Welcome to our latest edition of Vocare for 2021, titled Good News.
This year has begun with Good News as Pope Francis announced it as the “Year of Saint Joseph”. I received this Good news, with a grateful heart. In his Apostolic Letter, Patris Corde (A Father’s Heart) as well as in his message for World Day of Prayer for Vocations, Pope Francis offers us Saint Joseph as our patron and model, to inspire us to open again the doors to Christ and let him into our hearts. Saint Joseph’s example of daily leap into the dark with trust as he said Yes to God’s call, is a prophetic sign to us, that grace offers the single, steadfast, pathway through which we too can discern and respond to our individual vocations.
Everything is grace. A Yes to grace here and now in 2021 could be a Yes to a life of adventure with God. As we leap into the future with hope, the Yes of Saint Joseph inspires us to recreate our hearts to live our vocation as a gift for others. God looks on the heart (1 Sam 16: 7). One of the greatest legacies of Saint Joseph to Christian Vocations is the Cultivation of “This selfgiving, Yes-heart of the Father,” even in the face of the unknown.
As we stand before this dramatic turn in both vocations and human history, Saint Joseph gives us the courageous heart to leap into our own amazing joyful unknown of God. It is only those who joyfully enter into the uncharted vocational space of the unknown, with the God who also wants to be wrestled with, that will receive, celebrate, and announce this Good news.
When I was growing up, I was told that Australia was the end of the world. So naturally, I neither planned nor imagined that Australia would ever form part of my leap into the heart of God. If you are reading this vocare now, it is because you have also learned or are learning “to dream” and risk abandoning yourself and projects to grace.
Through the patronage of St Joseph your leap of Yes to God, as well as mine, becomes a fountain of living water for others, “like God’s living water flowing from the Temple”. Amazingly, our leap of Yes which becomes the Good-news is not the end of the journey.
It is only the beginning.
Saint Joseph, Pray for us.
Father Stanley Orji