Reflections on Vocation | Lauren Metters ‘25
My mother likes to tell a story about my first few days of nursery school. As she tells it, early into the year, my teacher called her aside at pick-up and expressed her surprise that I could count to fourteen. After all, most children my age stopped at ten. My mother laughed, explaining that our house had fourteen steps up to the second floor. I had learned to count the steps.
Today, I can count differently. One God, two natures of Christ, Three Persons in the Trinity, four marks of the Catholic Church, five precepts of the Church, six liturgical seasons, and seven Sacraments, eight Beatitudes, nine days in a Novena, ten Mosaic Commandments, eleven canonized Saints from the United States, twelve Apostles, thirteen Pauline epistles, fourteen Stations of the Cross.
As a Catholic, my faith centers around Sacramental life. My life is marked by Sacraments and ritual participation. I think it has led me, though, to narrowly define vocation. There are two vocations which are Sacramentalized: Marriage and Holy Orders. While we may be called to serve God in other aspects of our lives, I’ve experienced considerable challenges as an unmarried lay person, who, on account of my queerness, is likely to remain unmarried and lay. I also know that, as people continue to delay marriage (and, for that matter, ordination) until later in life, the number of unmarried and lay adults in the Church will continue to grow, even if most will eventually phase out of the demographic. I am convinced that empowering discipleship and commitment among those without a Sacramentalized vocation is a foremost challenge of the modern Church.
Whether justified, or on account of my own grief at not being able to receive either of the vocational Catholic Sacraments, it is difficult for me to engage in broader questions of vocation. All others seem subordinate and secondary to me. As such, I would like to offer the phrase “creative purpose.” What are the interactions, decisions, and contributions for which I was created? Perhaps easier to identify as a series of powerful or illuminative moments, discernment of creative purpose is no less lofty an endeavor, even if at times more accessible. As I engage my peers in the Horizon Fellowship, I offer this: perhaps these are some of the moments for which we have been created.