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clarity, confessor, dating, fogginess, imagination, intellect, kissing, secret, sermon, spiritual director, Vocation, vocations
There are three vocations in life which are:
- The vocation to the priesthood or religious life;
- The vocation to the married life
- The vocation to the single life.
Quotes about finding your vocation:
“God expects us to shield our chastity with modest and pure behavior and especially by means of prayer; most notably the three ‘Hail Mary’s and the daily Rosary.”
“We’ve seen this [procreative] power, God’s special gift which is to be used by married couples and married couples alone. We’ve seen it for the unmarried that passionate kissing is mortally sinful simply because the unmarried do not have the right to those kind of passions or pleasures. They don’t have the right to those passions by thought, word or deed. Why? Because those passions and pleasures are reserved strictly for the married… The kisses that are allowed to unmarried people are the little peck on the cheek kind of thing… there’s no passion allowed. Once we understand that it’s easy to see what is forbidden.”
“As Saint Gregory points out, ‘Eternity hangs upon our vocation.'”
“As Saint Alphonsus de Liguori points out, ‘It is evident that our salvation depends principally upon our choice of our state in life.'”
“To single people [who have yet to discern a vocation]: you have to guard your heart. The first thing you need to do is determine your ‘state in life.’
Saint John Bosco says, “One third of the young people have a vocation to the priesthood or religious life.”
“If you think, or suspect, that you have a vocation to the priesthood or religious life, in order to preserve that, one thing that you must not do is ‘to date anyone.’ There are several things that you must do, in order to preserve that vocation: if you think that you have a vocation, generally speaking, you must keep this a secret. A secret from everyone except from a reliable confessor or spiritual director. This is a special call from God. He only makes it to certain privileged souls and you must keep it a secret; even from your parents. That might sound shocking but parents, this is one place where your authority certainly does not extend. I’m not making this up. This is a salvation issue. It is serious that if you have a vocation keep it a secret. Tell it to a good confessor and spiritual director and led them guide you in the process. That’s the first thing. The second place, you must pray. A vocation is something supernatural and in order to preserve it you must pray. If you mess up and wind up in a ‘state of life’ in which God has not called you it will be much harder for you to lead a good life. That’s the way it works. In the plan of Divine Providence He has a certain path that each of us has to follow in order to get to heaven. And, if we go off that path, we do it to our own peril. Even in another ‘state of life.’ It’s going to be harder. Eternity hangs upon your vocation.”
“To find your vocation you have to pray, don’t blab (about it) – – keep it a secret, and don’t date otherwise you can easily kiss a vocation good-bye.”
If you think that your vocation is to holy matrimony be very careful when you date.
If an unmarried couple start to passionately kiss, what have they just done?
“Instead of being careful to actually get to know each other, instead of being as reasonable and as cautious as possible with each other, what have they just done? They’ve just cranked their passions right up to ‘ultimate flame-thrower.'”
“This is a big mistake. A big, big mistake. You see, that to the very degree to which those passions are enflamed, which of course depends on how often this sort of behavior goes on and what all happens, to that very degree they will each suffer increasingly serious consequences.”
Saint Thomas Aquinas says that both the imagination and intellect will be affected. Images enter our mind from our five senses. Our knowledge of the outside world comes flowing in from our senses. We can store images in our memory and draw on it. But first we got it from the outside world via the senses.
“Our intellect, and this is the important point here, which is the spiritual part of the soul, the part of our soul by which we can do things like
- think, and
- know and
- judge and
- understand, our intellect is the ‘place of ideas,’ relies on our imagination to stay in contact with reality. So, our imagination relies on [understanding] the exterior world by our senses, to stay in contact with reality, and our intellect – – in order to understand – – is in contact with our imagination. That’s how it works. That means that the clearer the image that we have of something, the better grasp we can have of what it is… better images let you better understand what you are dealing with.”
“So, our intellect relies on our imagination to stay in contact with reality. The more clear the image, of the exterior object that is portrayed by our imagination, the clearer can we understand it. The more confused or hazy the image the less clear of a grasp do we have of the exterior object.”
“A young couple, with a vocation pointing to Holy Matrimony, who right out of the gate engage in passionate kissing… what does it do? It stirs up violent excitement in the passions due to the sensory inputs. In the young man’s image that he has of the young lady, and vice versa, the image that he has of the young lady becomes totally coated with these violently passionate feelings. The raging passions distort the image [and the intellect is negatively affected.]… So the image of the other person in the imagination is steamed over… his intellect, that relies on the imagination to stay in contact with reality, to get to know this person, [the intellect is prevented from functioning properly.] The more repeated, or the more perverted, or the more depraved becomes the passionate behavior the more the passions will fog up the image… St. Thomas calls this process ‘intellectual blindness.’ … The intellectual blindness for this couple means that each person does not have a very clear picture of the other person.”
“Instead of being able to make a relatively calm and reasonable judgement of the other person, that they are thinking of marrying, [each person, in the relationship, suffers from a profound blindness about the other.]
“We either have to lead (control) our passions or our passions are going to lead us. We need to guard our hearts.”
“If I were the devil and I wanted to cause huge problems, problems that would make it very difficult for a young man or woman to discern their vocation in life,… if I wanted to cause huge problems in marriages, and contribute greatly to the breakup of marriages,… if I wanted to make it very difficult for a young man and woman to even respond to a clear call to the priesthood or religious life, if I were the devil… all I’d do is convince young people that passionate kissing (which is only reserved for those in the married vocation) isn’t any real big deal. That ‘everybody does it,’ or ‘you really don’t know what you’re missing until you’ve tried it.’ If I were the devil I’d just do something like that and I could just stand back and let things develop naturally.”
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Quotes are from a Sermon given by an anonymous cleric to educate the young on the dangers that exist with respect to discerning one’s true calling in life.