Living Your Vocation:
Even If You Don’t Know What It Is Yet
Fr Nicholas Crowe, OP
ISBN 9781784697662
eISBN 9781784697174
ASIN B0CS6YKQLW
CTS Booklet PA68
I discovered the books and booklets from the Catholic Truth Society in 2018, I was doing research on Alice Curtayne and stumbled upon older out of print booklets from the CTS. Since then I have read nearly 400 different titles and many of them more than once. The booklet number for this volume is PA68 which marks it as being a Pastoral booklet. This is a great little volume.
The description of this volume is:
“What does God want you to do with your life? How do you know? Fr Nicholas explains how everyone can live a life that is holy and pleasing to God, even if you don’t know what God wants you to do.
One of the biggest questions Christians ask is what vocation God has given to them. Marriage, priesthood, consecrated life, something else? What does God want you to do with your life? How do you know? How do you find out? What if you’ve already got it all wrong?
Fr Nicholas Crowe, OP is on hand to rescue us from confusion and despair. He explains how everyone (including you!) can live a life that is holy and pleasing to God, even if you don’t know what God wants you to do, how to do it, or what’s going on at all.”
The chapters this volume are:
A Gift from God and a Gift to God
What Is a Vocation?
The Baptismal Call
The Secondary States
God’s Call for Me Today
Concluding Thoughts
This is one of the new volumes released by the CTS early in 2024. I picked all of them up as soon as they were available. I highlighted several passages while reading this volume, some of them are:
“What, then, is a vocation? Our English word ‘vocation’ comes from the Latin vocat, which means ‘he or she calls’. When we use this word ‘vocation’ in a Christian context, it carries the sense of a summons. To have a vocation is to be called or summoned to some definite goal.”
“This means that, strictly speaking, over the course of a Christian life we will have many vocations according to the different aspects and seasons of our life. Some of our callings are permanent.”
“God’s omnipotence is such that we will never thwart his plan: like the child choosing a gift in the tent, we cannot get it ‘wrong’ if we are trying to make of our life “a living sacrifice” (Rm 12: 1), an offering of love given to our heavenly Father.”
“We have seen that, at the most fundamental level, our calling is to live in God’s friendship forever. Indeed, we can think of our vocation as the working out or fulfilment of God’s plan for our life.”
“For St Paul, our calling or vocation is God’s execution in time of our predestination. We are, before all else, called to be converted and to turn or return to God’s friendship through Baptism or Confession.”
“To be called by God means that we are called to live in friendship with Jesus in this life by living as his disciples, walking in his footsteps in a deepening repentance and conversion that culminates in the perfect love of the vision of God in heaven. This life of growing friendship with God through our Lord Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit is our baptismal vocation.”
“To be a disciple of Christ is to learn the ways of Truth and Goodness through loving contemplation in prayer, meditation and study. Here we allow God to guide us and empower us, such that our lives might become transparent to the glory of God.”
“The only way to understand our calling and the meaning and purpose of our life is to turn our eyes away from ourselves and instead look to God:”
“We have seen that it is our baptismal call to live in friendship with God in this life so as to enjoy eternal happiness with God in the next. We have also seen that our friendship with God is expressed by a life of ongoing conversion as a disciple, in which we learn from Jesus in order to live like Jesus–doing all things for the glory of God.”
“There is a sense, then, that the parish priest, as a limb of the bishop, is called to represent Christ in a more holistic way than a non-ordained consecrated person. Where the religious brother or sister re-presents particular aspects of Jesus’s life and ministry, the parish priest when acting in Christ’s person re-presents the whole Christ, and this wholeness spills out into his entire ministry.”
“We have now explored two dimensions of a divine vocation: first, our baptismal call to friendship with God and a life of discipleship that culminates in the perfect happiness of heaven and, second, the anchoring of this call to discipleship in a particular network of relationships through embracing a particular state of life within the Church.””
I hope those few quotes give you a feel for this volume. Father Nicholas writes in an engaging style. It is an easy volume to read, engage with and understand. He flows back and forth across some of the different vocations. It is a volume I expect my youngest two will read, and one I pray my oldest two will be willing to try. I believe it is the only volume published by Father Paul. It is one I can easily recommend.
Note: This book is part of a series of reviews: 2024 Catholic Reading Plan! For other reviews of books from the Catholic Truth Society click here.
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