Inscapes: Stories of Personal Calling

Many of us cling to lies about ourselves that become false names and false identities. St. Peter, absorbed in his own shame, shrunk from Jesus when first called by him: “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5:8). But Jesus confronted Peter’s false identity of being a mere “sinful man” with a new name and a personal vocation to be the “rock” of the Church.

“Peter needed to hear ‘You are a Rock.’ What do each of us need to hear?”

In this podcast Joshua Miller talks with internationally acclaimed Catholic speaker and writer, Christopher Stefanick, about his new book I Am_Rewrite your Name, ReRoute your Life.

Stefanick, challenges us to identify those false names we can dwell on, take them captive, and preach to ourselves (even aloud!) our true identity in Christ: I am a child of God, beloved of God. The point here is not “self help” with spiritual veneer so we can “feel good” but renewal in the Holy Spirit so we can live our personal vocations with great fruitfulness.

“The more we grow in conformity to Christ, the more we become who we are.”

We discuss:

* How “self help” is properly understood as self-alignment with how God sees us: his own sons and daughters destined for eternal glory.

* Doing the hard work of letting the reality that we are priests, prophets and kings truly infiltrate the way we think about ourselves and live into the world.

* Chris’s own personal vocation and lessons he learned about it while writing the book.

* Choosing sides between the enemy accuser (Satan) and the Holy Spirit advocate battling between our ears and taking captive every thought for Christ.

* The need for the Church to exist not in reaction to cultural attacks but on the offense because the joy of the Gospel transforms everything.

 

 

Russell Shaw was one of the first Catholics to highlight the importance of personal vocation and has done so consistently for over 25 years. In this podcast, Shaw discusses how the paradigm of personal vocation is essential for helping laypersons realize their proper place as builders of God’s Kingdom on earth and for eliminating clericalism which emphasizes “vocation” as primarily a state of life for priests and religious. 

The cancer of clericalism – which Shaw refers to as clerical elitism – stunts the Church. It stifles laity from flourishing in their own callings. It degrades clerics who are treated as functionaries of the priestly state of life, not as unique persons. It undermines the co-responsibility that all Catholics have for advancing the mission of the Church.  Shaw’s emphasis – grounded in Church teaching – that personal vocation is an antidote to clericalism and a way of renewal was prophetic 25 years ago and is even more timely now that the Church is mired in crisis.

In the podcast we discuss:

• Shaw’s close collaboration with Germain Grisez with whom he wrote Personal Vocation: God Calls Everyone By Name and other works.  

• the meaning of personal vocation and its relationship to other ways that the word “vocation” is used

• the dynamic nature of personal vocation and how it unfolds over time

• the blessing and challenge of constant discernment required to fully respond to God’s call.

A final point from Shaw – that I found strangely comforting – is for those of us both hungry for renewal and used to the rapid-fire cause and effect of our digital age.  Change happens slowly in the Catholic Church, he says.  Although Catholics increasingly see the value of personal vocation it will take time, perhaps a long while, before it is fully embraced.  We must persevere in teaching it, but be patient.

 

I journeyed up to the Stone Barn Center for Food & Agriculture with Claire Alsup, Director of Business Development for Yolele Foods, to interview Fred Kirschenmann, the “philosopher farmer” who wrote one of my favorite books on ecology (not that I read a ton of them) and the most interesting title for a theological essay ever: Theological Reflections While Castrating a Calf.

Fred has lived out a fascinating personal vocation. He was born on a North Dakota farm during the Great Depression, in the grips of the worst drought in U.S. history, and has now spent most of his life working to change how we farm, as well as our relationship to the land.

Fred is a thought-leader in sustainable agriculture, a Distinguished Fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University and a professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy. He also continues to manage his family’s 1,800-acre certified-organic farm in south-central North Dakota.

Fred holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Chicago. He has held numerous appointments, including the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board and the National Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, operated by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Check out Fred’s TED talk here.

