One of the joys of being a vocation director is seeing how unique God’s call is in the life of each person. When we compare vocation stories there may be common themes, but the moments which God uses to call a particular individual are as unique as those individuals that are called.

Many people bemoan the fact that the numbers of people responding to God’s invitation are less than they were in the past, but in many ways I find the opposite to be true. The number of those responding to priestly and religious vocations is generally increasing, and in some ways I find it remarkable that given the number of distractions that are out there which can derail a person from this path. In addition to this, given the strength of the objections which people are facing when they express an interest in embracing a vocation to the priesthood or to religious life, I find it inspiring to see how many persevere.

Those that persevere are not markedly different from their peers who choose to ignore the tug of a vocation or those who go down a different path from the one Jesus is proposing to them. One way in which they are different is that at a certain point in their life they were able to hear the voice of the Lord and they were willing to take the risk and follow Him.

Each of us must continually grow in our abilities to listen and to follow, in order to be fruitful disciples of the Lord. There are many who want to hear the voice of God but they may not know how to listen or they may have a preconceived notion of how God will speak to them so they miss out when He actually speaks to them. This brings to mind one of my favorite scripture passages:  “Then the LORD said: Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD; the LORD will pass by. There was a strong and violent wind rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the LORD—but the LORD was not in the wind; after the wind, an earthquake—but the LORD was not in the earthquake; after the earthquake, fire—but the LORD was not in the fire; after the fire, a light silent sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.” (1 Kings 19:11-13)

This passage is one of my favorite scripture passages because it goes against the conventional wisdom of how God acts in our lives. Sometimes we expect God to try to get our attention through a bolt of lightning or some other powerful intervention, but the reality is that most often God simply communicates his will through the stillness and ordinariness of our daily lives. Our life may feel too ordinary for God to have anything particularly important to say to us, but the reality is that if we’re here upon this Earth it’s because God has a particular mission to entrust to us. So we need to cultivate an atmosphere of silence in our lives where we can hear what God wants to say to us. As Saint Faustina put it in Divine Mercy in My Soul, “In order to hear the voice of god, one has to have silence in one’s soul and to keep silence; not a gloomy silence, but an interior silence; that is to say, recollection in God.”

We need to carve this space for silence not from the scraps of time that are left over when we fulfill our daily obligations but rather from the best part of our day where we are most alert and most able to focus on spending some time with God. It is also helpful from time to time to leave all the busyness of our lives aside for awhile and to take a day or a few days of retreat, going off to a quiet spot, perhaps a monastery or a retreat center and placing ourselves with open ears before the Lord. The more we do this the more we’ll discover God’s presence in our lives, and we’ll begin to hear more clearly how He is calling us to cooperate with the gifts He’s given us.

      This purposeful seeking of silence is not an end unto itself. It should move us to take the fruits of our prayer and apply them as we lead our daily life. The more we do this then the more we discover our path to joy and fruitfulness in this life and eventually in the glory of the life to come.