We do not have the answers to every question – maybe only a partial answer that could set you in the right direction. But the very asking of the question is the beginning of the answer. So why don’t you send us your questions and together we will search.
Last January Archbishop Jesus A. Dosado CM of Ozamiz ordained Columban Father Jovito Dales to the priesthood. Young readers often ask how they can know if God is calling them to the priesthood or religious life and how they can prepare to live such a life. On 17 February Pope Benedict met with seminarians of the Roman Major Seminary and they asked him some questions related to those topics. Here are some of the questions along with the Pope’s answers. These have been slightly edited.
HOW DOES GOD SPEAK?
Gregorpaolo Stano, Diocese of Oria (First-Year Philosophy): Your Holiness, ours is the first of two years dedicated to discernment, during which we are taught to make a profound personal examination. It is a tiring exercise for us, because the language of God is special, and only those who are attentive are able to discern it among the thousands of voices clamoring inside us. We are asking you, therefore, to help us to understand how God talks in practice and what clues he gives you in his private pronouncements?
Pope Benedict XVI: How can we distinguish God's voice from among the thousands of voices we hear each day in our world? God speaks with us in many different ways. He speaks through others, through friends, parents, pastors, priests. Here, the priests to whom you are entrusted, who are guiding you.
He speaks by means of the events in our life, in which we are able to discern God's touch; he speaks also through nature, creation, and he speaks, naturally and above all, through his Word, in Sacred Scripture, read in the communion of the Church and read personally in conversation with God.
It is important to read Sacred Scripture in a very personal way, and really, as St Paul says, not as a human word or a document from the past as we read Homer or Virgil, but as God's Word which is ever timely and speaks to me. It is important to learn to understand in a historical text, a text from the past, the living Word of God, that is, to enter into prayer and thus read Sacred Scripture as a conversation with God.
St Augustine often says in his homilies: I knocked on various occasions at the door of this Word until I could perceive what God himself was saying to me. It is of paramount importance to combine this very personal reading, this personal talk with God in which I search for what the Lord is saying to me, and in addition to this personal reading, reading it in the community is very important because the living subject of Sacred Scripture is the People of God, it is the Church.
This Scripture was not simply restricted to great writers – even if the Lord always needs the person and his personal response – but it developed with people who were traveling together on the journey of the People of God and thus, their words are expressions of this journey, of this reciprocity of God's call and the human response.
Thus, the subject lives today as it lived at that time so that Scripture does not belong to the past, because its subject, the People of God inspired by this same God, is always the same, and therefore the Word is always alive in the living subject.
It is consequently important to read Sacred Scripture and experience Sacred Scripture in the communion of the Church, that is, with all the great witnesses of this Word, beginning with the first Fathers and ending with today's saints, with today's Magisterium. [Editor’s note, this means the teaching office of the Church, consisting of the Pope and Bishops.]
Above all, it is a Word that becomes vital and alive in the Liturgy. I would say, therefore, that the Liturgy is the privileged place where every one of us can enter into the ‘we’ of the sons of God, in conversation with God. This is important. The Our Father begins with the words: ‘Our Father’; only if I am integrated into the ‘we’ of this ‘Our’ can I find the Father; only within this ‘we’, which is the subject of the prayer of the Our Father, do we hear the Word of God clearly.
Thus, this seems to me most important: the Liturgy is the privileged place where the Word is alive, is present, indeed, where the Word, the Logos, the Lord, speaks to us and gives himself into our hands; if we are ready to listen to the Lord in this great communion of the Church of all times, we find him. He opens the door to us little by little.
I would say, therefore, that this is the focus for all the other points: we are personally directed on our journey by the Lord, and at the same time we live in the great ‘we’ of the Church, where the Word of God is alive.
Moreover, other points are associated with it: listening to friends, listening to the priests who guide us, listening to the voice of today's Church; hence, listening to the voice of the events of this time and of creation which become decipherable in this profound context.
To sum up, therefore, I would say that God speaks to us in many ways. It is important to be in the ‘we’ of the Church, in the ‘we’ of the life of the Liturgy. It is important that I personalize this ‘we’ in myself; it is important to be attentive to the other voices of the Lord, also letting ourselves be guided by the people who have experience of God, so to speak, and help us on this journey, so that this ‘we’ becomes my ‘we’, and I become one who truly belongs to this ‘we’.
Thus, discernment grows, and personal friendship with God grows, the capacity to distinguish God's voice among the thousands of voices of today, which is always present and always speaks with us.
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Gianpiero Savino, Diocese of Taranto (First-Year Theology): In the eyes of most people we might appear as young men who say their ‘yes’ firmly and courageously and leave everything to follow the Lord; but we know that we are far from being truly consistent with that ‘yes’. Trusting as sons, we confess to you the partiality of our response to Jesus' call and the daily effort of living a vocation that we feel is propelling us along the path of the definitive and the total. How can we respond to such a demanding vocation as that of shepherds of God's holy People while being constantly aware of our weakness and inconsistencies?
Benedict XVI: It is good to recognize one's weakness because in this way we know that we stand in need of the Lord's grace. The Lord comforts us. In the Apostolic College there was not only Judas but also the good Apostles; yet, Peter fell and many times the Lord reprimanded the Apostles for their slowness, the closure of their hearts and their scant faith. He therefore simply shows us that none of us is equal to this great yes, equal to celebrating ‘in persona Christi’, ‘in the person of Christ’, to living coherently in this context, to being united to Christ in his priestly mission.
To console us, the Lord has also given us these parables of the net with the good fish and the bad fish, of the field where not only wheat but also tares grow. He makes us realize that he came precisely to help us in our weakness, and that he did not come, as he says, to call the just, those who claim they are righteous through and through and are not in need of grace, those who pray praising themselves; but he came to call those who know they are lacking, to provoke those who know they need the Lord's forgiveness every day, that they need his grace in order to progress.
I think this is very important: to recognize that we need an ongoing conversion, that we are simply not there yet. St Augustine, at the moment of his conversion, thought he had reached the heights of life with God, of the beauty of the sun that is his Word. He then had to understand that the journey after conversion is still a journey of conversion, that it remains a journey where the broad perspectives, joys and lights of the Lord are not absent; but nor are dark valleys absent through which we must wend our way with trust, relying on the goodness of the Lord.
Therefore, also the Sacrament of Reconciliation is important. It is not correct to think we must live like this, so that we are never in need of pardon. We must accept our frailty but keep on going, not giving up but moving forward and becoming converted ever anew through the Sacrament of Reconciliation for a new start, and thus grow and mature in the Lord by our communion with him.
It is also important of course not to isolate oneself, not to believe one is capable of going ahead alone. We truly need the company of priest friends and also lay friends who accompany and help us. It is very important for a priest, in the parish itself, to see how people trust in him and to experience in addition to their trust also their generosity in pardoning his weaknesses. True friends challenge us and help us to be faithful on our journey. It seems to me that this attitude of patience and humility can help us to be kind to others, to understand the weaknesses of others and also help them to forgive as we forgive.
It seems to me that we must have trust in God’s gift of perseverance, but we must also pray to the Lord with tenacity, humility and patience to help and sustain us with the gift of true ‘definitiveness’, and to accompany us day after day to the very end, even if our way must pass through dark valleys. The gift of perseverance gives us joy, it gives us the certainty that we are loved by the Lord, and this love sustains us, helps us and does not abandon us in our weakness.
[Translation of Italian original issued by the Holy See] Copyright 2007 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana
Visit our Misyon website and send us your feedback
Email us at editor@misyononline.com