Dominican Vocations

	DOMINICAN VOCATIONS PROVINCE OF THE ASSUMPTION

Site map	Our brethren	Fr Joseph Vnuk, O.P.
Home News -------------------------- Welcome Benedict XVI Master -------------------------- History Introduction St Dominic's gift Australia --------------------------- Order Discernment Formation Dominican habit Novitiate Studentate --------------------------- Life Introduction Four pillars Apostolate --------------------------- People Dominican saints Our brethren --------------------------- Resources Lectio Divina Links Prayer Reading --------------------------- Site dedication	A few months before my priestly ordination my godmother finally told me that thirty-two years earlier at my Baptism, she had prayed, “God, make this one a priest”. I strongly suspect that she had made the same prayer every day since. Although I had long been aware of those whose prayers had supported me along the path to priesthood, this remark shed a new light on the matter. Jesus specifically asked us to pray for God to send labourers into the harvest: is it any surprise that my priestly or religious vocation might be God’s answer to someone else’s prayer? This serves to remind us that a vocation is both a grace, an undeserved gift from God that is free and makes free, and at the same time it is part of the way God is relating to others, and so in my freedom I am not alone but am accountable to others. And if all that time I had been growing up as the answer to a prayer of which I was ignorant, then both growth and ignorance are to be found in the story of at least my vocation, if not also those of many others. And since speaking of one’s own ignorance is a good way of making others feel comfortable, that is where I shall begin. One component of vocational discernment is letting our unlimited ambitions and desires take account of our own human limitations. It is a skill we learn over the years. The very first time I remember declaring what I wanted to be when I grew up, the girl next door, taking full advantage of her greater age and wisdom as a four-year old, dashed my hopes by telling me that boys can’t be mothers. Not that my next decision was all that well grounded in reality. I was going to be a zookeeper so that I could look after the giraffes, which I liked because they were yellow: I thought that my mother’s comments about my fear of animals were totally irrelevant. Of course, these childhood wishes were not about a vocation. A vocation is a gift of God and it consists in making of ourselves a gift to others. Or, as the Pope likes to quote from Vatican II, “The human being is the only creature made for its own sake, but it only finds itself in the gift of self”. A vocation can only exist in a context of grace. The world became graced for me at the age of five and three quarters. I was on an overseas trip with my family, and the realisation struck me that I had received good things that I did not deserve, and therefore I ought—and at the same time wanted—to be good. I wouldn’t have used the term then, but it was my first sense of vocation. Looking back, I am sure that my moment of grace had something to do with the fact that at this stage my father was taking all of us kids with him to daily Mass. This focused my attention on the priest as a figure of great importance, and soon I found that I wanted to be one. For someone who wanted to be good, this would be a very good thing to do. Who knows, one day I might become pope. This ambition lay behind my choice of Peter as my confirmation name three years later. But in my desire for the priesthood at that stage I was responsible to no-one, I could still choose something else if I wanted. In fact, by the time I was confirmed my real preference was to be a scientist. But in the early 1970s the Church was changing. The numbers in the seminaries were dropping from the exceptionally high figures of the 1950s and 1960s, and they began talking of a crisis. A vocations evening was organised in my parish, and I was struck by the need of the Church for vocations. I, who at one time considered being a priest, felt that I was being personally addressed, and also somewhat ashamed that I had given up the idea. The priesthood was now something that the Church wanted me to do, and it was to this calling that I wanted to respond. At this stage (aged ten) I had not yet given much thought to the sort of priest that I wanted to be. The priests I saw most were the Dominicans teaching at my school (Blackfriars Priory School, Adelaide), and this role for a priest appealed to me. But then there was another moment of grace (perhaps assisted by the fact I was praying fervently at the time for a school-friend who was seriously ill). The feast of St Dominic came round, and my teacher was explaining how Dominic was an intelligent man who used his gifts to preach. Now, I was not totally deluded about my own abilities: when it came to sport, for instance, I was probably the second weakest in the class and I accepted that. Academic achievement was a different matter, and I was on safe ground in considering myself intelligent. And so when St Dominic was referred to as intelligent, I found it easy to identify with him, and perhaps I got a little carried away. God was calling me, I concluded, to follow Dominic into the Order of Preachers. I was not entirely happy about this: I had wanted to teach, not to preach. But maybe teaching is a sort of preaching. (Yes, I know that there were Dominicans teaching in the school all around me, but somehow I did not think of that.) So, after a moment’s hesitation I said 'yes' in my heart to the vocation of a preacher, and I have never looked back. Although better informed and more realistic than those earlier ambitions I have spoken of, this decision to become a Dominican can be seen in hindsight as arbitrary and impulsive, and oblivious to facts that were staring me in the face. But there was raw material for God’s grace to work with. A primary school kid is in many ways still unformed. This desire to become a Dominican priest, combined with the Dominican presence at school and a number of more fortuitous or providential factors, affected the way I developed during high school and university. I became the sort of young man for whom entry into the Order was a fitting choice. For instance, at the age of ten, celibacy was not an issue: the idea of a girlfriend was too mushy to contemplate. However, with the priesthood firmly in my sights, even as adolescence progressed somehow I could never imagine myself with one. I imbibed Dominican values at school: the holiness of the body and its use in worship, the search for Truth wherever it may be, an esteem for St Thomas Aquinas, and even the significance of dress. I also was reading the lives of the saints, which instilled in me a deep sense of the importance of prayer. By the time I got to uni and met two young men who wanted to join the Society of Jesus, my loyalty to the Dominicans enabled me to resist the charms of the Jesuit prestige. Besides which, very early at uni I had joined a small group that met for Morning Prayer from the Divine Office: I had no attraction to a life which favoured praying the Liturgy of the Hours alone. Nor did I want to persistently hide my religious and priestly vocation beneath secular clothes. A far stronger challenge at uni was my involvement with the Catholic student movement, which placed a great emphasis on the lay vocation and on building a more just society. To enter the Dominicans seemed to mean abandoning an urgent task, in a sense betraying the movement, and yet I could not bring myself to be untrue to the commitment I had made years earlier that had so much shaped my sense of who I was. I managed to reconcile the tension by developing a strong sense of both the uniqueness of each individual vocation and the value of all of them. A good education should increase your awareness of your own ignorance. I had finished school still aged sixteen and everyone advised against going straight into a seminary then. But when I had finished uni four years later it was now I who was aware of the limitations of my experience. I delayed for another year, among other things spending some time with friends from uni who were trying to form a Christian community household among the poor and oppressed of St Kilda in Melbourne. It was a good learning experience. But at the end of it all I knew both that I would always want to be a preacher of the Gospel, and also that there is a limit to what we can experience of the lives of others: it is within those limitations that we must live and work and preach. Working within all my ignorance and limitations God had for years been graciously and generously answering other people’s prayers in me. The time had come to enter the Dominicans. Why I stayed is another story. Fr Joseph Vnuk, O.P. celebrated ten years a priest on 10 September 2004. He holds degrees in Science (honours), Arts, a Dip.Ed. and a Licentiate (Master) of Sacred Theology in Patristics and Post-modern thought 'summa cum laude' (with highest praise). Fr Joseph is currently working at the Bomana Seminary, Papua New Guinea