The Real Vocational Crisis: We Aren't Praying Equally for All of Them

Twice in the past two days I have heard or read impassioned prayers for young people to be open to God's vocational call to the priesthood and religious life.  Neither prayer mentioned asking God's help for these young people to listen carefully and thoughtfully to God's call to Holy Matrimony, which is also a vocational path to which arguably most of these young men and women will be more likely to be called than to either the Priesthood or religious life.  I think this is a very huge mistake.

I contend that a lot of the problem with marital difficulties among men and women who were raised in the Catholic church might be because we live in a larger culture that sees marriage as a limited, disposable and often unnecessary institution.  And then within our churches we hear prayers for vocations which call only the priesthood and religious life as being set apart, called by God for a higher purpose.

Speaking for myself as well as my devoted husband,  we both know that from a young age we were called to the vocation of marriage.  We went into our marriage thinking of it as a vocational choice to honor God and through how we live our lives and raise our children to point others toward God.  In the act of having our five beautiful children, and raising them in the faith we are doing it for the greater good of the Kingdom.  We continually pray for our marriage as a vocation, and to help  our children be open to God's vocational call to them wherever  that call may lead them.

And yet, when the Church as a whole prays for vocations, my children only hear about vocations to the priesthood and religious life.  They don't hear about marriage as a vocation and rarer still are prayers for the vocation of single Catholic adult. (to which at least one of my children has been called I believe).

As I see it (and have only heard in one vocational prayer) Marriage is the source of all other vocations.  Without holy marriages open to procreation where will  the Church find the children  to be called to be the next generation of priests and religious?  Since the church doesn't believe in artificial insemination they won't be creating them in a laboratory.

I also contend that if we worked as a church to pray for and strengthen the vocation of Holy Matrimony, and teach it as a vocation to which men and women are called the crisis in vocations to the priesthood and religious life will be overcome.  Men and women will choose marriage more wisely and with a thought toward having more than 2.2 children (if you look at some of the families in our churches today you see these kinds of couples already emerging).  More children raised in the faith means more children for God to call to vocations  to the priesthood and religious life.

So the cure for the vocations crisis is not in praying for more vocations to the priesthood and religious life, but in praying for the vocation of holy matrimony first, or at least as equal to and on the same level as the other vocations in the church.

I wonder if we had an International year of the Family within the church, and focused all of our prayers for an entire year on that vocation, what kind of miracles might begin to happen?

Pax

Lord Give us Your Words . . .

Mrangelmeg and I are going to give a talk tonight at RCIA on the Sacrament of Matrimony. We put together a short outline over the weekend when we were on our little getaway, so that we would have at least a few talking points down on paper, but I always like to leave room for the Holy Spirit when I give a talk.

Mrangelmeg on the other hand, (being the engineer and a very high J on the Meyers Briggs) would probably much rather have every word we were planning to say written out so that we just had to read it.

We want to start with a short introduction of us; how we met, how important faith hope and love have been to us in our marriage, and that we don't begin to understand why our marriage works we are just happy that it does.

Then we are going to go into the sacrament as we have come to understand it over the last 26 years. Then we will leave time for questions which with God's help we will be able to answer.

Send up a quick prayer for us. I am used to these kinds of talks. Mrangelmeg is more used to presentations to government and military personnel. This is almost uncharted territory for him and he is venturing there at my request. Now that is a true partnership.

Pax

NOTE: Our talk went quite well last night. We were relaxed and got our points across really easily and with humor and grace I believe. The group was very receptive which helped a lot. Thanks for your prayers. There were more than a few young married couples and soon to be married couples in the group, so I hope they can gain a little from hearing the story of our journey.

Nice to Know our Marriage is Timeless!

86 As a 1930s wife, I am Very Superior Take the test!

mrangelmeg's score:

133 As a 1930s husband, I am Very Superior Take the test!

h/t to Darwin Catholic for the link

Just a Few Days Shy

October 10th marked the beginning of mrangelmeg and my 25th year together. I missed posting on that date because I was working on my final exam essays and didn't have time to post. Now that I have a few minutes here at gradual school before we all go out for the evening (mrangelmeg isn't here tonight but is driving down tomorrow so we can go out to dinner) I want to write something about how blessed I have been over the past 25 years.

