9-5 Vocations
The Priesthood and a Parable of the Absurd
It is rather true that I am married. It is
equally rather true that I am a father.
From roughly 7 AM to 5 PM (and later into the night occasionally) I am a
married man with all the obligations incumbent upon that state of life.
This is undeniable.
As a father from roughly 7 AM to 5 PM (and later into the night occasionally)
I am obliged to embrace the duties of fatherhood, and this, too, is equally
undeniable. After all, I am a husband and a father. That is my vocation.
Typically, however, the hours after 5 PM are mine to do with as I
wish, and the erstwhile obligations that bind me to wife and child no longer
obtain. After 5 PM I am no longer married or bound to the obligations of
my vocation to marriage or to fatherhood. My life is then my own to do with
as I please whatever the plight of wife and child. It must wait until
7 AM until I resume my vocation.
What is more, I have 3 to 4 weeks vacation every year in which I am totally
free, 24/7, from marriage and fatherhood, and any of the obligations that
had attended either or both. Wife, child, both will have to await my return.
I am not to be troubled, accessed, vexed, or in any way deterred from my
vacation from my vocation.
After all ... I am only a man.
The terribly odd thing about this predicament, however, is sorting out who
and what I am between the hours of 5 PM and 7 AM and, of course, while
on vacation. I do not hold the obligation to marriage or fatherhood to
a sick child at an unwelcome hour or a distraught wife "after hours" to
be universally binding upon me. That is to say, my putative vocation as
husband and father can only be predicated of me conditionally,
and not ascribed to me indefeasibly.
Something clearly
is askew.
Considered carefully, we find that the distinction of which we speak is
precisely the distinction between a "job" and what we have always understood
as a "vocation".
Apart from
some dusty and discredited corners of academia, Marxism has largely fallen
into disrepute, and with it the curious notion that man articulates his
meaning through work. It nevertheless remains the closest proximation, in
a profane sense, of our understanding of the relationship between a job
and a "vocation" as articulating the axis around which our lives revolve,
and in light of which they become coherent. In either case, considered as
a job, or as a vocation, we are left empty-handed at least for 14 hours
of each day (vacations apart) as to what we really are if we are not "fathers
and husbands".
Most sane men will argue that such an assessment is more than absurd: it
is a mockery. Fatherhood is not a job. It is a vocation. Marriage is not
a job. It is a vocation. The priesthood and Religious life (the lives of
consecrated nuns, of friars, of monastics) are not jobs. They are vocations.
The difference, simply put, is that jobs are essentially temporal in nature,
which is to say, they are defined, circumscribed, by time: by hours, days,
constraints, contracts, vacations, wages, provisos in a word, they are
delimited. One is not an engineer the way in which one is a father. One
can cease being an engineer. One cannot cease being a father. An engineer
closes the door to his office at 5 PM. A father's door is always open. A
contract can be deferred, but not an ill and crying child.
A priest can
always recapture the highlights of the football game, but not the soul desperate
for Christ who rings at the door in need of the Sacrament of Penance or
spiritual guidance in a crisis overwhelming his life and whom Christ
Himself has brought to the door as the last measure. One can be recaptured.
One can be lost.
Do we agree that there is not just a distinguishable difference, but an
essential difference between a job and a vocation?
We hold this to be true of parents, of spouses, of Religious. There is no
time when they cease being "fathers", mothers", "priests", "nuns",
"friars", "monks". There is no "time off" in a vocation in any
vocation. Ask any parent. Ask any consecrated nun.
To bring the point to absurd relief, visualize the following: Jesus Christ
calls Peter, Andrew, and John from their boats, and this is His commission
to them: "Come follow me 9 AM-5PM lunch hour excluded and I will make
you fishers of men except on your "days off" as Apostles, and of course,
excluding your vacation days. See how reasonable I am. I know that you are,
after all ... just men ..."
To whom, then, is this absurd parable addressed?
To anyone and especially priests whose vocation has become
just a job ... a mere obligation ... to fools who cherish time
as their own, as though they could wrest it from God, use it to their own
ends, and keep both in the bargain ...
The next time
you peek before you answer the door, you may find that it is God knocking
...
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