“For many are called (κλητοὶ), but few are chosen.” (Mt 22: 14)
A “calling” or “vocation” is common to all members of the “church” or “ekklesia” (from the Greek verb “ekkaleo,” which means “to call out”). We are all “called” “according to his purpose” (Rom 8: 28) for each of us, according to our specific, God-given gifts and character. But it is not easy to discern God’s voice in our lives (our specific “calling”), and to choose it over other voices. They pull us away from being ourselves, the “selves” God wants us to be, and into a mainstream of popular masks behind which most of us feel safe.
A “vocation,” as Karl Jung defines it, is “an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths.” That is to say, it is liberating. But for Jung “vocation” is “at once a charisma and a curse, because its first fruit is the conscious and unavoidable segregation of the single individual from the undifferentiated and unconscious herd. That means isolation…” When we are isolated into the salvific “ark” that is the Church, however, we are neither cursed nor alone, but in the good company of the communion of the saints, – those canonized and those not.
Let me ask God for courage today, to be myself, as He made me and sees me, that I may join others who choose His voice today. Let me not resist being “chosen” and liberated by Him, to be my “self” as He has envisioned it.
