Vocation Month

September is the month-long celebration of vocation. The stress however is on the vocation to the priesthood and consecrated life.

Celebrating vocation month in this year of the youth, there’s need of responding this question: “How can we make young people recognize that the most important hunger is the hunger for God?”

There’s this practice in the middle ages that when a young man presented himself as a novice in a certain monastery, he was made to wait. Sometimes for days outside the monastery, in the cold snow and rain without food or water or human contact.

He would knock and he would not be admitted. Then at length one of the monks would come out to tell him: no, you’re unfit, you’re not suited for us, or the monastery is filled, there’s no room for you, or maybe you should come back next year. Then, he was made to wait. The monk simply disappears.

Is the perspective novice persevere, the monk would come out again maybe days later and in louder voice tell him to go away.

Only when after many days of being tested, would they let him in, knowing them in a visceral way that he was truly hungry for God.

Only those starving for God would be allowed in. We may be in a different context but I think that should always be this point of emphasis.

As Saint Augustine said: “You have made us for yourself Lord and our heart is restless till it rests in Thee.”

Its only when we are responding to that hunger that we will truly be satisfied.