By Fr. Jerry Hardy

Vocational decision-making is like breathing. As soon as you stop doing it, you stop living. That’s just a simple fact.

What I mean there is each of use never simply stops deciding to be this or that. We make up our minds and set about doing a particular thing with our lives.

But that’s not the end of it. We continue to reaffirm that initial decision by a lot of other daily decisions which flow from it and in fact give practical extension and meaning to it.

For instance, a husband and wife commit themselves to each other on their wedding day. They do so with a sort of open-ended attitude of mind that says an unconditional “yes” to all that the future holds of good times and bad, sickness and health. But their honeymoon trip is hardly begun before they have opportunities to reaffirm and ratify their brand new commitment by a lot of smaller decisions that bespeak their love and dedication and tenderness.

Ten years later, they will be doing the same thing, renewing their pledges and promises, but in very different ways because they will have come to understand so much more of what it means to be a husband and wife to each other. To the extent that they refuse or fail to renew those decisive promises TO BE husband and wife to each other, they will begin TO DIE as husband and wife.

This is an important factor today, I think, because vocational choices are often pictured as once and for all things that are opened and closed like a book or like boxes into which we nail ourselves, thereby excluding ourselves from the action and satisfaction of life. Younger people tend to shy away from such an absolute position and consequently we find more and more of them postponing decisions about what they’re going to do with their lives. Some of that’s good because it reflects a growing maturity and respect for life time choices. Too much of it can be problematic. It hits the decision to be a priest or sister with a sort of un-realism that paints the decision to be either as being more difficult and more final than any other. Such isn’t the case.

That doesn’t mean that such a decision is not hard one to make and keep on making. It is.

However, the decision to enter a seminary or religious novitiate is a decision to try one’s hand at being priest or religious. It is a decision to work, learn, pray, ponder and laugh within a framework that leads toward service and leadership.

It is not a decision never to wonder about it all, never to question, never to worry. It is not a decision that is so iron-clad that it has to eliminate all other possibilities.

Such a decision is a decision to have a look, a decision to start a trip, a decision to begin a process that may lead any number of places. I’ve always felt that my first year in the seminary during college simply helped me understand what adult Christian faith and responsibility were all about and that had I never become a priest that year would have been invaluable.

Men and women, in the ordinary course of things, don’t commit themselves to dead-end streets, open and shut books, preprogrammed lives. We commit ourselves to processes that should bring us to the end of the road leading to personal happiness, to processes that should enable us to finish the book written about unselfish love, to processes that should enable us to live lives that are full of commitment and peace. We do none of that all at once. In fact the only way to do it is slowly, daily – repeatedly deciding on the kind of people we will be and the quality of lives we will live by choices that are as free as they are loving.

The whole purpose of this column is to try to create an atmosphere which will support the idea that vocational decisions to be priest or sister or brother in the service of the Church are processes that can lead that kind of living.