The above picture is our engagement picture. We got engaged one month after our first date (those quiet engineer types work fast). We have a bit of disagreement over exactly when our time together begins. He counts from the night my mom made a big pot of chili for my sister's fiance's fraternity brothers to celebrate their college homecoming and he showed up for free food. I happened to be eating there that night as well because I wanted the free food.

We didn't say a word to each other that night. A week later I went to a party at my sister's fiance's fraternity and in an attempt to get away from the cigarette smoke (I had recently quit smoking and didn't need the temptation) I had ventured into the kitchen, where mrangelmeg was standing with a beer in his hand talking about, of all things, being a confirmation sponsor for a young kid from his home church. That led to a discussion about the merits (or lack thereof) of the local churches.

It turned out that we both hated the campus ministry parish, which I affectionately called "Our Lady of the Nuclear Winter". I told him that he should come to my parish for Mass the next Sunday. We hung around together the rest of the party and even went to the Midnight Movie (Rocky Horror Picture Show, good times) before I went home to my apartment alone.

On Sunday, I was coming down the stairs of the school (I taught 5th grade CCD) and he was standing at the bottom of the stairs. We went to Mass together (he liked my church as much as I did). Mom was at mass and asked us if we wanted to come to her house for breakfast. Being poor college kids we said uhm yes. After breakfast he drove me back to my place. On the way I asked him if he wanted to come to the party at my church that night in honor of the canonization of Maximilian Kolbe. (Franciscan parish, big deal). Even if it is a snore there will be free food, I added. He said yes and said he would pick me up in a few hours.

We went to the party which was decidedly not a snore, and the food was great. A week later we went on our first real date to a German Restaurant. The rest, as they say, is history (or our-story actually). One month later we were engaged. six months after that we were married.

I am complete because I am married to mrangelmeg. He is the only person who can keep me from going off the deep end. He loves me unconditionally, and challenges me to be the best person I can be (what God created me to be).

We are going to go out to dinner at a German Restaurant tomorrow night to honor our first date. Only this year he will decidedly have a better chance of getting more than a kiss goodnight (if you know what I mean - wink wink- nudge nudge).

Pax

It Could be Worse, I Suppose . . .

Mrangelmeg and I drove down to my Gradual School tonight because I have class this weekend. We were planning to have a nice little relaxing "mini-vaca" day before I have to go to Philosophy Class in the morning.

Things didn't quite go as we had planned. First we didn't leave quite as early as we had planned and our leisurely afternoon ended up being spent packing and driving. Then we stopped for dinner and it began to rain and I mean downpour, body drenching rain while we were eating. Needless to say we got a bit damp getting back to the car. Then when we got to The Hill, for some unexplainable reason the elevator didn't work and we had to schlep our bags up three flights of stairs to our room, which was supposed to be a double room but in actuality turned out to be a nice seminarian's room with a single bed and (I am not making this up) a couch.

But, our little welcome gift from Abbey Press (which is run by the monks of the Abbey) this month, is a bookmark of the Serenity Prayer .

So, we are sitting here counting our blessings; we made it here safe and sound. We both have someplace to sleep, (I suppose we will flip a coin to see who gets to sleep on the couch, and who gets the blanket.) And this is certainly a mini-vacation we will not soon forget.

This is going to be an interesting weekend.

Pax

You Can't Always Get What You Want

Joe Kennedy's First Marriage: Still On says a Time magazine article and apparently the Roman Rota, thank God.


I have been following this case from the very beginning, because it involves all the things that make the Catholic Church Stand out in the eyes of the world. . .

A rich influential family;

A man in politics who wants what he wants;

A wife who for 12 years was his helpmate, and agrees that the marriage failed, but disagrees that there was grounds for annulment.

I don't believe that this was done out of spite, though who knows, Sheila Rauch Kennedy isn't Catholic after all, so if she wishes to remarry she may do so outside the church with no penalty. Her ex-husband is involved in a civil marriage and has been since 1993. His chance of having that marriage convalidated within the Church are now dashed. He will have to remain outside the sacraments because of his choice to abandon his first sacramental marriage.

Isn't that what the Tribunal is supposed to do, after all; uphold sacramental marriage? It isn't a clearinghouse which makes it possible for the rich and influential to marry again if they so choose regardless of the state of their first marriage.

