Although our Blessed Father has given you the fullest possible instructions
on this subject, in his seventeenth Conference, entitled, _On voting in a
Community_, I see that you are not quite satisfied in the matter.
I know very well that your dissatisfaction does not arise from any unworthy
motive, but only from a conscientious desire to do your duty to God, and
to the sisters whom you have in a way to judge. To relieve your minds of
doubt, I am about to supplement the teaching of that Conference with a few
thoughts suggested to me at various times by Blessed Francis himself, which
I put before you in words of my own.
In the first place, we must be careful never to confuse the terms
_vocation_ and _avocation_, for their meaning is very different.
An _avocation_ is the condition of life in which we serve God.
A _vocation_ is His call to that condition of life. When we call a servant
to command him to do something, the calling him is one thing, his obeying
and employing himself as directed quite another; and this, even if he do
the work precisely as he is told, and no more. Now, there are two sorts of
vocation. The first is the call to faith or grace; the second, the call to
a particular avocation in life.
To follow the first vocation, viz., to Faith, is necessary for salvation,
since he who refuses to listen to this call and to obey its voice risks
the loss of his immortal soul. A pagan or heretic called by God to embrace
Christianity or to submit to the Catholic Church, and to the end neglecting
this call, must needs be lost, for out of the true Church there is no
salvation. Again, if a member of the true Church who is spiritually dead in
mortal sin, refuse to listen to the call, or vocation, of preventing grace
which bids him return to God by confession, or by contrition of heart, he
is in a state of damnation.
Not so, however, with the second kind of call or vocation. As this is only
to some particular condition of life in the world or the cloister, although
we must not neglect it, but must listen with respect to what it may please
God to say to our heart, yet essentially it is not of vital importance to
the welfare of our soul that we should follow such a call, since, at the
most, it is but an inward counsel, which may be acted upon or not according
to our choice.
And now remember that the counsels given in Holy Scripture are not
precepts.[1] Our Blessed Father has often said that it would be not only
an error, but a heresy, to maintain that there is any kind of legitimate
calling or avocation in which it is impossible to save one's soul. On the
contrary, in each, grace is offered, by means of which we may safely walk
before God in holiness and justice all the days of our life.
To deny this would be to cut off from the hope of salvation, not thousands
only, but millions of men and women, those, namely, who are engaged all
their lives long in occupations which they have undertaken, not only
without a vocation from God, but sometimes even against their own
inclination.
This is the teaching of this Blessed Father in his Philothea, where he
says, "It is an error, nay, a heresy, to wish to exclude the highest
holiness of life from the soldier's barrack, the mechanic's workshop, the
courts of princes, or the household of married people."
He used to say that it is not sufficient merely to love our calling, but
that our most earnest endeavours as true and faithful Christians should be
to strive to attain perfection in that same calling.
He remarked, too, that we do wrong to waste time in arguing as to what that
perfection consists in. The glory of God should be the one aim of every
devout soul.
Only by the practice of virtue can that final end be reached, and no virtue
unaccompanied by charity avails to attain to it. Therefore, charity is the
bond of all perfection, nay, itself is all perfection.
He attached much more importance to the spirit in which a vocation is
followed out, than to the mere fact of its being embraced.
And this because the salvation of our souls, which we shall owe to God's
grace, does not depend so much on the nature of our particular vocation or
calling, but on our own persevering faithful submission to the will of God,
which will of God is the salvation of us all.
Now, as we can save our souls, so we can also lose them in any calling
whatsoever.
Would you desire a more unmistakable vocation than that of King Saul, or
one more glorious than that of Judas? Yet both were lost. Where will you
find one more troubled, and more interrupted by sin, than that of King
David? Yet in spite of all that happened to him, how happy was its issue.
The vocation of a certain young lady who resolved upon taking the veil, but
only out of a sort of despair, and because irritated against her family,
was nevertheless approved by our Blessed Father, who to justify his
approval gave the following explanation.
"As regards the vocation of this young lady, I consider it good, mingled
though it be in her mind with imperfections and desirable though it would
have been that she should have come to God simply and solely for the sake
of the happiness of being wholly His. Remember that those whom God calls to
Himself are not all drawn by Him with the same kind, or degree, of motives.
"There are but few who give themselves absolutely to His service from the
one only desire to be His, and to serve Him alone.
"Among the women whose conversion the Gospel has made famous, Magdalen
alone came through love, and with love.
"The adulteress came through public shame, the woman of Samaria from
private and individual self-reproach, the woman of Canaan in order to
be healed of bodily infirmity. Again, among the saints, St. Paul, the
first hermit, at the age of fifteen, took refuge in his cave to escape
persecution. St. Ignatius Loyola came through distress and suffering, and
so on with hundreds of others. We must not expect all to begin by being
perfect. It matters little how we commence, provided only that we are
firmly resolved to go on well, and to end well. Certainly Leah intruded
with scant courtesy into Rachel's promised place, as the wife of Jacob, yet
she afterwards conducted herself so irreproachably, and behaved with such
modesty and sweetness, that to her rather than to Rachel was vouchsafed the
blessing of being an ancestress of our Lord.
"Those who were compelled to come into the marriage feast in the Gospel,
ate, and drank of the best, nor, had they been the guests for whom the
banquet was prepared, could they have fared better. If, then, we would have
a pledge of their good living and perseverance, we must lock at the good
dispositions of those who enter Religion rather than at the motives which
impel them: for there are many souls who would not have entered the convent
at all if the world had smiled upon them, and whom we nevertheless may find
to be resolute in trampling under their feet the vanities of that same
world."
[Footnote 1: 1 Cor. vii.]