The Father calls to life

16. The existence of each one is the fruit of the creative love of the Father, of his efficacious wish, of his generative Word.

The creative act of the Father has the dynamics of an appeal, of a call to life. Each person comes to life because he is loved, thought and willed by a good Will who preferred him to non-existence, loved him before ever he was, knew him before forming him in his mother's womb, consecrated him before he saw the light (cf Jer 1, 5; Is 49, 1.5; Gal 1, 15).

Vocation, then, is that which explains in depth the mystery of an individual's life, and is itself a mystery, of absolute predilection and gratuitousness.

a) "...in his image"

In the "creative call" a person appears suddenly in all the richness of his dignity as the subject called to relationship with God, to stand before Him, with others, in the world, with a face which reflects the same divine features: "Let us make man in our own image and likeness" (Gen 1, 26). This triple relation belongs to the original design, because the Father "chose us in him — in Christ — before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him" (Eph 1, 4).

Recognising the Father means that we exist in his way, having been created in his image (Wisdom 2, 23). In this, therefore, the fundamental vocation of man is contained: the vocation to life and to a life immediately conceived in the likeness of the divine life. If the Father is the eternal spring, total gratuitousness, the eternal source of existence and love, the individual is called, in the small and limited measure of his existence, to be like Him; and therefore "to give life", to assume the life of another.

The creative act of the Father, then, is that which provokes the awareness that life is a consigning to freedom of the individual person, who is called to give a response which is personal and original, responsible and grateful.

b) Love, the full meaning of life

In this perspective of the call to life one thing is to be excluded: that people might consider existence to be something obvious, necessary, casual.

Perhaps it is not easy, in today's culture, to experience wonder before the gift of life.(³⁰)

While it is more difficult to understand the meaning of a life given, which will benefit others, a more mature conscience is needed, some kind of spiritual formation, in order to understand that the life of each one, in every case and before any choice whatsoever, is love received, and that in this love is already hidden a subsequent vocational project.

The simple fact of being should fill all of us with wonder and great thanksgiving towards Him who, in total freedom, created us from nothing by speaking our name.

And then the perception that life is a gift should not only give rise to a thankful attitude, but should slowly suggest the first big response to the fundamental question of meaning: life is the masterpiece of the creative love of God and is in itself a call to love. A gift received which, by its nature, tends to become a good given.

c) Love, the vocation of every person

Love is the full meaning of life. God has so loved man as to give him his very life and to make him capable of living and loving in the divine manner. In this excess of love, the original love, man finds his radical vocation, which is a "holy vocation" (2 Tim 1, 9), and discovers his own unique identity, which immediately makes him similar to God, "in the image of the Holy One" who called him (1 Pet 1, 15). "Creating the human race in his own image and continually keeping it in being, — says John Paul II — God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being".(³¹)

d) The Father who educates

Thanks to the love that created him no-one can feel "superfluous", because he is called to respond according to a plan that God considers appropriate for him.

Then each person will be happy and fully realised, standing at his post, welcoming the divine educational proposal, with all the fear and trembling that a similar claim raises up in a heart of flesh. God the creator who gives life, is also the Father who "educates", who draws out of nothing what does not yet exist to bring it into being; he draws forth from the heart of man what He himself has placed there, so that he may be fully himself and what God has called him to be, in His way.

Hence the nostalgia for the infinite which God has placed within each one as a divine seal.

e) The call of Baptism

This call to life and to the divine life is celebrated in Baptism. In this sacrament the Father tenderly reaches down to the creature, the son or daughter of the love of a man and woman, in order to bless the fruit of that love and make him or her fully his child. From that moment the creature is called to the holiness of the children of God. Nothing and no-one can ever extinguish this vocation.

With the grace of Baptism, God the Father intervenes to illustrate that He, and only He, is the author of the plan of salvation, within which every human being finds his personal role. His act is always precedent, anterior, it does not await man's initiative, it does not depend on his merits, nor is it based on his abilities or dispositions. The Father knows, designs, inserts the instinct, places a seal, calls even "before the creation of the world" (Eph 1,4). And then He gives strength, He walks beside, He gives support, He is Father and Mother always...

In this way the Christian life acquires the significance of a responsorial experience: it becomes a responsible reply in the building up of a filial relationship with the Father and a fraternal relationship with the great family of the children of God. The Christian is called, by means of love, to encourage the process of similarity with the Father which is called the theological life.

Accordingly, fidelity to one's Baptism urges one to ask ever more precise questions about one's life and oneself; above all in order to encourage oneself to live life not only based on human aptitudes, which are also gifts of God, but based on His will; not according to worldly perspectives, so often of little matter, but according to the wishes and plans of God.

Fidelity to one's Baptism, then, means looking above, as children, in order to discern His will for one's own life and future.