I for one am glad she appealed. I wonder how many people realize that they have that right? I don't think the Church in this country is doing enough to uphold the sacrament of marriage. I think it is just resigned to the reality of divorce. I agree with the statement of the Vatican official at the end of the article, that Americans think that annulments are their right if they get a divorce.

I only know of one priest who has ever counseled anyone; a friend of mine, that she probably shouldn't even attempt to seek an annulment because she didn't have grounds. The woman in question was upset for a while, but later decided that she loved her faith and the Church much too much to live outside of it, and chose to embrace a life of the vocation of a single adult after divorce and is much happier that had she tried to manufacture false grounds to force an annulment she really didn't deserve.

In my work for the tribunal I have found that there are many cases where there are grounds for annulment, but in other cases there really aren't grounds. Since I am only trained to help people begin the paperwork I have no idea how far the cases I have helped begin get unless those people contact me later on, which almost never happens.

Happily, I have never heard of any of the cases where I didn't see grounds going on to have an annulment granted, but then that is only because I lost contact with the people involved.

I pray a lot about the work I do. Needless to say. Marriage is sacred, no less to me than it is to God.

Pax

Twenty-Four Years of Bliss

Today is the anniversary of the day mrangelmeg and I took our vows before God and the representative of the Church that sealed our vocation as husband and wife.

We celebrated by exchanging cards and gifts of chocolate (that is the traditional gift in our house) and we went out for lunch, because mrangelmeg is on his way out of town for the week on a business trip. This is probably the only anniversary we have ever had to spend apart in the entire 24 years of our marriage.

I think that each year we have been married our relationship has grown in ways that we would have never imagined when we were first married. We understand each other so much more than we did when we were younger, and we have lived through adversity and success.

I wouldn't say that we think alike now, because I will never understand why he drinks Mountain Dew or likes Country Music, (although I do like Keith Urban), but those are the things that make him the man that I love.

I hope that we have many more years together, so that I can explore all the other intricacies of his character, and grow to love him even more. And besides, in just 26 short years we have a date for dinner with the Archbishop of our Diocese (He honors every married couple in the diocese who have been married for at least 50 years with a Mass and Dinner) so we have that as a goal.

Pax

One Who Understands Vocations

As I was catching up on blog reading this morning I came across this amazing post about vocations by Deacon Dan Wright.

In my diocese I have been frustrated for years because the only time the children or teens hear about vocation at all it is in reference to the priesthood or religious life. It is as if to choose anything else would be a less holy choice for ones life.

When I worked for the church it frustrated me to no end that I couldn't even craft a general intercession that mentioned vocation to marriage or the single life even though it was statistically accurate that the majority of the teens at the Confirmation mass would fall into those two vocations. Any vocational intercession HAD to be only for an increase in vocations to the priesthood and religious life.

For me it is a matter of discernment to which vocation I was called. Had I chosen to enter religious life knowing I had been called to the vocation of marriage because I thought that the religious life would lead me to a more holy life would have been wrong. God chose my vocation and the only way for me to enter into the fullness of whom I was created to be was to accept that vocational call and enter into marriage with my husband almost 24 years ago. My holiness comes from being wife, helpmate and mother.

I don't think we can pray for an increase in vocations, because God calls whomever He wills. I think the only valid prayer that we can pray, and the only way that I can pray for vocations is that every person will open their heart to God's loving vocational call wherever it leads them. When one is open to God's loving call and willing to follow that call wherever it leads, only then will one be able to become the truest self.

That is my prayer for my children. If God were to call any of my children into religious life I would be behind them 100%. And if God's vocational call is for my children to be married I will be there to help them be strong in that vocation as well. And if God asks my children to remain single as their vocation (which in the case of my two autistic children he might) I will be there to support them in that vocation, with its stresses and needs as well.

Saying Yes All Over Again

At times over the past nearly 24 years of married life I have asked mrangelmeg if he would be willing to renew our vows; on special anniversaries and when we were vacationing where they had those quaint wedding chapels in the mountains. Each time I asked he has always said "Why bother, they worked the first time." or "No need to fix what isn't broken." or some other quip equally dripping with romance.

