I’ve heard multiple people say that these are the days we should lean into our gifts and callings. The medical field is a perfect example: doctors, nurses, and their colleagues are exercising their expertise on a much larger scale, and with exhausting precision. They’re relying on all their training, testing its limits each day. Even for those of us who can’t work with the sick (and trust me, you don’t want college journalists helping you in the ER), the call to action remains. The truth is that each person has their place in this moment—a fact that helps save us from despair.
But how can we find our role, especially from inside our homes? For many of us, the difficulty lies in getting our wits about us to assess the situation. The constant news, the successive restrictions on normal life, the unforeseen challenges of each day, all command our energy and stress our nerves. When we’re constantly being told what we can’t do, we can feel the question, “Where am I needed?” is passing out of fashion. On the contrary, our work begins anew the minute we shut ourselves in our homes.
These days of sickness have thrown us dramatically on our primary calling, our first and best vocation—to know, love, and serve God, offering Him our prayers. In this way, no one is helpless who can still form a thought in his heart. Even if these might be the least eloquent, most distressed prayers we’ve ever made, we’re at least following the path we know was always set out for us.
That vocation—to bend God’s ear with praise and thanksgiving—puts every other work into its proper place. From there, we can only examine our gifts and look for their new homes, their plague-time names. This looks different for everyone, though I wish there was a conversion chart we could all refer to. It seems like the best thing we can do is rely on the basic skills and intuitions we’ve honed, to let our reflexes carry us even when the context is different.
This can be harder than I’m giving it credit for. Writing professors, for example, have told my classmates and I that we have a kind of duty to bring this crisis into our work, to search for meaning in challenges and bring light to triumphs. I was excited by the idea until I sat down to write and was brought to frustration. How am I supposed to say anything meaningful? I thought. I don’t know what’s going on, either. All I felt was the constant buzz of bad news in the back of my mind.
Honestly, I still don’t know how to break through the anxiety of daily life in order to play my part. It seems many of us are paralyzed in place. But I remember how a generation of poets wrote from the trenches of World War I; when we read their work, we read the witness of a vocation they clung to, because suffering only magnified who they were called to be. They couldn’t have predicted their best lines would grow up in the mud of war-torn France, where they would have a lot to think about besides poetry—but they saw the ground they walked on as a ground where their calling could grow. I think they knew, like us, that our work doesn’t die until we do, even if circumstances force it to change shape.
Finally, though I don’t envy anyone suffering from this disease and can’t pretend to speak for them, their vocation seems to be one of the greatest mysteries of our time. While the rest of us answer practical questions like, “How much food do we need in the house?” and, “What will happen to my job?” the dying patients are grappling with the questions at humanity’s core: “Where is God in this, does He love me, and if so how do I respond to it?”
I’m sure many of them must feel absolutely helpless, and so they are exemplars of the most difficult calling on earth—to offer God nothing but their weakness. We should never forget we share that vocation with them, and we should pray for the success of this work, where man is drawn face-to-face with his Creator. All of our vocations lead to this. With hope, we continue to believe that if we stare into the challenge of the times, it’ll change into the face of God.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia.
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