Book Review: Discovering Your Personal Vocation: The Search for Meaning through the Spiritual Exercises

February 12, 2004

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is part of a series of book reviews featured monthly in The Globe. The review is sponsored by the Religious Education Media Center as a service to those interested in developing their own spirituality. Books featured in this column can be borrowed from the diocesan media center.

You may request this or other books by writing Deacon Larry Sitzman, Religious Education Media Center, 1821 Jackson St., Sioux City, IA 51102, e-mail him at larrys@scdiocese.org or phone (712) 255-7933.

Father Nickolas Becker offers this book review of Discovering Your Personal Vocation: The Search for Meaning through the Spiritual Exercises (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2001).

What is your name?

For Father Herbert Alphonso, S.J., author of Discovering Your Personal Vocation: The Search for Meaning through the Spiritual Exercises this is the essential question for the serious Christian. For Father Alphonso, knowing your true name is knowing your personal vocation, one's "unique way of giving and surrendering self" (52). The personal vocation is one's "deeply unique personal way of being Christian" (63).

One might feel particularly close to God whenever one reads in Scripture about the goodness of God, for example. Whenever one reads about God's goodness, one is almost drawn spontaneously into prayer, thanking and praising God for His gifts. This is a good sign that one's name, one's personal vocation, is simply to be the goodness of God to others. From his study of Scripture, Father Alphonso suggests Jesus' personal vocation: "Abba," a word that summarized His entire life and mission (18).

One's personal vocation should not be equated with one's state of life. One's personal vocation is the spirit that animates the way that one lives as married person, religious, priest, single person-whatever one's state of life may be.

Father Alphonso writes of his conviction that discerning the personal vocation is what gives meaning, focus, and direction to one's life. When you know your personal vocation, you know who you are, who God has called you to be.

Further, the personal vocation, once discerned, becomes the norm for discernment of all life's decisions. Return to our example of the person whose vocation is to be the goodness of God to others.

Making choices in life is not then a matter of simply choosing good over evil or even choosing the best between competing goods. Making choices is a matter of discerning which option is most consistent with the personal vocation, which option fits in best with being the goodness of God to others.

The personal vocation makes discernment, if not easy, much more approachable than simply hunting blindly for God's will.

Discovering Your Personal Vocation is the best thing on discernment that I have read in a very long time. It has the great gift of being simple without being simplistic: Father Alphonso's book is only 74 pages long, and it is a very quick read. While he does make references to some rather complex philosophical and theological ideas, most of what he says is very accessible-any thoughtful, serious Christian would be able to read this with profit, and I am happy to recommend it.

(Father Becker is associate pastor at Blessed Sacrament Church in Sioux City.)