We have actually participated in one renewal of vows ceremony at our church. I have the picture to prove it. It is one of my favorite pictures of us because it happened to be one of those winters when I had cajoled mrangelmeg into growing a beard and in the picture he has a beard and I don't look half bad myself. The picture was taken by a friend of ours who was playing "wedding photographer" for the evening's festivities that night at church. Each couple that participated in the Mass got a nice dinner and a photograph to commemorate the evening.

It has been many years since that time, and I had decided that it was easier not to ask anymore than to keep getting turned down. While mrangelmeg sees no reason to renew the vows we made all those years ago, I see nothing wrong with a refresher.

I suppose I look at it more as I do the renewal of promises that the Priests make at the Chrism Mass. Their Ordination made an indelible and irreversible mark on them, yet each year they stand before the altar of God and reaffirm the promises they made at that ordination. It isn't that the first promises didn't take, it is just that it doesn't hurt to make a public show of reminding ourselves about what is important.

I think it is really important that it be in a Mass as well. Marriage is a vocation. As one of my favorite Bishops says in his vocations prayer it is the source of all other vocations. When the Church begins to recognize and uphold the vocation of marriage and call for the strengthening of the vocation of marriage with the same vigor that it has been the vocation of the priesthood and religious life I think the vocations crisis in this country will vanish.

I will get off my soapbox now and get back to my point. Saturday evening mrangelmeg surprised me by registering us for a Marriage renewal service at our parish. He had mentioned it once before, but I thought he was joking because of his previous statements. I was pleasantly surprised that we attended, and we had a wonderful time.

The nicest thing of all though was looking into his eyes and telling him that I would still take him as my husband from this day forward, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer, forsaking all others until death us do part. As I said those words I could see that 21 year old young man standing in the front of the church with me all those years ago. Little did we know then what those words would mean. If we can get through what we have been through to this point I think the safe money is on us.

But it was really nice hearing him say the words over again, because I know I don't much look like that young girl anymore. Heck I don't even feel like her anymore.

If you get a chance to renew your vows, take it. If you just get a chance to say to your spouse "I would marry you all over again today." do it. Don't miss an opportunity to say I love you in words and deeds.

Pax

Direction Comes, Even When You Don't Get Directed . . . God is So Good!

My Spiritual Director is ill this week and had to cancel our regular monthly appointment, so I missed my monthly shot of spiritual direction. I felt really bad for him because being the pastor of two parishes and all it must be difficult for him to admit that he has to cancel everything on his calendar and stay in bed (he really must be sick, especially to cancel Mass).

This morning though I got a very eye opening and deeply needed moment of correction from my devoted and highly put upon husband as he was preparing to leave for work. I was musing out loud about losing someone's email address, and he asked a simple question and I jumped to a totally wrong conclusion about the intent of his question (something he pointed out later in the conversation that I do quite often.)

It occurred to me, as I listened to what he was saying and then used that as prayer meditation as I spent a half hour on the treadmill. I usually react to what he has said before I even try to understand what he means. I really need to work on that because I know that he doesn't intend to say things to hurt me and if I would just stop and think I might understand that he is simply asking a question to gather more information and not trying to in any way impugn my intelligence or capabilities as a person. He just likes to have all of the facts before he makes a statement because he is a Myers Brigs TJ where I am an FP.

As I was doing my meditation walk (sounds so much better than exercise don't you think?) I realized that while I have been trying to make changes in myself in the last year and thought that I had come pretty far, I still have a lot of growing to do. The first thing I need to do is to publicly apologize to mrangelmeg for being so blinded to how ignorant I have been in the past to our different communication styles. Then I need to thank him for the loving correction and not so gentle nudge he gave me this morning that started me on this path of self revelation. I have to learn to stop jumping to conclusions before I jump into or off of something that will do irreparable harm to our relationship.

I am so blessed to have mrangelmeg in my life. In the Vocation of Marriage the role of each spouse is to insure that the other spouse gets into heaven. In our case I think mrangelmeg has the tougher assignment. Be patient with me I may be slow but I do eventually get it.

Pax

Truth is stranger than - well - made up dictionary references

angelmeg -- [adjective]: Benevolent to a fault 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

mrangelmeg -- [noun]: A poltergeist sent back in time to change the course of history forever 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

hat tip to Ironic Catholic for the link and the laugh.

Pax