Food and a connection to our common land has played an instrumental role in many of the personal vocations that we’ve explored, and I think it really comes down to this: the Incarnation.

Al Kresta interviews Dr. Joshua Miller on his show, “Kresta in the Afternoon”, on Ave Mardio Radio (EWTN), about the importance of personal vocation for the renewal of the Church, with a particular focus on how to draw out the gifts and talents of children and each member of the body of Christ.

Thank you, Al Kresta, for this beautiful introduction:

St. John Paul II taught over many fields. He’s probably best known for his Theology of the Body and for his understanding of the human person. Foundational to what he taught is the affirmation that each person is unique and unrepeatable. That affirmation is the primary and fundamental way of the Church. We’ve been talking so much about the co-responsibility of the lay faithful, but that rests upon an understanding that all of us are created and redeemed and have a particular call. We have the universal call to holiness, of course. But even beyond that, there is a call to marriage or religious life or consecrated virginity. And even beyond that, there is call to exercise the various gifts that we possess by virtue of creation and by virtue of being baptized and confirmed—to apply those gifts to the building up of the body of Christ so that we might attain maturity. When the world looks upon the Church, the world must see the Son of God in operation within our community.

Saying “yes” to a vocation is not always easy. In this episode Dr. Joshua Miller interviews Lisa Hendey, best selling author, founder of CatholicMom.com, and evangelist working to help each person say “yes” to their personal vocation.

We talk primary about Lisa’s book The Grace of Yes where she presents virtues each can cultivate for consistently realizing God’s unique plan. Lisa shares how active belief orients us to realize custom tailored opportunities for service, how authentic humility challenges us to see our path never as “less than” that given to others, and how vulnerability opens us to how God blesses us through others, a key part of responding to His call.

Lisa also sheds light on how Catholics can continue to say “yes” to God when discouragement and doubt born by the scandal of clerical abuse grip us. “Become part of the solution,” Lisa urges, and step up to serve in practical ways. We must not assume a passive stance, but recognize that God wants us to cooperate with him to bring healing and renewal. For each of us personal vocation is not a “one and done” invitation but a dynamic and daily invitation to serve with our unique gifts. Accordingly, we must we watchful and attentive. What God wants from us, Lisa shares is “sometimes simple, sometimes challenging, but always needed.”

At the time of this podcast, August 20, 2018, the Catholic Church is engulfed in crisis. Six days ago a Grand Jury report detailed accusations against 300 priests of sexual abuse in six different Pennsylvania dioceses. In recent weeks Archbishop Theodore McCarrick resigned as a Cardinal following substantiated allegations of sexual misconduct against adult seminarians and boys. While the scandal of abuse surfaced in 2002 the current crisis seems even worse because it sheds light on decades of episcopal cover up and self-satisfied clericalism. Can the reality of personal vocation be an antidote to the cancer of clericalism in the Church?

Our guest for this podcast, Catholic entrepreneur Patrick Molyneaux, is from Pittsburgh, which some have described as “ground zero” of the current crisis. Molyneaux is the co-owner of Molyneaux Tile • Carpet • Wood as well as a founder of several non-profit organizations including the Pittsburgh chapter of Legatus and the Human Formation Coalition. In all these efforts Pat works to cultivate human flourishing. We talk about his use of MCORE (Motivational Core) and other assessments to help employees connect their unique gifts with their work and experience it as part of their personal vocation. We discuss the coaching and coach training Pat provides for priests, who generally have strong intellectual and spiritual formation, but little training in how to identify and cultivate their own unique gifts or those of the laity.

In the pews we already have what we need to renew the Church.

A major theme of the podcast is Pat’s vision of unleashing the massive potential of millions of Catholics who come to Church but remain undeveloped by the Church. We talk about the culture of clericalism that helped breed the current crisis and in which the unique gifts and calling of the laity continue to be ignored. We close with conversation about how authentic renewal can be achieved when we work with the Holy Spirit to cultivating the personal vocations of everyone.

