Fruitful Discipleship. Sherry A. Weddell
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Recently, I spoke to a national gathering of religious vocation directors. I asked them, “How many of you have inquirers come to you who are not ready to discern?” The response was unanimous, “We all do.” I responded that most Catholics assume that only very exceptional people embark on a personal spiritual quest. So, it is very easy for those who are just beginning to move into a new threshold like curiosity or openness to conclude that their new and apparently rare surge in spiritual interest must mean they are called to a rare vocation: priesthood or religious life.
My friend Janet is a good example. She was raised Catholic and experienced a serious conversion as a child. Growing up, she decided that she must be called to become a sister since religious life was the only place where she knew Catholics talked out loud about God.
Janet entered a women’s community but eventually discerned that she was not called to religious life and left, still seeking God. For a time, she “double-dipped,” dividing her time between attendance at Mass and participation in a small non-denominational evangelical church. Why? Because that little evangelical congregation strongly encouraged its members to lives of conscious discipleship, fostered the discernment of charisms, and surrounded her with love and support as she passionately sought to follow Jesus. Eventually, Jan married. When her husband became a fervent Catholic convert, she returned full-time to her life as a Catholic. Despite years of serious spiritual searching, Jan did not grasp — until she was in her thirties — that she could be a lay disciple in the Catholic Church.
No wonder the Church is struggling. The vast majority of those to whom the power of the Holy Spirit has been given are not yet manifesting that power. This is why what Pope St. John Paul II taught is so important:
Therefore, the Church fulfills her mission when she guides every member of the faithful to discover and live his or her own vocation in freedom and to bring it to fulfillment in charity.11
Missionary Disciple in the Muslim World
My oldest female friend (I’ll call her “Natali”) is an American who has lived for decades in a variety of Muslim countries. I first met Natali the day after I graduated from college and thought of her as a sophisticated “older” woman. After all, she was married and in her thirties with both a house and a profession. Over the next two years, we became good friends — and then she left to live in the Middle East.
Every summer since, we have gotten together when she returns to the States for vacation. Natali downloads her year with me in long, rich conversations, telling amazing stories of God at work in and through her relationships in some of the most complex and difficult places on earth.
Today, Natali would strike a stranger as a quite ordinary, five-foot-nuthin’ wife, mother, and grandmother. And what a mistake that would be. She and her husband spent years equipping themselves to be “tent-making” missionaries — that is, Christians who (like St. Paul the tentmaker in Acts 18:3) work at a secular profession that enables them to live where no overt missionary work is possible so that some living witness to the love of Jesus Christ might be found there. She speaks the language fluently and has a real charism in this area. She frequently goes places where no Western women go and where she has developed many friendships. She is credible and approachable because she is a housewife and mother and so can connect with the other women who are also raising their families. With them, she not only shares goat and spiced coffee but the love of Jesus.
What she does is possible only because she is a layperson. No “official” missionary, no pastor, priest, or nun would be allowed into the country. No man would be allowed to enter the situations and relationships where she has been welcomed as a woman. My friend is supported in her efforts not only by her husband but also by her Protestant congregation back home and an international missionary organization.
When a lay Catholic embarks upon an apostolate outside the standard ecclesial structures in the United States, he or she usually has to carve out an individual, and often, quite lonely path. Lay Catholics serious about their secular mission usually have to be remarkably independent and persistent.
A few years ago, I taught a three-hour graduate class on the development of the Church’s understanding of the laity from 1497 (St. Catherine of Genoa and the Oratory of Divine Love) to 1957, the year of the Second World Congress on the Apostolate of the Laity. I was trying to help my students grasp the experience of the Church regarding the laity over those 460 years, because that experience had shaped the bishops attending the Second Vatican Council and, therefore, the debate over the vocation, mission, and charisms of the laity that took place in October 1963.
My students were surprised to learn that Pope Pius XII had been a great champion of the term “lay apostle.” In his address to the Second World Congress, Pope Pius XII referred to “lay apostles” twenty-three times. In fact, he observed that, in 1957, “‘lay apostle’ is one of the terms most widely used in discussing the activities of the Church.”12
Five years earlier, in 1952, Pius XII had spoken of his intense desire for huge numbers of both priestly and lay apostles:
We would love to have vast phalanxes of apostles rise up, like those that the Church knew at her origins … and next to the priests, let the laity speak, who have learned to penetrate the minds and hearts of their listeners with their word and love. Yes, bearers of life, penetrate, in every place — in factories, workshops, fields — wherever Christ has the right to enter. Offer yourselves, see yourselves among your own kind, in diverse centers of work, in the same houses, closely and tightly united, in one thought and desire only. And then open wide your arms to welcome all who come to you, anxious for a helpful and reassuring word in this atmosphere of darkness and discomfort.13
The Pope was calling the laity to be magnanimous. The virtue of magnanimity is the aspiration to do great things, to bear great fruit for God and his Kingdom. Pope Pius XII knew that St. Thomas Aquinas called magnanimity the “ornament of all the virtues.”14 The magnanimous person has the courage to seek out what is truly great and become worthy of it.
When I first encountered the idea that aspiring to this sort of holy greatness was considered to be a virtue by the Church, I had difficulty taking it in. Saints do great things for God. But aren’t ordinary lay Catholics supposed to be humble and not presumptuous, to minimize our abilities and significance, and avoid big expectations?
As we have observed hundreds of times in the Called & Gifted discernment process, even the idea of having charisms and being anointed for a mission unnerves many lay Catholics, especially those who are older. Believing that God might do something genuinely important and supernatural through them seems to lack humility. Over and over in the course of helping laypeople discern their charisms, they have told me of their deep belief in the virtue of living small and expecting little of God. As one particularly charming eighty-four-year-old Scot told me in a lilting brogue, “I couldn’t have charisms! It wouldn’t be humble!”
We must recognize that humility is magnanimity’s necessary partner, the attitude before God that recognizes and fully accepts our creaturehood and the immeasurable distance between the Creator and his creation. But in Catholic thought, humility never stands alone. Without magnanimity, we don’t see the whole of our dignity as human beings. Magnanimity and humility together enable us to keep our balance, to arrive at our proper worth