Category: VOCATION

  • Most people are afraid to die because they’ve never lived. It’s actually the fear of life that paralyzes us. So we come to the end of our life and we feel like we never did what we’re supposed to do.

    —Erwin McManus

  • “If a man has no sense of meaning, he will numb himself with pleasure.”

    — Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
    (via Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy by Donald Miller)

  • “I don’t believe in marriage, and I have no time for it,” he said. “If you do what you really should do, you will have what you want.”

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • “Viri,” she said through the doorway, “but isn’t it better to be someone who follows her true life and is happy and generous, than an embittered woman who is loyal? Isn’t that so?”

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • Saint Luke associated sorrows with the personal Cross which we have to shoulder in our life and which distinguishes the way of Christ from other ways of living. He says, typically, in one of his sermons: ‘Our life, the life of each person, is sorrow and pain. All these sorrows in our social and family life are our Cross. A failed marriage, an unfortunate choice of profession, don’t they bring us pain and sorrow? Shouldn’t people who’ve suffered these calamities have to bear them bravely? Serious illnesses, contempt, dishonour, loss of personal wealth, jealousy between spouses, slander and, in general, all the wickedness that people do to us, aren’t they all our Cross? That’s exactly what our Cross is, the Cross of the vast majority of people. These are the sorrows that afflict people and we have to bear them, even though most people don’t want to. But even people who hate Christ and refuse to follow His way, they, too, have to shoulder their own Cross of pain. What’s the difference between them and Christians? The difference is that Christians shoulder the Cross with patience and don’t complain against God. Humbly, with eyes cast down, they bear it to the end of their lives, following the Lord Jesus Christ. They do it for Christ and His Gospel, they do it for fervent love of Him, but the whole of their thought is caught up in the Gospel teaching.

    —St. Luke the Surgeon

  • Trust Your Vocation

    You have to start trusting your unique vocation and allow it to grow deeper and stronger in you so it can blossom in your community. . . . Look at Rembrandt and van Gogh. They trusted their vocations and did not allow anyone to lead them astray. With true Dutch stubbornness, they followed their vocations from the moment they recognized them. They didn’t bend over backward to please their friends or enemies. Both ended their lives in poverty, but both left humanity with gifts that could heal the minds and hearts of many generations of people. Think of these two men and trust that you, too, have a unique vocation that is worth claiming and living out faithfully.

    —Henri Nouwen

  • Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment “as to the Lord.” It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

    —C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

  • Abouna Matta had written the two brief pages of the Epilogue to Orthodox Prayer Life: The Interior Way on October 28, 1995. The coherent Coptic epilogist refers to Prayer: Access into the Father’s Presence, and tells of the Holy Spirit speaking within Christians and through them. The Holy Spirit “speaks words known well to those who have experienced him, hot and flaming words that set the whole body on fire. They make man forget his disability and insignificance, nearly lifting him off the ground. For the burden that weighed him down with sins and bound him to this earth disappears.

    ABOUNA MATTA EL MESKEEN
    CONTEMPORARY DESERT MYSTIC
    By John Watson

    COPTIC CHURCH REVIEW
    Volume 27, Numbers 3 & 4

  • One who wants to learn a foreign language is not a competent instructor of himself; he gets himself taught by experts, and can then talk with foreigners. So, for this high life, which does not advance in nature’s groove, but is estranged from her by the novelty of its course, a man cannot be instructed thoroughly unless he puts himself into the hands of one who has himself led it in perfection; and indeed in all the other professions of life the candidate is more likely to achieve success if he gets from tutors a scientific knowledge of each part of the subject of his choice, than if he undertook to study it by himself; and this particular profession is not one where everything is so clear that judgment as to our best course in it is necessarily left to ourselves; it is one where to hazard a step into the unknown at once brings us into danger. The science of medicine once did not exist; it has come into being by the experiments which men have made, and has gradually been revealed through their various observations; the healing and the harmful drug became known from the attestation of those who had tried them, and this distinction was adopted into the theory of the art, so that the close observation of former practitioners became a precept for those who succeeded; and now any one who studies to attain this art is under no necessity to ascertain at his own peril the power of any drug, whether it be a poison or a medicine; he has only to learn from others the known facts, and may then practise with success.

    —St. Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, Chap. 23

  • The monastic studies theological matters, not for educational purposes, but to benefit from them personally.

    Sometimes when one studies, one seeks to teach others, considering it a buried talent if people do not benefit from this knowledge. If you learn theology for your own personal gain, this is good for you. If you study theology in order to teach others, then you will be fought with venturing outside your rite of isolation and meditation.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us