VOCATION

The word ‘vocation’ indicates that there is a proper course for every person’s development to follow, a specific way in which he commits his whole life to the service of certain values. That a particular person has a particular vocation always, then, means that his or her love is fixed on some particular goal. Both virginity and marriage understood in an uncompromising personalistic way are vocations. Vocations are meaningful only within the framework of a personalistic vision of human existence, in which conscious choice determines the direction which a person’s life and actions will take.

‘What is my vocation’ means ‘in what direction should my personality develop, considering what I have in me, what I have to offer, and what others – other people and God – expect of me? The challenge of vocation today is to understand betrothal, first the betrothal of marriage and then betrothal to God. In doing so we will have covered the first and greatest element in all the vocations. The decisive character of betrothed love is the giving of one’s own person. No form of love can take the person as far in his or her quest for the good of the other as does betrothed love. Marriage is the result of betrothed love. The problem of betrothed love in marriage does contain a very real paradox. The principle of individual substance does not admit a person to be transferred or ceded to another. Yet the most uncompromising form of love consists in self giving. It is possible to step outside of one’s own ‘I’ in a way that we continue to possess ourselves and far from being impaired the ‘I’ is enriched in a moral sense. Thus married people can approach Original Unity.

Within man’s relationship with God, understood as a relationship of love, man’s posture must be one of surrender to God. This is perfectly comprehensible, especially as the religious man knows that God gives Himself to man, in a divine and supernatural fashion (a mystery of faith revealed to mankind by Christ). We see then the possibility of betrothed and requited love between God and man; the human soul, which is betrothed of God, gives itself to him alone. This total and exclusive gift of self to God is the result of a spiritual process which occurs within a person under the influence of Grace. This is the essence of spiritual virginity – conjugal love pledged to God Himself.

Spiritual virginity is closely connected with physical virginity and is the basis of the religious vocation, whether the vocation is as a lay person or in religious orders or priesthood. Of course all the forms of love identified in the metaphysical analysis apply to spiritual virgins in them giving and receiving love from other persons. The value of virginity, and indeed its superiority to marriage, is to be found in the exceptionally important part which virginity plays in realizing the kingdom of God on earth. The kingdom of God on earth is realized in that particular people gradually prepare and perfect themselves for eternal union with God. In this union the objective development of the human person reaches its highest point.

Spiritual virginity, the self-giving of a human person wedded to God himself, expressly anticipates this eternal union with God and points the way towards it. Speaking of “those who have renounced marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” Jesus says “whoever can accept this (i.e. those to whom it has been granted) ought to accept it”. (Matthew 19, 12)