Twenty years ago this week I was on retreat in France preparing for priestly ordination. I remember it as a time overflowing with gifts of grace. For that reason it has since always been my preferred time for retreat, especially if, as this year, the time includes the Feasts of Corpus Christi and the Nativity of John the Baptist. Both speak powerfully about priestly vocation.
For the Baptist, vocation is everything to do with God’s choice and prevenient grace and nothing of self-realisation. It is a divine call, but since we are not angels, it is mediated through a human context, through those things and people which give us life. It is in the womb than John leaps; from the womb he is called, according to the prophecy of Isaiah. Every embryonic vocation must be nurtured in God’s time within what is feminine and receptive: a mother’s love and example, a biological mother or the spiritual motherhood of the Church, and the womb of silence and prayer.
