I have an aunt who is a sister. My husband has an uncle who is a brother. Just another example of how well we compliment each other. No, but seriously, I have never known of anyone else who had a member of their family join the religious order.
As a little girl in a Catholic school, I vaguely remember hearing a spiel encouraging us to grow up to become priests, sisters, brothers, etc. I’m sure we all rolled our eyes and thought, “Yeah, right!” (I know I did…)
Today at mass we listened to 3rd year seminarian Peter Davis speak about his call to serve God. He was attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the time. I thought about all the other opportunities he must have had being at a big ten school like that. I imagined what I was doing my freshman year at college, and what my husband was doing back at his U of I days. Needless to say, listening to this smart, articulate, young man speak about his devotion to the church I was very impressed and also grateful.
Grateful because we are facing a priest shortage as we see priests working far past retirement age or we recruit priests from other countries to help close the gaps. As parishioners, we are quick to criticize if we cannot understand a priest’s accent or find their homily ‘missing the mark,’ yet we don’t offer much in the way of helping this situation. If we are not willing to enter into religious life ourselves, the least we could do is pray for those who do.
Honestly, Peter Davis, I’m rooting for you, and I vow to pray for you as well!
I was reading through various prayers for vocations and below is my favorite.
Lord, You told us that “The harvest indeed is great but the laborers are few. Pray, therefore, the Lord of the harvest to send laborers into His harvest.” We ask You to strengthen us as we follow the vocation to which You have called us. We pray particularly for those called to serve as priests, sisters, brothers and deacons:
Those whom You have called, Those You are calling now, Those You will call in the future.
May they be open and responsive to the call of serving Your people. We ask this through Christ, our Lord, Amen.