Course XLV - Teaching 2: Vocational Discernment

Vocation to Ordination is an unyielding feeling of the soul, a dark state of being, a determining idea of the mind, and an unknown certainty about one’s destiny and choice.
A soul describes this vocational state to his Spiritual Director as follows: “What a strange thing! Every day I recognize less all those things and beings that before were familiar to me. I feel that I am dreaming when I see them and the world around. Now the cause of my suffering is my selfishness, my faults and all those things that refuse to die in my personality. I would want really to die, and I meditate much on death in order to abandon my human personality, fragile and unhappy. But its roots are very deep! Here is my pain and my hardest cross: to see myself in this way, with so many graces that I do not deserve, and being so hard-hearted because of my evils! I do not understand this, and my Director never wished to explain this to me: he just said they are crosses. I did not know that faults were crosses… But they are crosses, or should be crosses in proportion to a real eagerness for purity, innocence and humility that now is just an aspiration in my soul! What a hard, ugly and sad thing is to fall! Truly, if She does not intervene, it is our ruin! And all this without any merit or virtue for my part; just because She simply wants… What a great deal is to die in order to resuscitate! What a sad and despicable thing is to live without renunciation and to miss one’s dynamics for the frightful statics of attachment”.
Vocation is true when what you feel within is love, nothing more than love, and this love becomes surer and more unyielding through trials and hardships. Vocation is true when your love is so self-possessed that does not wish comfort, compassion, distinction or understanding, because love of your vocation is enough.
If your love is a volitive feeling, a power of love, does not need any other love to be sustained or filled, because you sustain yourself through your own vocational love.
Vocation is an unyielding feeling of the soul because emerges like true love; it does not know why, when or how.
Desires of vocation against the true vocation are sensible and also bodily incentives based on certain personal tendencies to seem different from others and to achieve some characteristic and especial gift. These desires lead always to failure and disappointment, and the Director Spiritual must be very watchful not to confound desire for love. If the spiritual aspirant tends to be easily enthusiastic and carried away by affections and flatteries, makes easily particular friendships, and loves to keep them, then we can doubt of his vocation.
Vocation is a dark state of the being, because clear things are not human, but those states that come close to God are dark, because Gods is always darkness to the soul. It is a dark state because logical reasons or common actions of other human beings do not explain it and because it is something undetermined but irresistible.
True vocation cannot be humanly explained, but just divinely intuited.
Whoever wants to reason much and brood about vocation waste his time; he digs a well in the sea. But whoever surrenders trustfully to the arms of his vocation, that is, to the arms of the Divine Mother, reaches eternal shores.
Vocation is a determining idea of the mind, which is sure of its good result and of its final perseverance, because it comes into being within and its root is in the Divine Voice that has called the soul to the Path to Renunciation.
A Soul will fail when it has many vocational ideas. What is real never is the result of our thoughts or dreams.
Vocational ideas come into being from fantasy, never are the idea of true vocation or vocation in itself. If he aspirant considers beforehand his future life, how his companions will be, where he will live and which tasks must perform, we should doubt much of him; he is building “a priori” his own castle on the air, not considering his true vocation.
Vocation is an idea that remains there in a permanent way and disposes of other ideas. It is an idea that knocks and repeats: that is your destiny, God wants you there. It does not create any illusion; any fantasy is out of question there.
Vocation is an idea converted into a permanent habit of the mind and centered on it, and rejecting all in a systematic and stubborn way. It is an idea that becomes effective and permanent through certainty and continuity; it becomes a living and unavoidable power. It is nothing more than an idea, but is the unique idea of vocation and determines life of a being in a direct way. All can change, but vocation, that vocation, cannot change.
Vocation is an unknown certainty of one’s destiny because its basis is an inner, intimate and divine impulse.
On this earth there is no greater certainty than that of knowing that we are chosen, divinely chosen. When a soul feels it is chosen for a vocation through a divine call, its vocation is certain for the rest of its life. Although this call was nothing more than a very soft internal call, it remains so real as if it were the Mother’s Voice speaking to the ear.
To refuse a divine call would the worst evil; although you totally rebel, the divine call would remain there intact, and if you do not answer, a terrible burden would remain on you.
A call is surer when is more visibly unknown, because when is visible unknown, its roots are deeper in the intimate, dark and divine part of your being, and more established in the unshakeable rock of the Divinity.