vocabulary for it, either, and that’s why nearly all the advice I sought out and received turned out to be, at best, unhelpful. So with this project, I want to articulate what I wish I had had years ago: a vision for the Christian life that can accommodate the unexpected, that has a place for people whose lives do not follow a nice, tidy track.

I once found myself in a conversation with a young girl (under 10) about vocation — never mind how it came up — and I asked her what she thought God might call her to. She replied, very confidently: “A mom or a nun.” This is, in many Catholic circles, the standard answer for girls/women (and the same, I suppose, is probably true for men, mutatis mutandis), and it struck me as being very limited.

I thought of many other women I knew (myself included) whose lives did not follow either track: women who were well into adulthood and (as yet) unmarried; women who married but were enduring year after year of childlessness; women who spent several years in religious life before discerning out; women who had children before marriage, in whatever circumstance. And I thought of other adults, too; I don’t talk to men as closely as I talk to women, but I imagine there are as many navigating life without the ordinary moorings of (socially approved) commitment and life direction.

I wanted to affirm the goodness and value of all these lives even though they did not fit into traditional categories. A woman’s life does not begin when she makes final vows or delivers a baby (and the same for men, mutatis mutandis). Probably most people experience these things as the beginning of a new phase of life, as I did. But if we assert that they can’t otherwise relate to God or have a mature life of faith, can’t contribute to the building of the kingdom of God, don’t have a place in the Church — or that they now finally can do these things because they’ve achieved the status of “mother” (or whatever) and their earlier life was of less value — that is wrong in so many ways; scandalous and harmful to a person’s faith. I don’t know if I’ve heard anyone say these things explicitly, but it’s the natural conclusion of a lot of the rhetoric and literature. I know a number of people who have had their own faith so challenged or even harmed.¹

Ciszek and time

Most influential in my own thinking on this issue has been the writings of Walter Ciszek — specifically, his book He Leadeth Me. Ciszek was from Pennsylvania and became a Jesuit priest, hoping to serve in Russia, ministering to the people’s spiritual needs there. He did go to Russia, but for a while was unable to reveal to anyone that he was a priest; the Soviets believed him to be a Vatican spy and arrested him; he spent five years in solitary, with no access to sacraments (either given or received); he spent a decade and a half in prison camps in Siberia.² He had to face the question very seriously: Why am I not able to do the thing that I thought God was asking of me? And he came to realize that God’s will for his life was in the specific and particular circumstances of each day, the people he is presenting to him in this moment. I latched onto this idea because it opened up a way to see all of life — not just the parts that fit onto the track — as belonging to God.

We might say “my vocation is motherhood,” but what about the time we spend doing professional work, or gassing up the car, or voting? What about the years before kids? Or “my vocation is the nonprofit I started for a good cause,” but what about our family, our hobbies, our friends? What about going to the grocery store or talking a walk in the arboretum? We might say “I have discerned that my vocation is to do X” but what if X is impossible, or delayed for many years? What if it never happens? Is a person’s value in God’s eyes contingent on that? On anything?

In the Easter liturgies, we remember that all time belongs to God. That includes the time we spend waiting in line at the DMV, the time of undesired singleness or childlessness, the time drifting from job to job, the time spent preparing food, the time of frustration with one’s family or work or parish or neighborhood, the time waiting for maintenance to unlock the door because your ID badge isn’t working. That time belongs to God, too, and is an occasion to grow in love for him and for the people he has given us to love.

I’m personally very settled on this, but I want to do a big research project to be able to speak and write more authoritatively on it.

So, why the lay vocation?

First, because it’s most relevant to me and the people I interact with most often.

Second (maybe I’m wrong here; someone can correct me) it seems to me that priests and religious get a solid amount of formation for their particular state of life, and are explicitly taught about how to live it.³ But lay people don’t get that at all, and I think that’s why lay people who are serious about their faith often struggle with the twin temptations that John Paul II laid out in Christifideles Laici 2 (paragraph break added):

the temptation of being so strongly interested in Church services and tasks that some fail to become actively engaged in their responsibilities in the professional, social, cultural and political world;

and the temptation of legitimizing the unwarranted separation of faith from life, that is, a separation of the Gospel’s acceptance from the actual living of the Gospel in various situations in the world.