Andreas Widmer, former Swiss Guard for Saint John Paul II and Director of the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship, is interviewed by Catholic entrepreneur and colleague Luke Burgis about his personal story of vocation in business and, now, as a teacher. Andreas and Luke co-teach a course called “The Vocation of Business” at The Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.

“God never created anything that wasn’t profitable.”

In this podcast, they touch on everything from “Business Nihilism” to the role of marriage in the vocation of business and the question of whether or not there is something “broken” with free markets (or perhaps, instead, something broken in our understanding of the important role that living out personal vocations has in a free society).

Andreas goes into depth about his first startup experience in the early 1990’s Internet world and how he cut his teeth as a young immigrant to the blow up of his company Dragon Systems after selling out to fraudulent buyers. Most importantly, he explains how that experience began to open his eyes to a deeper understanding of the meaning of work itself. And more:

• The theology of creation and how it can help us understand the role of the entrepreneur and worker

• The false distinction between “for-profit” and “non-profit” entities (including the difference in language between the United States and Europe)

• Why teaching attitude is just as important as teaching skills or knowledge

• The importance of understanding the memes that we use, or the self-talk that can either lead to self-destructive behavior or success

• And a personal story about Pope Saint John Paul II

What started out as a 20 minute interview turned into almost 40…but the conversation was so good that we couldn’t cut any of it out.

Fr. Boniface Hicks is a Benedictine monk and Catholic priest at the Saint Vincent Arch Abbey in Latrobe, PA, and the co-author of the book “Spiritual Direction: A Guide for Sharing the Father’s Love” with Fr. Thomas Acklin. The following is an except from that book:

“In the end, if we allow God’s loving action to transform us, we will become uniquely what we were created to be. Every human life is unrepeatable and unique. In our insecurity we fear that we are broken when we are different. The most distinctive parts of us are the most vulnerable. But when we start before God face to face, we will be completely at home, and the most distinctive parts of us will be the ones that are most like God.”

Fr. Boniface speaks with Dr. Joshua Miller about the importance of spiritual direction in the discernment of personal vocation, and the fundamental importance of the uniqueness of each person in the unfolding of one’s relationship with God in the process of spiritual direction.

In this episode of the Inscape podcast, Dr. Joshua Miller speaks with Chris Lowney about the vocation of the entrepreneur and what we can learn from it about leadership in the Catholic Church.

Chris is a one-time Jesuit seminarian; he later served as a Managing Director of J.P. Morgan & Co on three continents. He is a popular keynote speaker who has lectured in more than two-dozen countries, on leadership, business ethics, decision-making and other topics.

Whether a vocation to the priesthood, religious life, or entrepreneurship, the message is the same: All must lead. Every personal vocation is a call from God to image him in a way that has never been imaged before, nor ever will be. This is our great and awesome responsibility.

Pope Benedict said that: “Every person carries within himself a project of God, a personal vocation, a personal idea of God on what he is required to do in history to

build his Church, a living Temple of his presence. And the priest’s role is

above all to reawaken this awareness, to help the individual discover his

personal vocation…” (Pastoral Visit to the Parish of St. Felicity and her Children, Martyrs, March 25, 2007)

In this podcast, we speak to a priest who is doing that. Fr. Bob Stec is the pastor of one of the top 12 parishes in the United States, St. Ambrose Church in Brunswick, Ohio. In this podcast, Fr. Stec shares with Joshua Miller a key reason for that success: creating opportunities for each one’s unique gifts to flourish in service and in close relationship with others in the parish.

All pastors can learn a valuable lesson from Fr. Bob Stec’s experience at St. Ambrose, which now has over 5,000 families and more than 150 ministries: by identifying and drawing out the unique gifts and talents of every parishioner and then cultivate their unique, personal vocations, everyone can truly be engaged and contribute to a flourishing parish life. Most importantly, these people will take that life into their homes, into their workplaces, and into society.