It is common to understand life, decisions, or one’s own faith, from a processual sense: everything is refined, reformed, updated, and grown; sometimes the changes are abrupt, due to certain events, but almost always we don’t even realize them until we stop to think and look back.
In the life of the Church, a sense of “administrative goal” sometimes prevails. First Communion or Confirmation are spoken of as the moment when young people will no longer set foot in churches. It’s not that people are saying goodbye to the Church; rather, many have said goodbye to the answer to the most important question: Why did God create me?
If a person never confronts this issue, faith will become a custom imposed by others and the sacraments will become isolated events or social celebrations, without continuity in life.
In the Gospel there are many farewells: Zacchaeus said goodbye to a selfish way of understanding money; Peter said goodbye to the security of his fishing nets; Matthew got up from the tax collector’s table to begin a completely different life, without knowing what it was; the encounters with Jesus involved a farewell.
These things didn’t happen because God was taking something away, but because He was giving something much greater. A vocation has that power. It doesn’t just add another activity to the schedule, but rather changes the way one looks at one’s own existence, expectations, desires, and affections.
Those who discover their purpose in life gradually begin to say goodbye to what once occupied the center of their heart. In this sense, vocational discernment ultimately leads to profound farewells.
- Goodbye to a life without a horizon and a path without direction.
- Goodbye to begging for the approval of others.
- Goodbye to building your life on the guidance of success or appearance.
- Goodbye to the fear of not being enough.
- Goodbye to filling voids with just anything and in any way.
- Goodbye to accumulating as an escape route (experiences, possessions, recognition…).
- Goodbye to living only for yourself.
Augustinian Recollect spirituality understands vocation as a path of interiority to discover who we are; from fraternity no one finds their place alone and through service life is articulated as a gift for others.
Each person must discover what they need to say goodbye to in order to live their true vocation: goodbye to the fear that paralyzes, goodbye to the ego that always needs to occupy first place, goodbye to a life lived by inertia.
But it is also an immense yes: yes to a meaningful existence, yes to a personal mission, yes to the love that God has dreamed for each of us. And that is why it will never be the end of a journey, but the beginning of a life that, at last, discovers what it was created for out of love.
