Cardinal Martino great life satisfaction advice

Cardinal Martino used one of my absolute favorite words, "vocation," and hence made a very important point:

http://www.zenit.org/article-21080?l=english

snip

Mankind needs God in order to discover its vocation to be a united human family, said the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace at the inauguration of the dicastery's plenary assembly. The council opened its assembly Tuesday, dedicated to the study of Pope Paul VI's encyclical "Populorum Progressio" 40 years after the document was written.

Cardinal Renato Martino opened the assembly, saying, “There is not true development without vocation and there is no vocation without God."

snip

“Without God,” concluded the cardinal, “it is difficult for men to read in his own nature a vocation; without God, people require much effort to detect a vocation in their history and in their culture; without God, all of humanity finds it difficult to discover the vocation of being one united family.”

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I often used the word vocation (or I use the word avocation when I mean the process) when I have performed counseling or spiritual direction. Vocation is a great word to distinguish between the process of having a job, a career, or a work/chore responsibility as opposed to having a yearning and striving toward one's overall purpose in life. It is that second meaning that I refer to when I use the word "vocation." Here is the Encarta dictionary entry for "vocation," where you can see the second definition is the one I apply to the word. Notice it comes from vocare, the Latin word that includes the meaning "the call."

I think people all wonder what their "calling" is in life. One may have a talent to be an Internet web designer, and one may have a promising career as a web designer, and a great job as a web designer, but is that the totality of one's vocation in life, one's calling? No it's not. An obvious example is that web designer as a career does not include being a parent in one's life. Or having a home garden, a knack for counseling children, a prayer life, an artistic streak.... all of whom together constitutes one's life long "vocation."

Cardinal Martino is making the wonderful point (gosh, I could not have written it better myself, but am delighted to explain it, and suggest how to apply what he is saying). He is saying that without a relationship with God one cannot discover one's true vocation, either individually, as part of a local community, or on a global basis. Cardinal Martino is correct that it is difficult to read one's own vocation within oneself without God. Here's the analogy I would use. Without God is it like trying to select one's career based on an incomplete set of pamphlets about specific jobs. Suppose there are hundreds of jobs you would enjoy doing but someone only handed you a few pamphlets to choose from?

Likewise, without God one does not even think of the very things that one might be yearning for in order to satisfy one's self completely throughout one's life. The Cardinal does not mean a religious vocation, as in a calling to priesthood. Instead he is referring to the satisfaction in life of the everyday man or woman, boy or girl who "wants it all" in order to feel authentic and complete. If one does not have God in one's life, one does not even think of activities and routes through life that bring that total satisfaction of achieving the vocation one truly yearns for. In fact I would say many people who lack God in their lives feel a chronic dissatisfaction as they know they are not meeting a calling that is vital to their own happiness. Often a calling is less ambitious and achievement oriented than a career alone. Knowing one's vocation means knowing all of the activities and routes in life beyond the place where you get the paycheck and climb the corporate ladder, such as it is. A job or a career being the totality of one's life is like saying a village is made up of one building. Vocation discernment through relationship with God allows one to understand the entire dimensions of one's own internal structure and also, very importantly, provides much of the positive family, community, cultural, ethnic or global identity for groups of people.

vo·ca·tion [ vō káysh'n ] (plural vo·ca·tions)

http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/vocation.htmlnoun
Definition:

1. somebody's job: somebody's work, job, or profession, especially a type of work demanding special commitment
2. urge to follow specific career: a strong feeling of being destined or called to undertake a specific type of work, especially a sense of being chosen by God for religious work or a religious life

[15th century. <>Latin vocation-<>

The Latin word vocare "to call, name," from which vocation is derived, is also the source of the English words advocate, convoke, evoke, invoke, provoke, revoke, vocable, vocabulary, vocative, and vouch.