This Sunday, the fourth of Easter, is the day of prayer for vocations to the priesthood and the religious life. It is a day to pray for our priests, to pray for vocations and to encourage anyone who is discerning a call to priesthood or religious life.
The following are short promotional videos for vocations that we encourage you to share with your friends and contacts. The reflection and prayer below were written by Fr Karl Rahner SJ and capture the gift of a vocation where a divine treasure is housed in human clay.
‘The priest is not an angel sent from heaven. He is a man, a member of the Church, a Christian. Remaining man and Christian, he begins to speak to you the word of God. This word is not his own. No he comes to you because God has told him to proclaim God’s word. Perhaps he has not entirely understood it himself. Perhaps he adulterates it. Perhaps he falters and stammers. How else could he speak God’s Word, ordinary man that he is? But must not some one of us say something about God, about eternal life, about the majesty of grace in our sanctified being; must not some one of us speak of sin, the judgement and mercy of God?.
“Only in love can I find you, my God. In love the gates of my soul spring open, allowing me to breathe a new air of freedom and forget my own petty self. In love my whole being streams forth out of the rigid confines of narrowness and self-assertion, which makes me a prisoner of my own poor emptiness. In love all the powers of my soul flow out towards you, wanting never more to return, but to lose themselves completely in you, since by your love you are the inmost centre of my heart, closer to me than I am to myself”
KARL RAHNER SJ (1904-1984)