"A Vocation of Utter Futility"

A great post from Kevin O'Brien.  Excerpts:

"... I started to see two things.

First, you can't really say you love someone or something (like the Church or your vocation) until you hit a kind of rock bottom and there is absolutely no reason to love it.
Second, the frustration I'm feeling comes from a false expectation - the expectation that the Form I had envisioned for my apostolate - and for my life - is what God had in mind when I said "yes" to His call. In other words, I thought I had said yes to a kind of Hollywood; but God, in His mercy, has given me something far more Real than anything like Hollywood - a grace for which I have thanked God by doing a good deal of complaining (as is my wont, I am sorry to say).

And so, like an actor who thinks he can only be successful if he's a big time TV star and that trudging along doing "guerrilla theater" at wineries and in church basements for 35 years is a failure; or like a religious sister who expects her order to be one thing and finds that it's totally different and perhaps much more painful; or even like a husband or wife who gets married and finds out that it's absolutely nothing like they imagined it to be - like all of these folks, we are usually our own worst enemies, and even when we say "yes" to God, we are often saying "yes" to the image in our minds, and not to the far greater Reality that He intends to give us.

For God is always Real. That's what the Incarnation is all about.


Do you think, for example, that the Virgin Mary imagined her "yes" would mean the panic and poverty of the Nativity, life as a refugee in Egypt, losing her son for three days as He went about His Father's business, seeing Him condemned, tortured, executed? Did she imagine, perhaps, that being the mother of the Messiah would entail a bit more honor (in this life) and ease and earthly glory?

We know she didn't have any of the selfish egotism that we all do. But did she get confused or frightened when all of the apparent Success of being the Mother of God appeared to be for naught - a vocation of utter futility - on that dreadful day when the sun stopped shining and the earth shook?

We see the glossy images of the Nativity, but we don't smell the manure.

We see a painting of the Flight into Egypt and we forget the Slaughter of the Innocents.

We see the Reunion in the Temple, but we forget the horror and panic over a Lost Child.

***

Our Faith is Real, more Real than we would care to admit.

And every time our life, our career, our day doesn't go the way we envision it, let us say a little prayer. Let us say, "Thank you, God, for speaking to me in this frustration; thank you for showing me by this little suffering that the Reality You're giving me is always greater than the Unreality I keep telling myself I'd rather have."

Yes, we should be magnanimous. Yes, we should never settle. We should not lower our expectations and aim for the easy mark.

But no, we should stop arguing with God that when we told Him we'd serve Him we meant it on our terms and not His..."