The first temptation is treating the faith like decor, a hobby, or a tribe; the second is to silo the faith apart from the rest of life. It seems to me that these temptations arise because many lay people don’t know how to live the faith in everything they do, because it isn’t always obvious. Prayer can be difficult work, even when kneeling in front of the Blessed Sacrament. But it’s not hard to know how to do pray when kneeling in front of the Blessed Sacrament.⁴ But what about when we’re in the world? How do we “pray without ceasing” when we’re closing a business deal, enjoying a performance, playing euchre with our family at the Christmas get-together, or texting faraway friends for urgent parenting advice?

Part of the difficulty is that the lay state is the most diverse state. If you rounded up all the priests, surely you’d find a fair amount of diversity — consider St. John Vianney, Bl. Solanus Casey, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Peter, Fr. Walter Ciszek, Fr. John Hollowell, and your pastor. There’s even more diversity among religious.⁵ But there is simply no comparison with the diversity among lay people, and I think that makes it harder to provide state-specific formation.

But I don’t think we need to, and this is the heart of what I want to say. All time, every minute of our day, belongs to God. The trick is not how to see “meeting with a patient” or any specific thing as belonging to God, because we’ll end up in an infinite rabbit hole of “ok, now I know how to see this patient meeting in light of the gospel; next project: learn how to load the dishwasher in light of the gospel.” It’s going to get absurd and unwieldy very quickly, because we do so many different things. The trick, I think, is to see the present moment as belonging to God; to have an interior disposition of living every minute in light of the gospel, an interior disposition that spills out into everything we do.

So, that’s my project. I wrote this out to prep for a meeting with my thesis advisor (who routinely tells students to write it out as a way of understanding our own thoughts). I haven’t told him I’m writing this substack, but I might send this to him. If he reads it, he’s going to say, “But Mary, you’ve barely mentioned Scripture in your piece here, and your whole proposal is about Scripture!” and I will say yes, and my only defense is gratitude to the Scripture faculty at the seminary, who taught me how to love the Bible and hear it as God’s Word.

1. Now, before anyone goes blaming “The Church” or whatever, I want to point out that the devil used infallible Scripture itself to tempt Jesus (Mt. 4:1-11). The lesson I want to draw here is that the devil can twist literally anything, even the best things, into a distortion and a lie, and there is definitely something of that in this dynamic here. Should chaplains and pastors and vocations directors and poster designers and vocations-event planners and nosy parishioners be more precise in their language and better attuned to the exigencies of life? What about the priests (and others) who provide spiritual guidance on these matters — are they all malicious, ignorant, and sexist? I’m not going to provide blanket blame or exoneration here, except to say that I think most people are trying to do their best, and most of us are pretty clumsy about it.

2. One thing I really appreciate about this book is that he doesn’t dwell in the gory, violent details of everything. He doesn’t sugarcoat it, but the point of his book isn’t to make you vicariously experience what he experienced; rather, the point of the book is to show how God worked in his life and can work in yours, too. I’m just an ordinary person living in the suburbs, but it was easy to find a kind of solidarity with him, even though my life is very different than his.

3. Whether it’s good or sufficient, it’s not my place to say; I’ll let the priests and religious themselves speak on this. But there is a thing called seminary, and religious orders have a formation period for anyone who joins. There aren’t things like this for lay people.

4. If you’re local, ask me about my reading group. We’re going to start reading Prayer Primer by Thomas Dubay soon, and you’re invited. It’s the best “how to pray” books I’ve come across, and it’s not long.

5. I observed this in a striking way when I wandered into a chapel several years ago, not knowing that religious from many different orders had come to the campus to study and were gathering right then for Benediction. Uncomfortable in my street clothes, I slipped into a back pew and watched a well-groomed Dominican priest, in a spotless white habit and shiny black shoes, freshly polished, give the blessing. Right in front of me were some scraggly Franciscans who hadn’t shaved or probably combed their hair in who knows now long, and were barefoot. Everyone in the chapel had taken a vow of poverty, and it was expressed in very different ways.