Our Common Vocation

What is our vocation?  The word “vocation” comes from the Latin word “voco,” and means “call”.  What is my call?  What is your call?  Are we called?  Is there a Voice in the midst of all the myriad and incessant voices in this world that calls us by name and bids us to become all we are meant to be?  Is there a seed within each of us that seeks to make us more fully human?  Is there an “image of God” in each of us that yearns to be liberated?  Is there, as the Society of Friends suggest, an inner light that seeks to “light up” that within us which enables us to act more humanly in the world?  What are we essentially?  What does it mean to be more fully human?

The vocation of every man, woman and child is to enhance human life—not just one’s own humanity, but that of all others, no matter what religion we may profess.  It is a matter of living up to our own potential, our own humanness, which from the Christian perspective is modeled in Jesus of Nazareth.  For the Jewish person it may be modeled by an Isaiah, Moses, or a Jeremiah—as the “image of God” that abides within.  The Christian sees  Jesus as the “image of God” within, the “Light Within,” the “Seed,” the “Good Shepherd.”  Whatever the case, we are called to let that “Jesus in us” or that “image of God” in us (Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah) be liberated, thus becoming who we are meant to be (a more fully human person).

Any system, government, law, community, or behavior, therefore, that attempts to assault, captivate, enslave,  or  dominate human beings , requires us to protest, oppose and resist.  Any institution, even Church and government, any leader, or organization, therefore, that seeks to override, attack, or attempts to rid people of their rational thought or to corrupt their moral comprehension, or aims at getting them to abandon their conscience, is to be resisted at all cost.  For it is our rational thought, it is our moral comprehension, it is our conscience, that distinguishes us as human beings from all other creatures.  We are called to this—it is our vocation—to be more fully human.

The fourth Iris bloom...